Assuming this is a factor, maybe improving society’s epistemic norms would also help? Like, making it clear that tu quoque is not valid reasoning and that people shouldn’t be penalized for noticing and admitting to irrational fears without rationalizing them.
(I’m saying this because if anything can be said to be a trigger for me, it’s needles. When I tell people what happened to make that the case, they—my therapist included—tend to say I’ve given them a new nightmare. I avoided getting immunizations for several years because of it. And yet it seems really damn easy to notice the real reason for that and recognize that it shouldn’t inform my normative judgments. Although, maybe it’s harder to do that if there’s no particular incident that obviously caused the phobia?)
Seth Nicholson says:
https://www.facebook.com/mati.roy.09/posts/10158690001894579