The Three Cs

Thirty-two years ago, I began publishing Telekinesis, a newsletter I sent to every Feldenkrais teacher worldwide. Well, at least every colleague I could track down using the available resources and technology. Starting a year earlier, I wrote to every Feldenkrais guild and professional organization I could find, collected the membership rosters available, and added names and mailing addresses to basic customer relationship management software.

The purpose of the newsletter was to promote the advanced training I was teaching around the world. Sage Lee, the graphic designer and illustrator I was working with, asked me what I would offer readers in exchange for reading the course descriptions and reviewing the calendar. Drawing on my high school journalism background, I decided to write an essay or case study for each of the upcoming twice-yearly publications.

That was long before social media or blogs, at the start of the Internet age, when Sage and I invented what has since become known as educational marketing. The following is (an only slightly updated version of) the piece I wrote for the first edition of Telekinesis:

One day at the end of 1999, as I was moving from San Francisco to Champaign, my old car, Tillie, a forest green, four-door ’73 Volvo sedan, was experiencing trouble. The night before, Tillie’s battery had died while I was getting gasoline, and I had to charge it again.

The mechanic at the all-night truck stop thought I might need a new alternator. He advised me to install one the next day before continuing my trip.

Early the following day, I went to the local auto parts store only to learn they didn’t have the part. They could order an alternator from the distributor but would not receive it for a few days. The gentleman at the store was kind enough to call around for me; after several calls, he found the necessary part at the Volvo dealership twenty miles away. I called them. It was the Friday before New Year’s, and they regretfully informed me that they were too busy to help me. I thought of having to wait three days, the three days I had hoped to be driving across country so that I could reach my new home with enough time to unpack and settle before beginning to teach at the University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana.

I decided to ignore the bad news from the Volvo place and drive over there, hoping they would pity my situation and help me out. Luckily, they did. When I was standing in the service department manager’s small office, I noticed a sign on the wall. It said:

When I asked what it meant, he told me they used these Three Cs to help a customer understand the repair bill. When someone is paying, the mechanic should address all three factors: the problem’s cause, the car’s general condition (especially as it relates to the problem), and the correction they made to eliminate the problem.

The Three Cs are a perfect illustration of lineal causal thinking. This kind of thinking assumes that an event, or effect, has a prior cause, that you can trace a path from the effect directly back to the cause, and thereby localize this cause to a specific place. Here, the reasoning behind car repair mirrors the logic of medical diagnosis: a problem has an identifiable cause, and its resolution depends on the cause being identified and rectified. This approach is inherently reductionistic: it reduces a complex situation to a description of the elements that comprise it.

We can easily understand A mechanical problem with a car in these terms: The car won’t start. Since it doesn’t turn over, we conclude the battery is dead. We confirm this by noticing that the lights and the radio are not working. From the dead battery, we can work our way backward to the cause by asking why the battery died. Eventually, the mechanic deduces that Tillie’s alternator is not charging the battery. Therefore, it is broken and needs to be fixed.

However, we often deal with problems in rehabilitation and improving human performance in the arts, sports, and human learning that simply do not respond to this limited and limiting approach. For example, stiffness and reduced range of motion are common problems following surgeries, accidents, or traumatic injuries. This unconscious neuromuscular response, often called muscular splinting, can persist long after the immediate injuries have healed.

For instance, many years after surgery to remove a bunion, one of my students began experiencing low back pain and limitations in mobility and flexibility. In this situation, whether we refer to it as favoring one leg, limping, or adaptation phenomena, the cause of the problem is difficult, if not impossible, to localize. Is the problem caused by the foot? What if the operation was successful and the foot is no longer uncomfortable, but the person continues to avoid weight-bearing on the area that hurt before surgery? Is the problem in the back? What if there is no structural basis for the problem?

We cannot trace some problems back to a specific, local cause. Instead, these problems arise from the way a person moves. In these situations, the problem is a consequence of how a person functions, what she or he does, and how they go about doing it. To resolve this type of problem, we must shift our thinking. We must understand the nature of the body-as-movement-system and its underlying relationships.

The shift from reductionistic to systemic problem-solving is analogous to one that happened in the branch of psychotherapy known as family systems therapy. Where we once thought it necessary to treat an individual with problems, now we recognize that the individual is expressing something amiss with the functioning of the family. The problem comes from the relationships between the family members and the patterns they form—not from one person alone. A family systems therapist would refer to such a “problematic person” as the identified patient.

In much the same way, many so-called “physical problems” are mislabeled. The difficulty arises from the very act of looking for a problem’s cause and trying to find its specific location. From that moment, either we discover the problem, so we blame something as the specific structural basis for the malady, or, worse yet, we do not identify a particular pathology and label the problem as psychosomatic. Borrowing from family therapists, in the context of rehabilitation, somatics, movement education, and so on, we can understand the difficulty a person points to as the identified problem.

An identified problem comes from how the person moves, from the relationships of the parts of the body and the patterns they form—not from any part or place. With this kind of dysfunction, the problem is not the cause; it is, instead, a consequence. The identified problem arises from the movement, feeding off it and draining it of power and gracefulness.

The genius of Moshe Feldenkrais was realizing that our troubles are not due simply to physical defects, disease, and degeneration.

Seeing how we move and understanding how we can move, Feldenkrais understood that dysfunction arises from our limitations—in perception and motion—and how our difficulties are embedded in the very ways we sense and move. (Even when there is a particular physical problem, we consider how the person moves and how this could contribute to their trouble.) This perspective is a systemic one, a point of view that understands the person in motion as an integrated whole, as a unity. Resolving an identified problem requires a non-reductionistic approach to assessing the pattern and systemic strategies for changing it. 

We need a way to proceed that begins with this understanding. I will present a way of proceeding in the upcoming issues of Telekinesis.

For the top of today’s post, I used a photo by DokaRyan that I found on www.pixabay.com. I adjusted the size and adjusted the illumination. The image of the three Cs list is from a scan of the original article.