lbb

I think it's a bit of a fallacy to believe that fear can always be "dealt with", in the sense that most people understand the term. Understanding may bring peace if a fear is imaginary or overstated, but it may not if the fear is grounded in reality. Likewise, although many recite platitudes about needing to "face your fears head-on" or "get back on the horse that threw you", sometimes the reality is that when the horse threw you, you were getting off lucky -- get back on and you not only get thrown again, you get trampled as well. And sometimes, to a sufficiently traumatized person, even if a fear of future threats is not grounded in reality, no amount of "understanding" or "facing it" is going to make it go away. Psychic injury is like physical injury: quite frequently, it doesn't heal up good as new. You do what you can to minimize the damage, but sometimes dealing with fear, like dealing with any damage, consists simply of accepting that the damage exists, accepting that it may always be with you to some degree, and doing what you can to let yourself heal as much as you can over time.

(FWIW, and I may regret saying this, but I speak as someone who's gone through PTSD)