That sounds like trauma. A lot of us carry trauma that we're not aware of or know about it but don't realize how badly it dawns upon us until it does. I don't t

That sounds like trauma. A lot of us carry trauma that we're not aware of or know about it but don't realize how badly it dawns upon us until it does. I don't think I had a near death experience but I was really afraid of water when I was a kid, only the smell of swimming pool or chlorine would send me into a panic mode. My father taught my sister to swim quite early and when he tried on me he inadvertently gave me the feeling of drowning when holding me on the water. The sensation of being with the head close to water is similar to waterboarding and this thing I only realized way late in my 30s why it was so. Other trauma I had was fear of hospitals and that was similar to the water one. Of course it eventually subsided but later on I found out that when I was very little an unexperienced nurse pinched me several times on each of my arms because she could not find the veins and the trauma stayed there. These are not huge traumas by any means but the mechanism manifests quite the same. When one reexperiences trauma it feels like an irrational fear without being able to pinpoint where it is coming from.