Was just remembering some advice I received from a counsellor years ago: "thoughts lead to actions, actions lead to emotions". That never fully resonated with m

Was just remembering some advice I received from a counsellor years ago: "thoughts lead to actions, actions lead to emotions". That never fully resonated with me, because if thoughts as we understand them are the origin of everything, we should have a lot more control of ourselves than we actually do. Now I tend to think that both thoughts and emotions have the same origin: some sort of internal representation of the world around us that we do not directly control. Thoughts, whether visual or auditory or symbolic, arise from this "model". I'd like to think of this model as not consisting anything that we would recognise directly as thoughts or emotions or even memories. It may be a "machine language" layer that has no conscious representation. I wouldn't call it subconscious thought because that would imply a thought being thought, only without conscious awareness.