July 10, 2014

July 10, 2014

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Verbal Behaviorist

Dear Reader, 

 

This writer hasn’t written anything lately from a first-person perspective. As a consequence, he has also not addressed the reader directly. He is no longer so eager to address the reader directly. The reader will find that this writer is taking him or her to a third-person perspective of how we speak. If what this writer is aiming to accomplish succeeds, the reader will obtain a new view on his or her own first-person perspective, due to this third-person perspective.  

There is a certain order in how we communicate. Although we may have many problems, there is always a lawfulness to our verbal behavior.  Functionally, our way of communicating as well as our problems can be explained. To take this view, we look at how the environment, such as other communicators, but also circumstances and things, affect the way in which we, as individuals, talk.  How we as individuals speak sets the stage for how others talk with us. To find out how we talk together, we must look at how we talk as individuals.  

Since verbal behavior is mediated by another person, the tendency is to go with our attention to how we impact others. What is missing from this picture is how we impact ourselves by the way in which we speak. By remaining busy with how we would like to affect others, we are never in the position to realize how our own way of talking is affecting us. We keep thinking that this effect is caused by others, but, and this is where things can get complicated, neither others, nor we ourselves are causing this. To tease this apart, we must begin to realize that our speech is never caused by us, individually, but by our environment.  Only once we have acknowledged that our individual way of talking is function of our environment can we realize that this as true for ourselves as for those with whom we communicate. When we want to change how others communicate, we make them responsible, but we ignore the fact that our speech is caused by the environment. 

To rephrase the aforementioned, when we try to change the way others speak, we lose track of the fact that we are their environment and that they are our environment. When this happens, we produce Noxious Verbal Behavior (NVB) because we threaten others or we feel threatened by them. The notion that we are not responsible for each other while we speak, that we are only responsible for ourselves, is why NVB continues. However, in Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB), we are both responsible for each other as well as for ourselves. In NVB, by contrast, we are neither responsible for ourselves nor for each other. 

NVB continues because we keep thinking we are responsible for ourselves and  others, therefore, are responsible for themselves as well. This false belief can become clear when we treat SVB and NVB as two different languages which were learned under very different circumstances. During moments of SVB, we were feeling responsible for ourselves and for each other, but during moments of NVB, we were neither responsible for each other, nor for ourselves. Our lack of a scientific understanding regarding how we speak has perpetuated the notion that we are individually responsible for how we speak. Consequently, NVB is everywhere and SVB is only happening in an accidental and inconsistent manner. 

The way in which we individually speak affects others, but it also affects our selves. How we affect others is one thing, but how we affect ourselves is another. Often how we affect others is different from how we affect our selves. In NVB, there is no congruence between how we affect each other and how we affect ourselves. In SVB, we affect ourselves and each other in exactly the same way. This is not something to be believed, but something to be experienced. Once we have more of this experience, we realize that NVB is based on the dissociation from ourselves and from each other. During SVB, our way talking is bi-directional, the speaker becomes the listener and the listener can become the speaker, but in NVB, in uni-directional, my-way-or-the-highway speech, the speaker is alienated from the listener and both are alienated from each other, that is, from the environment.