> If something has you afraid, it doesnt matter if I think your fear is justified. No, but it does matter if I do. That matters a great deal. If I assume any f

> If something has you afraid, it doesnt matter if I think your fear is justified. No, but it does matter if I do. That matters a great deal. If I assume any fear I feel is always justified and act on it accordingly, or if I never even frame the question of whether it might be excessive, then I implicitly concede to that fear the privilege of controlling my actions, invariably to my own detriment and that of others. We have a word for such people, and there's a reason no one likes to be called by it. No one should. I'm not well acquainted with formal therapy for reasons beyond the scope of this discussion, but I believe a central tenet of the cognitive-behavioral school is that emotions are input, not output. No one likes to be told they need therapy, either, but in this case I wonder if we wouldn't do the world a service by abstracting this idea from that context to make it a commonplace. Edit to your edit: that seems easy to solve! I suspect for most I myself could achieve it in no more than an hour or two, given how much I had to learn I shouldn't talk about for fear of making people cry. I know there's those out there who speak more freely, because I've read some of their stories. That's hard for me to do, because of how they resonate. I am not especially interested in the pleas of those without the burden of similar experiences that they can't even handle dispassionate-unto-clinical accounts of the same.