Listen for the sentence next time somebody tells you about a bad day. It will almost always have this shape:
“He said this, and it made me feel ___.” “The traffic was awful, and I lost it.” “She didn’t text back, and I spiralled.”
The word doing the quiet work in each of those is made. He made me feel. The traffic made me lose it. The silence made me spiral. In each one, the sentence treats the event as the cause and the feeling as the direct result. Nothing in the middle. Event in, feeling out.
That’s the model most people live by. It is also wrong. And the correction, once you see it, changes how you handle almost every bad moment.
The formula people actually use (and the one that’s true)
What people say: A -> C
event feeling
What is actually going A + B = C
on: event belief feeling
The missing letter is B: the belief, interpretation, assumption, or meaning you ran about the event before you felt anything. The feeling is downstream of the belief, not downstream of the event.
Which is why two people can hit the exact same event and feel completely different things. The event was the same. The belief underneath wasn’t.
This is called the ABC model. The psychologist Albert Ellis put it on paper in the 1950s. The idea is older than that: the Greek Stoic Epictetus said more or less the same thing two thousand years earlier, that we are not disturbed by what happens, but by the view we take of what happens. Ellis just gave it three letters so people could remember it in the middle of their own bad day.
A: the activating event
The thing that happened. Someone said something. Someone did something. You lost a job. You stubbed your toe. Your flight got cancelled. The thing itself.
A is almost always what people fixate on when something goes wrong. “If this hadn’t happened, I’d be fine.” Mostly true, but misleading. It is not the full story.
B: the belief
This is the part most people cannot see.
B is what you believed, assumed, interpreted, or decided about A, usually in a fraction of a second, usually without noticing you did it. If someone cuts you off in traffic, B might be “that guy did that on purpose,” or “he must be in an emergency,” or “I always get picked on,” or “he probably didn’t see me.” Each one is a different B. Each one produces a different C.
The reason B is so hard to see is that it does not announce itself as a belief. It feels like reality. You do not say to yourself “I have interpreted this event in the following way.” You just know what the event meant. The meaning seems to come with the event, as if attached. It is not. You put it there, so fast you did not catch yourself doing it.
A useful way to picture this is as an iceberg.
WHAT YOU SEE
------------
Conscious:
the event, the feeling
-------- water line --------
Subconscious:
memories, past patterns,
the beliefs you half-know
about yourself
-------- -------- --------
Unconscious:
the deep rules you have no
idea you are running
WHAT YOU DON'T SEE
Most of your B lives below the water line. You can learn to pull some of it up with practice. That is really the whole project.
C: the consequence
The feeling and the behaviour. Stress, fear, anger, sadness, shame. Then whatever you did about it. Shouted at someone. Shut down. Avoided a call. Ate something. Sent a message you regret.
C is loud. It is also the only part most people pay attention to. The whole trick is to notice that C is not caused by A directly. C is caused by B. Which means that changing C does not require changing A. Changing B is enough.
Example 1: the traffic jam
Three drivers hit the same traffic jam. All three stuck. Nothing anyone can do.
A (event): Stuck in traffic.
Driver 1
B (belief): "This is outrageous. Everyone else is an idiot."
C (feeling): Rage. Honks horn. Blood pressure spikes.
Driver 2
B (belief): "Nothing I can do. Might as well listen to
something good."
C (feeling): Mild annoyance that fades. Enjoys the music.
Driver 3
B (belief): "I'm going to be late. They'll think I don't
care. I'm always letting people down."
C (feeling): Anxiety. Chest tight. Rehearsing apology.
Same A. Three completely different Cs. The variable is B.
If you only look at A, Driver 1 looks like a victim of traffic, Driver 3 looks like a victim of traffic, and Driver 2 looks lucky. Once you see the B column, you can see each of them is actually a victim of their own belief about traffic, and the belief is the thing that could change.
Example 2: the breakup
Same person’s situation, two different Bs.
A (event): "My partner just left me."
Version 1
B (belief): "I can't live without them. Everyone leaves
eventually. Something must be wrong with me."
C (feeling): Devastation. Pulls away from friends. Stops
doing things they used to enjoy.
Version 2
B (belief): "I'm sad it's over. It was their choice. This
will hurt for a while. I'll be okay."
C (feeling): Grief that moves through them. Keeps showing
up for their life. Lets it hurt without
letting it define them.
Same A. Two different Cs. Nothing about the breakup itself changed between the two versions. The person’s beliefs about what the breakup meant did.
The second version is not stoicism or denial. The sadness is real. The difference is that the belief is not catastrophic. The breakup is not evidence of being broken. It is evidence of being a person whose relationship ended, which hurts, and which is survivable.
The one real move: catch B
The whole model is useful because of what it tells you to do differently.
You cannot change A. The event already happened. Honking at it does nothing.
You cannot change C by trying to change C. Telling yourself to feel differently does not work. The feeling is downstream.
What you can change is B. And you cannot change B until you can see it.
The move is to pull one of your Bs up out of the subconscious water line and look at it.
When you notice a bigger C than the A seems to deserve,
pause. Ask yourself one question:
"What did I just decide this event meant?"
Whatever answer comes up is a B. Write it down.
That is the whole exercise. The surprise, when you actually do it, is how often the B is something you’d never say out loud if you heard yourself say it. “She didn’t text back” (A) sometimes gets interpreted as “I don’t matter to her, which proves I don’t really matter to anyone” (B). Written down, that B looks nothing like reality. In your head it felt like reality. That gap is the whole post.
The exercise
Pick one thing from the last week where your reaction was bigger than the situation warranted. Then write it out, slowly, in three parts.
A (what actually happened, just the facts, quotable):
__________________________________________________
B (what I decided it meant, said out loud, uncomfortably
honest):
__________________________________________________
C (what I felt, and what I did):
__________________________________________________
Fifteen minutes with a notebook and one honest B. That’s it. Doing this on one real incident will teach you more than reading five books about it, because you will see your own B for the first time, and once seen it loses most of its grip.
The one line
If you keep nothing else from this post, keep this:
X did not make you feel Y. X happened, you believed something about it, and that belief made you feel Y.
The event is not the problem. The belief is. The belief is the one piece in the chain you can actually touch. The whole project is learning to catch it.
This is not clinical or medical advice. If you are struggling with your mental health, talk to a qualified professional. These are personal notes, worked through in my own words.