Negative To Positive
THIS is a subject which I feel able to speak about through personal experience. I have discovered that anger can stem from a resentment but in my case not always. I have also known it to be directly linked with fear. I remember being six years old and having to sleep in a big room all by myself. During the night I would wake up terrified of the dark, creep upstairs to where my grandparents slept and knock on their door until they would let me in to sleep between them. My mum and dad insisted that I stayed in my own bedroom, so I would creep up the stairs and sleep outside my grandparents’ room on the canvased floor in the freezing cold (there was no central heating in our old house in the late fifties!). Anything was better than that cold dark room that they called my bedroom.
Moving forward to when I was 15 and about to attend my sixth school, on my first day I was full of fear. The other kids in my year must have sensed this and I became the victim of their violent bullying. Things got so bad that I would hide all day in the boot of my dad’s old car which was always parked in the garage, rather than face those bullies. In those days you didn’t snitch on your fellow pupils, the only way out of it was to fight back, and my father being ‘old school’ gave me his permission to do so. One day after boarding the school bus which took the kids to their various villages, the bullying started again in front of a young lady who I liked and fifty other kids. I was approached and punched as usual and something inside of me snapped with such a rage that I had never experienced before.
For the first time, I fought back, and the bus driver had to pull me off of the other kid who by this time was a bloodied mess. We both got sent to the headmaster’s office to be caned (this was normal in 1969), and on leaving his office, the other kid said that he wanted to be my friend and that he would tell his other friends not to pick on me anymore. A light bulb came on in my head, finally I’d found the solution to all of my life problems, hit them before they hit you. That was when my fear turned to anger.
These crazy thoughts became my motto for the rest of my life, until it got me into trouble with people, places, and things, including the police. The fear and anger was followed by alcoholism which eventually got me to my first AA meeting twenty years later. After eighteen months of listening to people’s suggestions at AA meetings, I chose a sponsor and started working through the Steps, and for the first time in my life the fear and the anger was reduced to a manageable level. I discovered in Step Four that fear and anger were on my list of defects and for 35 years of taking a daily Step Ten inventory, I felt like one big defect of character and began despising myself.
That was when I met a sponsor with a slightly different approach to the defects in my life. I understood that even non-alcoholics had defects of character, but maybe not quite to the extreme that mine were. He explained that even a defect could be a positive, because after all it was pride, self-pity and selfishness that got me into AA in the first place. He said that anger could be a good thing if I used it to protect a vulnerable person who was being physically attacked. He said it was all about turning the negative side of the defects into a more positive attitude about them.
This helped me to try living the opposite of each defect which then opened me up to more acceptance, and the ability to let go of many difficult situations in my life. After a while, I got a good understanding of a Higher Power which brought me the peace and serenity that I had never known, along with the ability to love others and myself. I am now in my 37th year of sobriety and at 71 years of age, I have finally stopped fighting the world and myself.
STEVE H, Bristol