November 11, 2013

November 11, 2013

Dear Reader, 

 

We need to know much more about what goes right in our spoken communication before we will be able to understand, change or prevent what goes wrong. In other words, Noxious Verbal Behavior (NVB) can only be derived from Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB). It is important that we look at the total picture of how we communicate and not only at the parts which we don’t like. However, since very little goes right in most of our daily spoken communication and since so much goes wrong, our tendency is not aimed at understanding what went right, but rather, at hanging on to what went right. Unfortunately, even those small parts that went right, over time become less and less, because they didn’t and couldn't lead to an accurate understanding of how this was possible in the first place.  

    

It is not so much that we are obsessed with what goes wrong with our spoken communication, it is more that we can’t avoid bad results as easily while we age. Most spoken communication is so bad that it is too painful to be reminded of it. Since our lives are examples of how spoken communication became more problematic, there is a general shared motivation not to address this issue any longer. We dread speaking about the problems caused by how we communicate, because our analyses have proven totally useless. We have stopped looking for solutions and “don’t even go there” because they created more problems. The parts that go right in spoken communication are constantly threatened. 

When someone incidentally, occassionally, seemingly miraculously produces SVB, this person is envied by all those who are troubled by their own NVB. Because SVB becomes increasingly scarce, less and less people are looking for it. Occasionally, SVB may be achieved, but it was never achieved consciously, deliberately and skillfully. The reason it was achieved at all was because our innate need to have it always won from our cultivated need not to have it. In other words, we keep having SVB in spite of ourselves. It is weird how upside down things are with regard to our spoken communication: the fact that we can’t be without SVB is actually our biggest communication problem. Since our need for it hasn’t gone away and will not ever go away, we better learn about what SVB really is. 

The truth about human relationship is that we need each other and that spoken communication only makes sense if it accurately expresses and fulfills our shared needs. Certainly, our needs can also be exploited by others. In the latter, we continue with our familiar patterns of NVB, but in the former, we experience a process of learning. Although we’ve had it in bits and pieces, we never had SVB consistently. To reliably have SVB requires knowledge which can only be obtained if we keep speaking with one another. Learning SVB requires subsidence of NVB. In SVB people co-regulate each other by what they say as well as by how they say it, but in NVB they dis-regulate each other. 

Neither our own, nor the needs of others are represented by NVB, our dominant way of communicating. SVB teaches that we can’t and shouldn’t try to represent the needs of others in our spoken communication. Unless we stop our pretension about expressing the needs of others, we remain incapable of expressing and fulfilling our own needs. Certainly, we need each other to express and fulfill our needs, but nobody can be the voice for someone else. The false notion that we can express the needs of someone else is at the root of all NVB. Each human being expresses his or her own need, but for our needs to be fulfilled, our spoken communication must be bi-directional instead of  uni-directional. NVB must give way to SVB.