In the past, I had always avoided C because I didn't understand why many aspects of why it is the way that it is (eg pointers etc). Then I took my university's CPU architecture courses. That sorted that fear right out since I had to go from the ground up, learning everything I'd previously largely avoided or ignored - everything from transistors and the basic logic gates (AND, OR, XOR, NOT, etc) they consist of to full adders, all the way up to pipelined CPUs. Naturally, we learned assembly as part of this.
C made an awful lot more sense after all of this! I still don't like using it, but that's a lot more to do with my understanding of it's dangers (I prefer to let the compiler do the hard work of verifying my programs make sense, a la Rust &c), rather than a fear born of ignorance.