March 20, 2014

March 20, 2014

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Verbal Behaviorist

Dear Reader, 

I always felt apprehensive about having to cite the words that were written by others. According to me, words belong to everyone. The obligation to write that certain words were said or written by someone seems to indicate otherwise. What matters is that people understand each other better and that what was written will help us to live better lives. This is not the case. Our respect for what a person has written or said didn’t and couldn’t lead to the understanding that  interaction is a shared, reciprocal phenomenon. To the contrary, it has kept the false idea alive that speakers are separate from listeners and that writers are separate from readers. I call all of this Noxious Verbal Behavior (NVB), because the voices of those who do most of the talking sound horrible. 

When speakers believe themselves to be separate from the listeners and when  writers think themselves to be separate from the readers, they are like children who cry for their mother and who sound distressed. Each time we make a big deal about the words we use, we are like children, anxious that others will play with our toys. You may not think in this way because you don’t listen like I do. However, I think that you can hear it too. You can hear like me. I don’t claim to have any special powers, but I do claim that my listening is quite different from most others. I listen to myself while I speak, but most people don’t do that. Your voice sounds different depending on whether you listen to it or not. If you don’t listen to it, you sound terrible. You may not know this, but when you don’t listen to your own voice while you speak, this has a negative effect on you as well as on others. This effect goes unnoticed because we are used to it. We have accepted as normal a way of communicating which is in my opinion abnormal. How can you say your communication is normal if you speak with a voice which isn’t yours?

  

In NVB our voices stab, grab, push, pull, pound, punch, poke, choke, drain, coerce, distract, disregulate, demean and dissociate. The reason that we don’t hear this is not because we are deaf, it is because nothing usually makes us listen to how we sound while we speak. We would immediately change the way we sound if we knew how bad we sounded. Most of our talking sounds stressed, agitated, anxious, hurried, pressured, defensive, hostile, disjointed, harsh, arrogant, pretentious, fearful, humiliating, whiny, sucky, edgy, dry and muffled. 

   

These words were taught to me by my father, mother, uncles and aunts, by my grandmothers and grandfathers, my teachers, friends and by people who I grew up with in my neighborhood. We are not told to quote those who taught us how to speak!? That seems to make much more sense. I want to honor those who taught me how to speak by the way in which I speak. What I say definitely has something to do with whom I have been talking. 

As a matter of fact, with some people I can’t talk at all. When people have a behavioral history of Noxious Verbal Behavior (NVB), and that is about 95% of us, they are used to talking at each other, not with each other, they are not listening and they want to force others into what they believe to be their way of talking, which supposedly is the right way, the better way or even the only way. 

Due to my back ground, I am inclined to put words together differently than you do, but that is nothing unusual, everybody does that. Whether we make sense by what we say or write is not a matter of our unique way of speaking or writing. Our success as communicators always depends on others, who understand it because they are already kind of thinking and talking like that. In other words, if what we say or write is too far removed from what others are able to understand, it will and cannot go anywhere.  

What we say depends on others. Nothing a speaker says makes any sense if there are no listeners. Likewise, nothing a writer writes has any meaning if there are no readers. Meaning doesn’t and can’t exist on its own. Meaning is socially mediated. Cultures may differ, but what matters in one society also matters to another. In the same way that Russian is spoken in Russia and Spanish is spoken in Spain, languages of the inhabitants of different environments only matter to those who know how to speak it, understand it, read it or write it. Indeed, there are different verbal communities, but they experience the exact same problems when their verbal behavior doesn’t accurately represent the reality.