As a survival instinct, we can have a tendency to treat all the unpleasant cause & effect patterns we’ve ever experienced as having coalesced into a single ever-present “force or power”.
And because we have a powerful emotional “muscle memory” of those patterns, we can often hold this imaginary force or power as responsible for every single thing that has worked against us, seems to be working against us today, and may be expected to work against our well-being in the future as well
I think this is one reason why our Habitual Fears are able to command our attention so easily; we see them as harbingers of that power or force that we’re expecting to inevitably work against us!
One solution springs to mind that is quite simple, if perhaps not all that easy:
Rather than clinging to old emotions rooted in bad memories, we might all be better off basing our expectations on the reality of our present circumstances, capabilities, and possibilities.