Families pass down fears as easily as recipes.

Recipes and fears travel by the same route. A grandparent’s anxiety about money, about strangers, about being seen as lesser, gets absorbed by a child watching, then performed again in front of the next child, without a single explicit lesson. Nobody intends it. It is simply what living around a feeling does to a person.

Identify a fear you hold that does not match your own experience. Ask whose it originally was and what circumstance produced it. Fears that belonged to someone else’s situation often lose grip once you can see where they came from.