This seems quite right to me, that in our minds things are often confused and conflated that don't need to be and as a result we act in ways that aren't what we think should be possible and it feels like doing what we really want is impossible because in our minds we don't know how to separate the thing we want from the thing we don't want. One possible way to deal with these sorts of problems that I've been excited about lately as a good framing for the mechanism that underlies the processes that clear these sorts of confusions is memory reconsolidation [LW · GW].