December 3, 2013

December 3, 2013 

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Verbal Behaviorist

There is such a thing as real human interaction and it is easier to recognize this by calling it Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB). The word “sound” makes us to focus on our voice and other nonverbal aspects of our spoken communication, which have been endlessly dismissed: the expressions of our true emotions. We have rejected our own emotions because they were repeatedly rejected by others in our past. Moreover, we were not in a position to accept our emotions, because we didn’t and couldn’t yet understand them. The conversation in which our emotions were expressed and understood (SVB) has not yet happened and our parents knew as little as we did.  

We behave in different ways and we experience our emotions depending on how we sound. We will only act calm and peaceful as long as we sound calm and peaceful, but we will not be able to act calm and peaceful if, as we so often in vain attempt, try to sound calm and peaceful. Even if we do our very best to sound happy, we still sound sad. No matter how much we try to sound calm and at ease, we still sound angry and agitated. Said differently, we only try to sound friendly, when we don’t feel friendly, we only try to sound positive when in reality we feel negative. 

There is no need to try to sound enthusiastic when we really feel enthusiastic. We try to do that only when we are not feeling that way, because we want to make others think that we feel that way. Although we may be able to make others believe it, what we experience ourselves is not the same as how we are able to make others feel. This discrepancy in how we have expressed our emotions has conditioned and prevented us from feeling what we truly feel. Nevertheless, the reality remains that when we feel good, we sound good, just like that. In SVB we do not try to sound a certain way because our sound expresses precisely what we feel. When we feel upset, rejected and misunderstood, we sound that way too, but we are sounding different, the moment we feel accepted, listened to and understood. 

The difference between SVB and NVB is enormous, because we have so often failed to communicate it. Our failure to recognize this difference is determined by the fact that in spite of SVB being possible, we live in a world which is dominated by NVB. Even if SVB was there, it was gone very quickly, because NVB soon took over. We continue again with NVB, because we dissociate from our SVB. 

No matter how nice our childhood might have been, we were raised in and determined by Noxious Verbal Behavior (NVB). The word “noxious” refers to the inevitable aversive neurobiological effect produced by the sound of our voice. NVB resembles negative emotions, which undermine our spoken communication. We must bring fear, anger, despair, distrust, shame and humiliation to an end, because it just sounds terrible. Our noxious-sounding voices elicit and maintain processes that make the interaction impossible, but our natural, effortless sound, constructs SVB. 

Our exploration of SVB is accumulative in that every step adds to our first-person, subjective experience of it, as well as our third-person, objective knowledge about it. SVB, but also NVB, is always first experienced and can only then be known. That knowledge is secondary and experience is primary makes sense, because we feel the way we feel whether we understand it or not. Only an understanding which is in tune with how we feel while we communicate is of any use, because how we feel informs us about whether we are reinforced or not.   

This additive process determines that if SVB continues undisturbed for a while, it gains momentum. What this means is that after an hour of SVB, things can be said and understood, which can’t be said and understood after half an hour of SVB. However, the things that can be said and understood after only half an hour are appropriate to that level. It is like doing intermediate algebra. One must first master the “Order of Operations” before one can solve a quadratic equation. The acronym PEMDAS, remembered as “Please Excuse My Dear Aunt Sally”, stands for “Parenthesis, Exponents, Multiplication, Division, Addition and Subtraction.” The numbers may change, but the way of working them is the same. The words we express may vary, but how we communicate is lawful. In SVB there is a particular sequence that has to be followed. We can of course say that we don’t want to or don’t like to adhere to that sequence, but that would be the same as imagining that we are solving an quadratic equation without using the order of operations. The reality of such wishful- thinking is that we fail at math. Similarly, we fail blatantly in our communication, because we don’t even know the simple things we need to do first before we can go on to more complex matters. The illusion that we can just jump into complexity, without being grounded in experience and knowledge, makes us continue our NVB, in which superficiality dictates the notion that we can copy the results from others.