A Middlegame Lesson

"My System" and "My System In Practice" books by Aron Nimzowitsch are widely acknowledged by many strong chess players as being the greatest chess manual ever. There's a shorter work of Nimzowitsch that literally translates from Russian as "How I became a grandmaster". It's a short chess centric biography which describes the early Nimzowitsch as a strong tactical player who totally lacked positional understanding. Just like you, he would "see" combinations, but couldn't explain why they are possible. He tried to play in some tournaments against masters and failed, so he took a break trying to understand what's going on. And his deep understanding of strategy came from "scratching the positional itch".