First, I’m so glad you find my writing intriguing! I’ll definitely take a look at your magazine’s submission guidelines.

You are of course correct that “no” and “not” are among English’s negative markers, but they aren’t the only ones. I tend to think — though of course this is arguable — that the phrase “free from anger” is “negative” in the sense that it calls attention to what you want to avoid, rather than what you want to attract.

More specifically: my suspicion from working with phonosemantics is that logical operators of any sort are ignored. The phrase “Y is free from X” has a complex implicit logical implicature, i.e. “all E, such that E is type X, are in state S, such that S is NOT “near” Y (in some vague sense)”. Thus the phrase “free from” has a “not” hidden in its meaning.

There are some linguists that argue that lexical meaning is “atomic”, i.e. that you can’t break down a phrase or word’s meaning in the way I just did without losing something essential. I’m sympathetic with this view, and I don’t think that the entire meaning of “free from” is encapsulated in the logical form I provided in the last paragraph. Still, I think it’s part of the meaning, and an important part.