March 12, 2014

March 12, 2014

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Verbal Behaviorist

Dear Reader, 

After more than eight years of classical singing, I suddenly stopped. My father was disappointed and also my friends were puzzled why I had given up on something I enjoyed so much and was so good at. A period of my life began in which I questioned everything. Meanwhile, I tried to meditate and find peace of mind, but I became more and more upset and frustrated. The reader is reminded here it is not the chronological course of events which is why I write this. I write about this part of my history to revisit what set the stage for my discovery of Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB). The fact that I stopped singing felt like a sacrifice. I knew I wanted to go on with something else and I had to free myself, but at that moment I had no clue  what that was. I felt a deep sense of loss.

 

In operant conditioning, the effectiveness of a stimulus, for example water, is determined by what is called Establishing Operations (EO), the deprivation of water, commonly known as thirst. Initially, I thought that I was thirsty to find out who I really was, but my dissatisfaction with spoken communication was such that I wanted to find out why people talk the way they do. My so-called soul-searching had in reality always been an exploration about how I interacted with my environment and how my environment interacted with me. The former had gotten more attention than the latter. I had been overly involved with how I interacted with my environment. This had led to singing and later to poetry. 

My poems were about switching back and forth between how I influence my environment and how my environment influences me. I liked them more than my singing, because I began saying what I was thinking and feeling. I was always singing songs which had been written by others, which were sung by others, but I wanted to state my own point of view. Also in my so-called spiritual search, I came across gurus, whose followers demanded a kind of interaction which felt unnatural and constrained to me. I wanted another way of talking and I threw away my poems because they weren’t cutting it either. They couldn’t contain a conversation. Nothing I had ever read captured the interaction accurately.

I was disillusioned about arts and done with spirituality. I wanted to talk, not at someone, but with someone. I wanted others to talk with me, not at me, but with me. I outgrew my need for approval by finding out what I really wanted. Because I am capable of expressing this so clearly, others, who don’t know what they want, often accused me of being arrogant. All people who have NVB are on automatic pilot, which prevents them from thinking about what they want. They think that they know what they want, but they don’t and they are suspicious about anyone who can articulate and fulfill their needs, because they have been exploited that way. We are all being exploited by our emotional needs, which cannot be fulfilled by the books, films, plays, games, politics, religions, matches, magazines and other carrots that are dangled in front of us. 

We need to communicate with each other to fulfill our needs, but we are not likely to do this because so many things distract us. Supposedly, we can get our satisfaction from other things than human relationship. Not only is this not true, these other things make human relationship impossible. Moreover, these other things perpetuate NVB and prevent SVB. Although I have had them too, I was always dissatisfied with them. 

I am the oldest son of a father, who, as a child, experienced war and devastation. The traumatic experience that had scared him was  the only way in which I was able to feel a connection. Every year, on May 5^th, the day on which Holland was liberated by the allied forces from the Germans, we would commemorate those who had lost their lives in war by silently walking with hundreds of people past a war memorial. Our solemn annual procession was accompanied by the singing of nightingales. I only felt close to my father during these processions.  

Short before I emigrated to the United States, my mother told me a peculiar story about a midwife, who had helped her gave birth to my two older sisters and who was also scheduled to help her give birth to me. This woman, who was  also a close friend, died in car accident days before I was born. Thus, my mother was mourning her death while I was born. She felt that I missed the midwife, who had always been singing when she was around to help her. My mother was in tears as she apologized that she had kept this story a secret for so long. She felt that I was missing something that she was unable to give.