June 14, 2014

June 14, 2014

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Verbal Behaviorist

Dear Reader, 

 

Just because we can talk and read doesn’t mean that we will understand each other. To understand each other something more is needed. Of course, talking and reading are necessary and without them understanding is impossible, but the point being made here is that it is not enough. Perhaps the reader has heard about the ability to talk with him or herself? Perhaps the reader has talked with him or herself and has listened to him or herself? Perhaps the reader has written a journal and has written to him or herself and has read what he or she has written to him or herself? Perhaps, because of all of these behaviors, the reader is capable of noticing the big difference between speaking and writing? 

It is unlikely that the aforementioned behaviors would develop as long as the speaker or the writer still believes and insists that he or she is always right, that he or she already understands, and therefore can’t understand that he or she in fact doesn’t understand. Such understanding is always a product of self-talk and self-listening or self-writing and self-reading. In other words, understanding of others is not possible if we don’t understand ourselves. We may talk with each other until we are blue, but as long as our private speech is not and cannot be part of our public speech, we don’t and we can’t understand each other. 

Admitting that we don’t understand each other requires that we individually admit that we don’t understand ourselves. We may be willing to admit that we don’t understand each other, but we aren’t willing to admit that we don’t understand ourselves. Since we are used to a public speech from which our private speech is excluded, from which private speech is ignored and rejected, we don’t know we don’t understand each other because we don’t understand ourselves. If public speech teaches us that our private speech has no relevance, how then is our private speech able to inform us that we don’t even understand ourselves?

Let’s be clear. Even if we are willing to admit that we don’t understand each other, we are we still incapable of understanding and admitting that we are not even understanding ourselves. We are not focusing on self-understanding in our usual way of talking, we are mainly focusing on understanding of others. Also, we are trying to make others understand us, but we are not trying to support each other in understanding ourselves. The idea that we don’t even understand our selves is infuriating to us and anyone who points this out to us is hated vigorously.  

Supposedly, we already understand ourselves and we only need to understand each other. We don’t need anybody telling us that we don’t understand our selves. We aren’t the least interested in our self-talk, which keeps telling us that we don’t understand ourselves. Ironically, it is inevitable that our negative self-talk sets the stage for how we talk with others. Moreover, we can only keep the lid on our own negative self-talk by constantly focusing on others, by accusing them of not understanding us. 

Because Noxious Verbal Behavior (NVB) is wide spread, we don’t realize that the us-versus-them mentality prevents us from understanding ourselves. Only when we consider how we communicate as individual organisms do we get to our lack of self-understanding, which prevents us from understanding each other. We find out about Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB) by listening to ourselves while we speak. We can do this with others, but we can also do this on our own. It is easier to do it alone than to do it with others, because others are likely to distract us from listening to ourselves. This author, who is the founder of SVB, knows that it is possible to have it with others once we know how to have it with ourselves. 

Especially, when we are still in the process of familiarizing ourselves with SVB, it is much more effective to be alone to learn to listen to ourselves while we speak. To be able to establish SVB with others, we must go back and forth between talking with ourselves and talking with others. In SVB we learn that we to understand others we must first understand ourselves.