When I was a kid I had this mix of phobia and fascination about monstera plants. At first they have sort of round leaves. Then holes appear in the leaves. After that, the separate flaps come to. I found that process scary and unnatural. I had never seen leaves develop like that.

I think we're born to see very small changes in nature and that is some kind of survival instinct. We're supposed to notice when things are a little different than they were before. Maybe that signals that this is a different plant than we thought it was, that this one might be toxic and even deadly.

Those kinds of instincts are notoriously hard to get rid of. I do think practice can help to a point though. But I do think there must be enough time for calming down, if you just expose without reaching calmness, I think that can feed into the phobia instead.