Two people are stuck in the same traffic jam on the same Thursday evening.
The first is gripping the wheel. Late again. Everyone's going to be waiting. This always happens to me. His jaw is tight and his chest is hot, and by the time he gets home he's snapping at people who haven't done anything.
The second is in the next lane, in exactly the same jam. She's turned the radio up. Nothing she can do about it, and for once nobody can reach her. She's almost enjoying the forty minutes to herself.
Same road. Same traffic. Same delay. Completely different evenings. So what were they actually feeling?
Do thoughts create feelings?
Yes. In any given moment, you're not feeling the situation. You're feeling what you make of it, the thought you're in. But some of those thoughts come fused to a charge laid down years ago, which fires faster than you can think. So a new thought can change a light mood, while a deep pattern needs its old charge removed.
Both halves of that answer matter. Most teaching on this subject gives you the first half and leaves out the second, and the second is where most people get stuck.
What am I really feeling in a difficult moment?
Your thinking about it, every time.
The traffic jam didn't make the first driver furious. It couldn't. If it could, the second driver would have been furious too. What made him furious was the meaning he attached to it. Late. Letting everyone down. Always me. That meaning arrived as a thought, and the feeling followed the thought almost instantly.
This is one of the most freeing things a person can ever really understand, not as an idea but as something felt. Nobody, no circumstance, no event can reach inside you and install a feeling. The feeling always comes from the inside, from what you're making of what happened. Which means that however stuck a feeling seems, it isn't welded to the world outside you.
This also explains why the same event can feel completely different to you on two different days. The meeting that terrified you on Monday barely registers on Thursday. The meeting didn't change. Your thinking about it did. Once you've noticed that a few times, it becomes very hard to go on believing the world is doing your feeling for you. It's in the space where you have far more say than you've been told.
If that's true, why can't I just think my way to feeling better?
Because some of your thoughts aren't fresh. They're very old, and they come with a charge attached.
When the first driver thinks this always happens to me, he isn't having a new thought. He's having one he's had a thousand times, since long before he could drive. It might go back to a childhood where he was blamed for everything, or where being late meant real trouble. When that thought first formed, it got fused to a strong feeling. Now the two travel together. The traffic touches the old thought, and the old charge fires, and it fires before he's had any chance to choose a better thought.
That's why positive thinking works beautifully for a bad mood and hardly at all for a pattern. You can think a better thought, but the charge has already gone off. It's the same reason understanding your past doesn't change you. The understanding reaches the thought. It doesn't reach the charge.
And it's why overthinking so often gets worse when you try to think your way out. You're adding more thoughts to a loop that's being driven by feeling underneath.
Are painful feelings a sign that something is wrong with me?
No. They're feedback, and very precise feedback at that.
Pinch yourself on the inside of your forearm, hard. The pain isn't the problem. The pain is your body saying, clearly, stop, this hurts. It's doing its job.
Painful emotions work the same way. They're instant feedback about the thought you're in, and whether it's really yours or something you learned along the way. When you're in thinking that doesn't serve you, thinking that says you're alone, or not enough, or in danger when you aren't, your body tells you with a heavy feeling. When you're in thinking that fits who you really are, it tells you that too, with ease and warmth and energy. The whole range of your emotions is a guidance system, and it's been working the entire time.
So a painful feeling isn't evidence that you're broken. It's evidence that the system is working. What gets people stuck isn't the signal. It's old charge that keeps setting the signal off long after the original danger has passed. Anxiety about the future is one of the clearest examples of this.
How can I see this for myself?
Try this the next time a strong feeling arrives. It takes about a minute, and you can do it anywhere.
When the feeling comes, don't argue with it and don't try to fix it. Ask one question first: what am I thinking right now?
Find the thought underneath the feeling and say it to yourself plainly, in words. They don't respect me. I'm going to fail. This always happens. Notice how quickly you found it. It was right there.
Then ask a second question: is this a new thought, or an old one?
If it's new, you'll often find the feeling shifts a little just from seeing the thought clearly. If it's old, if you recognise it from years back, notice that too. That's a thought with a charge attached. You won't clear it in a minute, and you don't need to. Just seeing that the feeling is coming from an old thought and not from the present moment is already a step outside it.
What changes when you really get this?
The weather stops being the sky.
When this understanding moves from your head into your whole experience, something relaxes very deeply. You still feel everything. But the feelings stop feeling like facts about the world. They become weather, passing through. And the old charged thoughts, once they've been met and removed, stop being able to hijack a new moment with an old weight.
I learned this the hard way. After years of hard knocks, I scraped together the money for one more training, and something happened I didn't expect. As I did this work on other people, it went deep inside me as well. As my clients transformed, so did I. What I discovered is that lasting change, releasing pain you thought you were stuck with forever, is actually simple, once you have the right method. For over twenty years since, on five continents, that's what I've been refining. You can read how the whole approach fits together on the RS Method page.
What I see, again and again, is that people don't need to be taught how to feel better. They already know how, underneath. What they need is for the old charged thoughts to stop pulling them out of it. When those are gone, what's underneath simply comes back into view: the ease that was there before the old noise started, and is still there when it stops.
If you'd like to begin from underneath the thinking, I made a free masterclass for exactly that, called Who Am I? It takes you to the one who has been noticing every thought and every feeling, and has never once been either of them.
Next time you're stuck in traffic, notice which driver you are. And notice that you get to choose again.
Robert Simic, guiding the remembering.