April 27, 2014

April 27, 2014

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Verbal Behaviorist

Dear Reader, 

 

These words are written under discriminative control of the most recent experiences of this writer. His experiences can be described and when this is done, it will be clear that this writing was somehow produced by these antecedent stimuli. Nothing this writer has ever written came out of nowhere. There were always circumstances with discriminative stimuli which set the stage for certain responses to occur. When there were good consequences, these responses began to happen more often if these circumstances occurred again, but when there were bad consequences, these responses became less. Thus, the responses that were not reinforced over time seized to exist, while only those that were, began to occur more often. 

Over the last year, many behaviors of this writer have drastically decreased or, surprisingly, completely disappeared. As a result, he experiences more peace and happiness. There is no tendency to go back to these behaviors, because it has become clear to this writer how they were enhanced by environments to which he is no longer exposed. And, even if these environments or aspects of these environments reappear, it is clear to him what they result in and need to be avoided. In other words, this writer seems to have improved his discrimination for what reinforces him and what doesn’t. He can now recognize without effort whether circumstances are enhancing or are preventing reinforcement. 

An experience of love and compassion produces this writing. These are good things which can happen to many people. This writer likes to think about how that changes our spoken communication. When the way in which we talk is reinforcing us we have Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB). This writer teaches and preaches SVB. His teaching is his preaching. There would be no preaching if there was no teaching, but most preaching is without teaching. Most preaching doesn’t teach the correct kind of behaviors and the behaviors which are increased by most preaching can’t produce the peace and happiness this writer is talking about. Most of what is preached creates only a resemblance of goodness, which is hard to differentiate from real goodness. The preaching without teaching doesn’t translate into improvement of how we talk with each other. It affects how we speak with one another, but the safety and peace that is obtained derives from limiting us in what we are allowed to say to each other. This is not the case with SVB during which people can say more than before.

We could be saying so much more than we currently do, but instead we are saying less and less. This writer, who, due to his discovery of SVB began to say more and more, realizes how afraid people are to say what they want to say. There have been many, many circumstances in which what we had wanted to say was punished. This has drastically decreased our willingness, our ability to say it and it has diverted what we had wanted to say into all sorts of ridiculous activities. These other activities are basically escape behaviors which take us away from saying what we want to say. We still want to say what we want to say, but we don’t want to be punished for it. We limit what we want to say with social conventions that fit with our behavioral history. Sadly, while we imagine that we are expressing ourselves freely, we mainly limit what we want to say on our Facebook, in our church or in the social groups that we belong to. 

The good we have experienced, which we want to experience again, is no longer experienced. What we experience is only the resemblance of the good for which we have settled. We know that we are missing out, but we console ourselves thinking that the resemblance is better than nothing. We are hanging on for dear life, because our beliefs are all we got. Behaviors that supersede our beliefs were not reinforced and  we prevent frustration by limiting ourselves and others.  We want and need others to believe what we believe in, otherwise our belief no longer prevents our frustration by means of limitation. Moreover, we sacrifice our independence and conform to the rules in the hope that others do the same. We don’t feel the frustration of being limited as long as we are surrounded by those who think like we do. Our limitation can only become apparent when we are confronted with those who don’t think like us. Of course, we think that they are wrong and that we are right, but they think exactly the same, they also think  they are right and we are wrong. Thus, we all have our own version of what is right, but we limit ourselves by what we say and think. Our frustration with limitation is with those who don’t think like us.

What we say is very much determined by our culture, which tells us what we are allowed to say. In America one is not allowed to say that hero-adoration is actually quite childish. We keep hearing these blown-up stories about heroes who have saved lives, who have fought battles, who in spite of great adversity have survived and we are told that these are our role-models. In other cultures, pious saints are examples of how we should behave. We should be as simple, humble and unassuming as Mahatma Gandhi or Mother Teresa. And, then there is Jesus Christ, who presumably died for our sins on the cross.The fact that Muslims believe something different bothers Christians, but also atheists want religious people to go away, because their presence reminds them what they believe in is not believed by them. Moreover, those who don't believe like we do, don't talk like us. We don’t talk like them. Spiritual heroes like Jesus, Mohammed or the Daila Lama compete for our attention.and we, with our belief, also compete for the attention of others while we talk. This ongoing struggle for the attention of others, which characterizes most interaction, is not getting us anywhere. This writer calls this way of talking Noxious Verbal Behavior (NVB). Those who have NVB are not communicating. 

To communicate, we have to leave behind our way of communicating. It doesn’t matter what our way of communicating entails, what matters is that it must be stopped. Unless it is stopped, we are reinforcing each other's NVB with our different languages. Whether we are talking about Christianity, Environment, Science, Buddhism, Republicans, Art, Democrats or Social Media, we can’t have SVB as long as we make it seem as if all of these exist separate from each other. They are part of one and the same reality. In the newspapers or the magazines, we can read about each of them in one language, in English, but what we read is written language. SVB, however, makes us speak about each one of these languages in in one language, but it is not English, but a new way of communicating. In NVB we all speak a different language, but in SVB we speak the same language. We can all learn to have SVB and we can know that our language is not the same as someone else’s language. This knowing is the goodness that is reinforced when we  acknowledge the limitation of our language. The understanding that knowledge itself is always limited results in SVB. NVB insists that we know it all, but SVB insists that our knowledge is limited. 

 

Once our way of communicating becomes a function of our movement through different environments or different fields of knowledge, it will be no longer limited to one environment. The verbal community that each human being grows up in inevitably sets the stage for our limitations. These limitations are normal and must be acknowledged scientifically. Only after this has happened, can our way of talking come under control of contingencies of reinforcement that pertain to all human beings. We discover these contingencies if we are brave enough to transcend what we are familiar with, but are constricted by. There is a new way of talking with each other, which is totally different from anything anyone has been used to. It is called SVB.

In SVB we don’t talk like we usually do and we have a very different way of expressing ourselves. However, we don’t know and can't know what SVB is like until we do it. When we have SVB, we know that we have it, because it is unlike NVB. We know it is unlike what we are used to. We agree whenever this is the case and because we mutually benefit from SVB, we are going to want to make it happen again.

The notion that we can’t know what SVB is beforehand is exciting as well as threatening. In SVB, we leave the safety and familiarity of what we are used to. In place comes an enriching experience which, although it may be slightly anxiety provoking, is energizing and inspiring. There are other benefits than those that are immediately obtained by familiarity, but these benefits become clear only when one continues to immerse oneself in new communication experiences. 

In SVB one has new experiences and one will be able to understand what makes these experiences possible. Once one embarks on SVB, one realizes what was missing in NVB. In NVB circumstances are totally  different than in SVB. In NVB there is no movement and no expression of positive emotions. In NVB we are all stuck with negative emotions that are always involved in our attempts to pretend that our way of communicating is the only way. This self-defeating characteristic of  NVB becomes funny once we have SVB, because it is so common, yet so little understood. Our lack of humor, our fanaticism and our inability to laugh at ourselves, is part of NVB, but in SVB we are capable of recognizing and accepting that we were all stuck.

SVB gives us the assurance that we can overcome our differences. SVB organizes the world in a different way than NVB. Once we have SVB, we realize that our NVB was not very sophisticated. We kept having it because we didn’t know any better. Once we know better, there is an incentive to maintain SVB or to find it back again if we loose it.