Fear can be something that touches about all areas of our lives.  The Alcoholics Anonymous Big Book states on page 67 that “it was an evil and corroding thread; the fabric of our existence was shot through with it.”  This created circumstances which brought negative issues into our lives.  The fears could be real or imagined.  I remember as a child I would become afraid of imaginary reptiles under my bed.  This was truly an unfounded fear!

Sometimes for those who use their anger to intimidate others we gain a sense of self-importance.  This can lead to all kinds of run-ins with others.  We cover our fear with arrogance and try to keep the other away from us by intimidating them.  The arrogance goes even farther in keeping the other away as it makes us to be very unpleasant to be around.  

Fear can bring us troubles we were not looking for.  It set in motion misfortunes which we blamed others for.  In step 4-5 we see how we ourselves set the ball rolling in the situation.  This was our fault, not the other person’s fault.  Fear can also feed our denial mechanism.  It is like the story where someone steals someone’s cell phone and then helps them to look for it!  Back to our state of insanity if we find ourselves in a situation like this.  

We put all of our fears down on paper to be discussed in step 5.  We discovered that self-reliance failed us.  Once again, we had taken back the running of our lives.  We had to re-commit our lives to the Higher Power one more time.  We have to turn over our so-called self-confidence to God.  If we don’t do this, we can become quite arrogant in protecting our unfounded fears.  It could be argued here that anger covers up fear.  Anger is a weapon we use to justify situations and use to attempt to intimidate others.  Fear and anger could be said to be second cousins!  They seem to work together to destroy us.  

The Big Book states that there is a different way of dealing with these issues.  If we look back in our step work, we see that in step 3 we turned our will and life over to the care of God.  We have to do this again when it comes to our defects of character generated by fear and anger.  We are now trusting God once again to handle our situations while we just do the footwork.  As we rely on Him, we our able to match calamity with serenity.  This helps us to stay sober and serene most of the time.