Fear

This talk goes into how fears drive our resentments, how they degrade our ability to be fully present, and how to write a fear inventory.

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Hi, my name is Tom and I'm an alcoholic. We seem to find it challenging to talk about fear effectively in AA. As most of you know, there's some pretty powerful reasons why that may be so. And for many of us, at least at the beginning, it seemed like fear was kind of down the list of my problems. Unless my problem was articulated as a fear that I couldn't stop drinking and never would be able to stop drinking. The other thing about fear, at least while you're pretty new in AAA, is that fear does a really good job of masquerading as something else. I don't know how to be angry unless there's fear involved. When I'm doing things obsessively, whether that means drugs, food, video, or something else, it always comes down to a cause driven by fear. We're very aware that in the big book it says that resentment's destroy more alcoholics than anything else. And I don't have any reason to believe that's not true. In doing inventory, however, I learned that every single resentment I ever had was driven by fear. If that's the case, then when the book says resentment destroys more alcoholics than anything else, it also means fear destroys alcoholics. A few pages later in the same chapter the book calls out fear as an evil and corrosive thread running through our lives. It says fear should be classified with stealing, but that it causes more trouble. Worse than stealing? Stealing's a felony, but fear isn't even a misdemeanor. When I started seeing my fear, I saw how much damage it does. In my experience, fear runs through our lives like a computer virus, all the while hiding from view the awful ways it's driving our behavior. In the third column of my fourth step inventory, the resentments, I began to see how they really affect me. When the result of my resentments was it affecting my pride, it was because I didn't want to look bad in front of others or be disliked by them. I have fear of looking bad and fear of not being accepted by others. When my resentment attacked my self esteem, it led me into totally destructive behaviors, all with the intention of feeling better about myself. In fact, looking strictly at the manifestation of my alcoholism, my drinking itself, that was driven by fear. Getting drunk separated me from my fear, and that was better than being sober. One of my deepest seated fears is not being good enough. I've made some bad decisions in my life based on a fear of not being good enough, and I don't think I'm alone in that. For those of you who happen to know me, I'm good enough. AA's taught me that I'm frequently a high performer in certain select areas anyway, but never in my life have I been the best at anything, nor have I been the worst at anything. I could go through all the areas of self that we think about in the third column pride, self esteem, ambition, security, personal relationships, sex relationships, and pocketbook. Fear is a really big deal. We will move on to the fear inventory in just a moment, but first let's talk about two different types of fear. The two types are what I'll call immediate fear, and the second one is what AA calls self-centered fear. So the first of these, immediate fear, I'm going to go on the record saying there's nothing wrong with it. If I'm in a crosswalk and I see a car coming and it's at speed, fear will drive me to jump out of the way. That's good. Immediate fear is not what we're talking about. Self-centered fear, on the other hand, is what we are talking about. And self-centered fear is always speculative or hypothetical. It's about a future that may or may not come to pass. At any given point, my experience is that there are plenty of bad things that could conceivably happen. I could contract a horrible disease. I could be unexpectedly fired from my job. My person could decide she no longer wants to be with me. But the odds are that today none of those are going to happen to me. I spend gobs of time thinking about my fears when I'm separated from my higher power. I wish I could get that time back. I'm grateful for them many times that my program is sufficiently solid that I'm not spending my time in fear. So as we talk about fear, we're talking about self-centered fear. Neither I nor you want to be relieved of immediate fear. We want to hang on to that. Those people in the fellowship who have what I want, they've managed to give their self-centered fear over to their higher power. The people in AA who are experiencing freedom, they've been relieved of their self-centered fear through their work in the steps. How do we do that? We do it through writing down a fear inventory. The fear inventory follows the resentment inventory, which is a good thing because the inventory left me aware of my fears but didn't take them away. And I need them taken away. Like always, my actions start in the big book. First, the book says we reviewed our fears thoroughly. We're on page eighty, by the way. Then it says we put them on paper even though we had no resentment in connection with them. So what does that mean? It means we put down all of our fears, including whatever weird neurotic ones we might have. So for me, I'm going to put down my fear of heights. For my friend Clark, he's got to put down his fear of clowns. What might be a little too subtle for some of us is that we also put down all of the fears we already found through our resentment inventory, and that's important. All of the fears go down on the list, and for most of us, it's quite a list. One thing I always noticed is that I would find five different ways to write down the same damn fear. In other words, bad hair, wearing the wrong clothes, saying something stupid, not being cool, being weird, etc. All of those can go under the fear of looking bad. So write down your fears, but you may want to condense them a bit. Your choice. Next, the book says, we asked ourselves why we had them. This is important. So why is bad hair a problem? Because I don't want to look bad to others. Why don't I want to look bad to others? Because I depend on relationships with others to feel okay. Why do I need to feel okay? Because I'm afraid of being alone, of dying alone. All with no higher power I can trust. So at the heart of it, I need my higher power to feel okay. And my higher power is much more effective at keeping me feeling okay than my hair ever was. When I feel the sunlight of the spirit, when I feel the presence of my higher power, I feel okay. Better than okay. Why do I have this fear? Because I needed to manage and control my looks so that other people would help me feel okay. Then the book says, Wasn't it because self-reliance failed us? Well shit, of course. I tried to control my looks, my hair, but it didn't work. So I'm going to paraphrase the book a little, okay? Having good hair was pretty good as far as it went, but that wasn't enough for me. I needed to have really good hair. I once had really good hair, but even then it didn't fully solve the fear problem because I could have a bad hair day. Or sometimes I'd get so proud of my hair that it made me cocky. And then I acted like an idiot in front of people because I was proud of my hair. So good hair or bad hair, neither one solved the fear problem because I was still trying to impress everyone I met. How did self-reliance fail me? It failed me because I couldn't manage it well enough that the fear would go away. However much I did to treat my own fears myself, they were still there. This part can be a little challenging in the inventory. Column one, what is my fear? Bad hair. Column two. Why do I have this fear? Because I need to have good hair to be accepted by my friends. Column three. What were the various ways that I tried to fix this fear without the need of a higher power? I grew it long, I grew it short, I had expensive haircuts, I had no haircuts at all. Blah blah blah blah blah. And all of this brings me to column four of the fear inventory. Am I willing to give this fear to my higher power? And only you can answer that. That's how you do fear inventory. Let me leave you with one last thing. Years ago I was sponsored by a guy named Wyatt, and it came up that I had this fear. I wasn't turning it over to God, and it was a fear of heights. When I would return to my fourth floor apartment, I'd use the outside stairs, but by the time I got up to about the third floor, I was feeling weird and dizzy. So when Wyatt asked if there were any fears I hadn't told him about, I admitted to this one, but I resisted using the steps on this fear. I went so far as to tell Wyatt that from my point of view I didn't think God really wanted to deal with it. Like any good sponsor would, Wyatt asked, have you tried praying to God for it to be removed? Of course, my answer was no. You probably know where this is going. Sure enough, a couple of weeks later, after I had started praying about it, the whole thing was resolved. I could walk up all the stairs to the fourth floor and go into the building without ever once having a queasy feeling about being up too high. All it took was doing the prayer. Thanks for listening. More soon.