May 14, 2014

May 14, 2014

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Verbal Behaviorist

Dear Reader, 

 

Communicators will only be able to say what they feel good about when they express their positive private self-talk (PPST). When there is no PPST, they can only express their negative private self-talk (NPST). As long as people express NPST without realizing that this is what they are doing, they will continue with their Noxious Verbal Behavior (NVB), which is negative public speech.

NVB can only be stopped if a person becomes aware, because of the process of self-listening, about his or her own NPST. The only way in which this is going to happen, however, is if he or she becomes aware first of his or her negative public speech. It looks as if NPST causes negative public speech, but NPST is caused by negative public speech! Thus, only our negative public speech can guide us into our NPST. In the same way that a child is taught by his or her parents, the person who is not yet capable of differentiating between negative and positive public speech, depends on someone who is capable of pointing this out.

Only someone who knows the difference, who is capable of teaching it, can teach it to others. Most people actually recognize the difference, but their knowledge does not translate into the Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB). The difference between negative and positive public speech results in the revision of NPST to PPST if Noxious Verbal Behavior (NVB) is decreased and SVB is increased. As long as NPST remains unchanged, it appears as if this is causing our NVB. Those who are troubled by NVB try to look inside, but they can’t find anything. Yet, whether we know it or not, we are all equally troubled by NVB. As long as our attention is distracted from public speech we are troubled by consequences of NVB which will occur in our NPST.

The fact that some of us are troubled by NPST and others aren’t is related to the extent to which they are able to get away with NVB in our public speech. Regardless how often individuals get away with forcing their NPST on others, they are equally stuck on NPST as those who are unable to get away with expressing their NPST. When individuals are taught to compartmentalize, they are forced into the dance of codependence, in which the enablers enable the addicts.

NVB is addictive, because people who have it want it again and again and need more and more of it. Thus, in NVB communicators are either compelled to force others or they insist on being forced by others. The cover up of NVB is made possible by the masses, who demand to be forced by others, who supposedly lead or guide them. All of this directly ties into the fact that we have been taught to listen to others, but not to ourselves. Although they pretend, those who lead others do not listen to themselves. Their need for attention is insatiable and their hierarchical communication is inescapable. 

     

Those who end up forcing others were taught to do so in the same NVB as those who end up being forced by them. It is the same NVB which causes some not to be troubled at all by their own NPST, but which causes others to be extremely troubled by it. How much we are troubled by our NPST all depends on the extent to which we are able to get away with our NVB. When, due to our conditioning, we are unable to get away with anything, this creates, as it did in the case of this writer, an exploration which might take us beyond our common search for causes that are believed to be inside of us. 

This writer, was, at one point, feeling very troubled by his NPST. It was only when he recognized the link between his NPST and his NVB that he was able to decrease his NPST by decreasing his NVB. However, this behavioral change couldn’t occur as long as he was still looking for the cause of his NPST behavior inside of himself. As long as he was, consequently, still thinking that he needed to change, he wasn’t changing and he couldn’t change, because his NPST was a function of his NVB and not the other way around. 

It was only after thorough exploration of his overt public speech that things began to become clear to this writer about his covert private speech. Thus, with his public speech, he gained increased and better access to his private speech and with this access he began to perceive his public speech in an entirely different way.

Initially, he was determined to sound "good' whenever he spoke with others, but that proved to be much more difficult and more complicated than he had thought it would be. It seemed so simple when he was talking out loud by himself, but once he talked again with others something changed the sound of his voice and he no longer sounded ‘good’. He named his approach the‘sounds-good’method. It is important to note here that sounding ‘good’ originated in his covert private speech experience, which had temporarily become part again of his overt positive public speech.

Later, as this author learned more about behaviorism, he renamed it Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB), giving central importance to the sound of his voice, which was different when he expressed himself by himself to himself by bringing out his covert private speech into his overt public speech. Each time he did this, he shifted in his expression from a negative to a positive emotional experience. This shift was so powerful that he would spend hours talking with himself, exploring any kind of topic that came to his mind. It was during these experiments that he slowly began to change his NPST. Again and again he witnessed how his own SVB resulted into PPST. The reader can try it out.