How and Why the Pathways to Peace, Inc. Program Was Developed
Pathways to Peace, Inc. was founded and developed by William Fleeman. Pathways to Peace came into being as a direct result of the founder’s personal experience.
The material that follows is an excerpt from the Pathways to Peace founder’s story, a first-hand account of how and why the Pathways to Peace program came into being. A more detailed account may be found in the Pathways to Peace workbook, the official guide of the Pathways to Peace, Inc. program.
Pathways to Peace, Inc. Founder’s Story
Writing down my story was an important part of my recovery from my lifelong problem with anger.
My father was an angry, violent army drill sergeant from Indianapolis. He was also an alcoholic. He abandoned my mother and me when I was an infant. My mother was the daughter of a northern Michigan lumberjack. My grandfather had a problem with alcohol and a temper like a rhinoceros. After my father left, my mother took me to live with my maternal grandparents.
Later in my childhood, I tried to figure out why my father left. I decided it must have been because I was defective. I felt defective. I must be defective, I thought. Or my father wouldn’t have left.
Soon I developed the belief that you can’t trust people to stick by you. If your own father leaves you, my child’s mind reasoned, whom can you trust? You can’t trust anyone. Period.
My grandfather was often violent when he drank. I saw violence in my home from an early age. My earliest memory of family violence happened when I was three or four. To this day I can remember it as though it happened only yesterday.
It was early one winter day. My grandfather had returned home from his taxicab dispatcher’s job and was drunk. I stood at the front window and watched as two other drunken men helped my grandfather up the snowy walk to the door. My mother and grandmother were watching, too. Glancing up, I saw rage in my mother’s eyes. My grandmother was angry, too. The two men left my grandfather at the door; then they staggered back to the car parked at the curb and drove away.
The door was locked. My grandfather pounded drunkenly on the door and waited in the cold for the door to open. My mother waited until the other men were gone. Then she opened the door. My grandfather staggered inside. My mother slammed the door behind him. Screaming and cursing, she shoved my grandfather to the floor. She leaped in the air, and then came down on his chest on her knees. Too drunk to defend himself, my grandfather lay passively on the floor while my mother pounded his face with her fists. My grandmother stood back crying and wringing her hands. I stood with my back pasted to the far wall of the room. I watched, terrified. I felt totally powerless. I never felt safe after that experience.
When I was five years old my grandfather died. I felt a great loss. Although he had been abusive, he was the only “father” I had known. I plunged into a depression and withdrew into a silent inner world. My grandmother grew sick with grieving and ended up in the hospital. There was no money to hire a sitter to care for me, so my mother took me out of school and sent me to stay with an aunt. I felt totally abandoned and alone. But time and my aunt’s loving kindness healed my depression. Yet I would suffer bouts of depression for most of my life.
I learned to use anger to mask depression and sadness. I found anger and rage more pleasurable than guilt and depression.
When I was seven, my mother remarried. She married another soldier, Jim, a WWII combat veteran. Like thousands of others, he returned from the war traumatized and alcoholic. My stepfather resented me, at times. He naturally wished for a son or daughter of his own. That never happened. But he was kind and treated me well, and he was not violent in the home.
My grandmother was religious. She made sure I went to Sunday School and church every Sunday. I did not like Sunday School. I felt self-conscious and out of place. I felt I didn’t fit. The bleeding figure of Christ looking down from the cross scared me. Sometimes I thought I saw my grandfather’s bloodied face there instead of Christ’s. I carried deep and painful feelings of guilt and unworthiness into the church with me. I felt God would only abandon me anyway, as my earthly father had done by choice and my grandfather by death. When I was seven, I stopped going to church, and I stopped believing in God.
I got in my first fistfight when I was eight. It happened at school. Another kid made fun of me because he knew I didn’t have a father. From early childhood I felt worthless and alone, powerless and afraid. That’s how kids feel when their fathers abandon them. The kid’s remarks hooked my feelings of abandonment and pushed my self-esteem even lower. I felt a sinking feeling in my stomach; then I shoved the kid down the school steps.
Watching the kid tumble down the steps, I felt my first “anger high.” The other kids who cheered me on added to the high. The high lasted only an instant, but for that instant I felt a sense of power I had never felt before. I felt confident instead of afraid, accepted instead of rejected, strong instead of weak. What I felt, felt good. The kid was not hurt. Neither of us suffered bad results. The teacher who broke up the fight merely talked to us.
Later that day the high went away, and all of the negative feelings I felt about myself came back. But that fight on the school steps changed me. The change lasted most of the rest of my life. A new part was added to my character: a part I could not seem to control, a part I was not even aware of, a part that would continue to seek the rush of power I felt when I shoved that kid down the stairs. Over time that part would grow big and strong. Finally it would run my life. Later I would find out what it was. It was anger and rage.
That fight on the school steps caused me to form another new belief: anger is power. That belief influenced my behavior for the next 35 years.
I moved to Detroit, Michigan at age thirteen. I moved into a “tough” neighborhood and went to a “tough” school. As usual, I felt out of place.
Then
I joined a street gang. I had a lot in common with the other gang members. Violence
and alcoholism and drug abuse were in their homes, and they were angry like
me.
Most of the gang members went to my school. We hung out together in the hallways. We protected each other from real or imagined threats from other students. For the first time in my life, I felt safe. For the first time in my life, I felt I belonged. But I didn’t feel safe or accepted anyplace else, only in the gang. I got into fights in school and on the street. My anger got worse. I punched walls. I bolted out of classrooms and slammed doors. My peers applauded my behavior, and that made the consequences seem worthwhile.
I ran away from home at fourteen. I wanted to get as far away as possible from my family and from school. I came back tired, but unchanged.
By the time I got to ninth grade the teachers at my school found my behavior unacceptable. I was expelled at the beginning of the spring term. I was fifteen years old. Being expelled greatly increased my status in the street gang. That was the payoff.
The following September I got into very serious trouble because of my anger. I was arrested and placed in a solitary confinement cell for 36 days. I spent my 16th birthday there. Then I was taken to a reformatory in Jackson, Michigan. At the reformatory a guard punched me in the spine for talking in line. He punched me so hard I literally saw stars. On another occasion, a different guard slashed my lower back with a dog choker chain that he used as a key chain.
I joined the reformatory boxing team and had some legal fights. I was a kid with an anger problem, and the coaching staff taught me how to be more effectively violent. (I have never been able to figure that out.) I also lifted weights.
After my release I was on parole until I was nineteen. I drank too much and got violent at parties. After I got off parole I hit the road. I was restless and unhappy and still felt my life had no meaning. At twenty I hitchhiked to California, where I met a girl and got married.
I went to college for a short time in California. In those days, in California, you could get into a community college even if you hadn’t finished high school. If you were eighteen or over and could pass the entrance exam, by law they had to let you enroll. I had always been a reader. I read widely on many subjects. Before I was expelled, I used to skip school every chance I got. I hid from the truant officer at the public library, and I read a lot of books sitting in the back between rows. I took the entrance exam at Los Angeles City College and passed. I was twenty years old. So they had to let me in.
Meanwhile I was still using anger and rage to deal with the world, and my new wife was having a hard time dealing with my anger. Before I completed my second semester, she left and went to San Francisco. I dropped out of college. The marriage had lasted a year. There were no children.
I was drinking too much, and also using other drugs. Eventually, I became addicted to speed and downers. One night I got drunk on Tequila and downers. I was blacked out but on my feet. I woke up in the morning feeling bad and looking worse. My friend came over later to tell me the story. He said I went into a rage and tried to choke him the night before. He said I also kicked out one side of the windshield of his car. He said he managed to pry my hands loose, then slammed my face into the dashboard of the car and knocked me out. He said he was sorry he had hurt me. I felt stupid and ashamed and could not face my friend again for several months.
I went back to Detroit at twenty-three. I divorced, and then married again. I had a son. I worked in machine shops and learned some skills. Meanwhile, my anger got worse. I lost ten machine shop jobs over the next ten years because of my anger.
I
got a DWI when I was thirty. Once again I was locked up, this time in the drunk
tank. I felt humiliated and ashamed. The police said they would have allowed
someone to come and take me home if I hadn’t been so verbally abusive.
I lost many jobs over the next three years because of my anger. Finally I had to leave Detroit again. I ran out of machine shop owners who were willing to put up with my anger. The word had gotten around. I was a good worker but couldn’t get along with people, especially people in authority like machine shop owners and machine shop foremen. I moved my family to Indianapolis when I was thirty-three.
When I moved to Indianapolis I rediscovered the sport of weight lifting. I quit my machine shop job and went to work as a health club instructor. I had a knack for selling memberships, and a talent for helping out-of-shape people with low self-esteem get back in shape. The new job helped increase my own self-esteem. But my anger habit followed me into my new career. One night I got angry with one of the other instructors and picked a fight with him. I lost my job because of the fight. I got another health club job a week later and lost that one too. I got angry at the club Christmas party and got into a fight with the owner. I went back to work in machine shops.
I joined a power-lifting club—the Central Indiana Weight Lifting Club (C.I.W.C.)—and started to compete. My teammates urged me to stop drinking and to stop using drugs. They said I could probably establish a new bench press record if I stopped. I joined a twelve-step program and stopped drinking. Nine months later I became a bench press champion. I opened a health club but lost it because of my anger. When I opened my club I had no money for equipment, so some of my power lifting friends let me use their equipment in exchange for memberships. My angry outbursts at the gym soon drove them away. They took their equipment with them. So I had to close up.
I moved my family back to Detroit again. I stayed off booze and other drugs and went back to machine shop work. I became shop foreman; then I had an anger outburst and got fired.
About nine months after I stopped drinking and using other drugs, I had an unusual experience—an awakening of some sort, a “spiritual” awakening. Actually words cannot describe what happened. But the word “spiritual” comes close. It was like what happened to Scrooge in “A Christmas Carol” by Dickens.
The experience made me aware I did have a purpose for being alive, and what I had been doing with my life up to then was not it. That strange experience gave me hope, and some of the fear that had haunted me for so long went away. I felt a pressing need to find out what I was supposed to do with my life; and, whatever it was, I knew that my anger and rage would not help me accomplish it. I wanted to stop the violence but did not know how.
That strange experience changed my outlook but not my behavior. It turned my face toward the light, but it did not take away my anger and rage.
Because of my anger my second marriage ended in divorce. Later I married again—my third marriage. I brought my son with me into this new union. Soon after, my new wife became pregnant.
My anger was still a problem. I had an outburst of rage one night, and my wife called the police. I didn’t hurt her, but I scared her. At first, I felt guilty and ashamed; then I plunged into a depression. Finally, I saw a counselor. When I admitted feeling suicidal, the counselor advised hospitalization for depression. I checked into a locked ward in Pontiac, Michigan. I was there 45 days. While I was there I discovered my purpose. I found out what my mission was, and the depression lifted.
My
wife, who was then pregnant, went to New York while I was in the hospital. My
first son and I joined her in New York soon after my second son was born.
I had discovered that my purpose was to help people. As a recovering alcoholic and drug addict, I was eligible for state and federal education funding as a part of my rehabilitation and was able to go to college to become a counselor. My last violent act occurred just before I started college. The person upstairs was playing his music too loud and keeping the baby awake. I told him to turn down the music. He refused. I kicked down his door. He called the police. The police came but didn’t arrest me. By then my wife could stand no more. She took my new son and ran away again. Because she was afraid of how I might react if I was able to find her and my son, she took an assumed name and went into hiding.
I did not see my second son for 19 years. I tried to find him but was unsuccessful. Finally when he was twenty years old, he found me, and we had a wonderful reunion. His mother and I met not long after and made amends to each other. My son and I are still in touch. If I hadn’t overcome my addiction to anger, we probably never would have met.
When I finished my associate’s degree, I became a counselor at a drug and alcohol clinic. One of my clients got drunk and had a standoff with the police. He was shooting at them with a .22 caliber rifle. The sheriff’s department called me to do a telephone intervention. But I was too late. He was too drunk. He even took two shots at me.
The SWAT team was there by then. A sharpshooter came up from behind and killed him. I went into a rage and verbally attacked the police. The director of the agency where I worked said my behavior was unprofessional and inappropriate, and he fired me. Anger robbed me again. Of course I blamed the police for my client’s death. But I blamed myself more. I plunged into a depression again.
At last I saw what the problem was. At last I understood. I was addicted to anger the way I had been addicted to alcohol and other drugs! My anger was a primary addiction. And I saw I was not the only one. I saw that anger and rage was a serious problem for thousands of people. At last I knew exactly what my purpose was. My mission was to help others like myself, not just those who were addicted to alcohol or cocaine or heroin. My mission was to help others like myself who used anger like a drug. But first I had to recover from my own anger habit. I had to get my own act together.
Six years later I felt I had a good handle on my anger. I felt I understood. And I felt I was ready to share what I had learned with others.
My personal recovery involved an eight-step process. Later, these eight steps became the Eight Principles of Pathways to Peace. In order to recover from chronic anger and rage, these are the things I had to do:
I worked hard at this eight-step process. I worked this program as hard as I could. Basic changes started to happen—positive changes.
Not only my behavior changed, but my attitude, outlook, and character also changed.
Now my purpose was clear. I had a mission. My mission was to continue my own recovery and to help other people who had problems with anger and rage. But I needed a way to deliver the goods; I needed a vehicle to help others recover. It came to me in a flash: I would create a self-help movement called Pathways to Peace to empower angry people to help themselves change. I wrote the Pathways to Peace workbook. Then I took the show on the road. Now Pathways to Peace groups are popping up all over the country.
Reflecting on my own pattern of anger and rage, I could see that an episode of intense anger had a “speed ball” effect. It was like ingesting a cocktail composed of one part cocaine and one part heroin! I also realized that patterns of chronic anger and rage were learned the same way patterns of addiction to chemicals were learned: through a process of repetition over time. I also understood that some chemically dependent people used their drug, or drugs of choice, in order to enhance the high they got from anger and rage—that for them, anger, not cocaine or alcohol, was the primary addiction. I then began to sense that anger was probably a major problem with people who weren’t also addicted to chemicals.
How Pathways to Peace, Inc. Self-Help Groups Were Started
I knew that many people recovering from chemical dependency had problems with anger. But I wasn’t sure if large numbers of other people who weren’t alcoholic or drug addicted also had problems with anger.
To test the need in the general community for an anger management program, I launched a pilot program in three different locations: Jamestown, NY, Dunkirk, NY, and Rochester, NY. The programs received minimal publicity and consisted of eight weekly, consecutive, one-hour seminars. Using donated space, I offered the seminars free to the community, and served cookies and coffee. At the Jamestown site, 22 people showed up the first night. The following week, 33 people were there. At the Dunkirk site, 23 showed up the first night. At the Rochester site, 56 people tried to squeeze into a space meant to accommodate, at most, 40 people! At the end of each of the eight-week programs, at least a third of the original participants were still attending. The Rochester program, by far the most heavily attended, averaged more than 40 participants each session.
Having demonstrated the need for an ongoing anger management program in the community at large, I needed to find an inexpensive way to deliver the education and support to all who wanted and needed it. The solution came to me in a flash. I would design a self-help program to meet the need—Pathways to Peace, Inc. The program would consist of self-help education and support groups that would meet at least once a week and would be led by unpaid volunteers. Participation would be free.
Why the Pathways to Peace Workbook Was Developed
In the beginning, Pathways to Peace groups were more like open discussion meetings. There was very little structure. Soon it became apparent that some structure was necessary. Many people suggested that a workbook be developed that would help the groups stay focused on solutions. The workbook was written, and then tested out in the groups. Over the past several years, it has been revised and edited several times. Now in its second edition, the Pathways to Peace workbook is used as the primary tool by Pathways to Peace groups and has become the official guidebook for the Pathways to Peace, Inc. program. The workbook provides a clear path for members to follow. Most important of all, perhaps, the workbook keeps Pathways to Peace group meetings from breaking down into blame-and-complain sessions.
Growth of Pathways to Peace Self-Help Groups
The first community-based Pathways to Peace group was established January 1998 in Jamestown, NY. There were only three members in the first group. After three months, there were still just three members. Then the group began to grow. Soon, the group outgrew the space provided at the first location and had to move to bigger space.
By the end of the 1998, another group had started in Dunkirk, NY. In 1999, Pathways to Peace established a community-based group in Buffalo, NY. Around this time a counselor at a mental health center in Tucson, Arizona, acquired the Pathways to Peace guidebook and started an in-house group there. Another community-based Pathways to Peace group opened in Fredonia, NY, in 2000, along with one in Hudson, NY.
In April 2001, the Cleveland Plain Dealer published a feature article on Pathways to Peace. As a result of the article, the first Cleveland, OH, Pathways to Peace group drew a crowd of eighty people! There are now four Pathways to Peace groups in Cleveland.
The Future of Pathways to Peace, Inc.
What started out as a single group to help half a dozen people has grown into a movement. New groups are being established. Existing groups are growing in size. Soon Pathways to Peace will go to Canada. A group may be forming in Ontario as this is written.
The Pathways to Peace vision is to establish at least one community-based group in every state in the U.S. by 2010. The expectation is that we will realize our vision before that. In fact, since we now are in the process of developing an online Pathways to Peace group, we may reach other countries even before we establish groups in every U.S. state.
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