Dear Mate:
What makes sense to me is that “something inside of me” is your brain, neuropathways in your brain. There is fear recorded in those pathways. This fear is not about your current peaceful environment but about the distressing past environments at the time those pathways were formed. For example, a child grew up in a hostile home, the parents fought a lot. The fear was recorded then in the child’s brain.
Later on, as an adult, the person lives in a peaceful environment, let’s say still at home, but the parents are divorced and there is no more fighting. The fear remains because of the time before, not the present.
Fear originating years before, when it becomes anxiety, it means the fear is never really gone. Sometimes you don’t feel it, but it is there and it gets activated and reactivated. Sometime for no discernable reason.
anita