An inherited fear may have protected someone whose circumstances no longer exist.

Fear travels down through families with its reasons stripped off. Someone learned to be careful about money, or strangers, or being noticed, and they learned it from circumstances that were real. Two generations later the caution is still operating, faithfully, in a world that no longer contains the danger it was built for. It feels like instinct because nobody remembers it being installed.

Pick a caution you hold that you have never actually examined and ask whose situation it was designed for. If you can, ask the older people in your family what they were guarding against. Respecting where a fear came from and declining to keep obeying it are not in conflict.