August 11, 2014

August 11, 2014

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Verbal Behaviorist

Dear Reader, 

How do I measure Sound Verbal Behavior ? When I am involved in a conversation, my attention always goes to whether we have Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB) or Noxious Verbal Behavior (NVB). Apparently, I only want to have SVB and that is why I notice whenever I am not having it. NVB bothers me and SVB pleases me, therefore, I avoid NVB and I try to create and maintain SVB. 

Whether two people (or more) have SVB, can be observed and measured. One sees a similarity in their body language. When one hears what they are talking about it is clear that they agree with each other and understand each other. Furthermore, they enjoy talking with each other, which is apparent by their smiles and their friendly gestures. Another aspect of SVB are the pauses that appear between the words that are spoken. This creates room for words to be more carefully chosen, to be spoken more calmly, to be attentively listened to and to make sense. Also, in SVB, our facial expressions are peaceful and relaxed. Futhermore, in SVB, our bodies move in a graceful manner, because we embody our way of communicating. 

When people engage in SVB, they always do so consciously. They know they experience positive emotions endovironmentally, outside the skin, which are emphasized and reinforced by how they speak ectovironmentally, inside the skin. Although they talk about a variety of issues, the attention of the communicators is  drawn to how they speak, to endostimuli. This verification and maintenance process is stimulated because SVB, speakers listen to themselves while they speak. 

In SVB, self-listening always comes before listening to others. Listening to others is improved and enhanced due to self-listening. Moreover, communicators agree that mandatory other-listening, a symptom of NVB, excludes self-listening, but that voluntary self-listening includes other-listening. 

In SVB, all communicators agree with each other that they sound good. If, for whatever reason, one of the communicators has the impression that someone doesn’t sound good, this is always discussed until the sound that was made by that person is agreed by everyone to sound good again. Whenever this inevitable adjustment has been made everyone agrees that this benefits the conversation.

The sounds of the voices of those who engage in SVB are easy to listen to and consequently, what is said is easily understood. The listener’s well-being is enhanced by the speaker because the voice of the speaker represents his or her well-being. Whether someone’s voice represents one’s well-being is not merely a subjective experience, to the contrary, everyone agrees whether a person expresses his or her well-being or not. Another way of saying this is that we agree nonverbally. This nonverbal agreement makes our verbal agreement possible. 

Two people walking next to each other in the park, while having a conversation, move into the same direction and, non-verbally agree with each other. Nonverbal agreement in SVB is because all the communicators find and remain tuned into the sound of their own well-being. We have already experience moments of SVB accidentally, but we have not done it deliberately, skillfully and consistently.

There is an obvious relationship between how we sound and how we feel. When we feel stressed, agitated, depressed, we sound that way, but when we feel happy, peaceful and relaxed, we sound accordingly. We don’ t try to sound a particular kind of way in SVB, but we just sound good while we feel good. In NVB, by contrast, people try to sound happy, confident or in control, while what they feel is not how they sound. In SVB there is congruence between what we say and how we say it, but in NVB there is a disconnect between the verbal and the nonverbal. 

In SVB communicators feel that they are each other’s environment. That is, they share one and the same environment. In NVB, by contrast, people have the notion that they live in different worlds. All of this is made worse by by the common superstition that we cause our own behavior and possess a behavior-causing self.

  

In SVB, because communicators reciprocate each other’s positive emotions, there is no need to keep private speech out of public speech and thus, public speech is enriched by the genuineness of our private speech. In NVB, however, where private speech is excluded from public speech, people get privately stuck with their unexpressed negative emotions, because, although they may blame and accuse others, they still think and believe that they are responsible for their own behavior. 

SVB can be done with others, but it can also be done while one is alone. Moreover, doing it with others is enhanced by doing it alone. One can talk with oneself out loud and one can listen to one’s own voice and one can adjust until one likes what one hears. The process of listening to oneself is easier to be explored by oneself than while being with others. Others usually distract us from listening to ourselves. 

Only when people have SVB do they stimulate each other to listen to themselves. When people are engaged in SVB, they can let each other be and they can leave each other alone. This is very important. Most of our spoken communication is NVB, because people incessantly interfere with each other by how they speak. In SVB, people are clear about what they feel, because the attention of the listener helps the speaker to clarify what he or she feels. Thus, in SVB people become clear about both their positive and their negative emotions. In SVB they can talk about their negative emotion because they experience positive emotion, but in NVB they can’t talk about negative emotion, because there Is no attention for how they feel. 

SVB is a listener’s perspective of our spoken communication. When people achieve SVB we see typical listening behavior: people come closer to each other and look each other in the eyes. People engaging in SVB have meaningful conversation which is experienced as energizing. The nonverbal behavior of communicators signifies their excitement, involvement and joyful energy. Even though speakers may get very animated, they maintain a sensitivity to each other, which evokes spontaneity. 

By one self, one hears one’s sound and realizes that one can only feel good about one’s voice, if speaking and listening happen at the same time. As long as one doesn’t feel good about one’s sound, one hasn’t yet synchronized one’s speaking and one’s listening behavior. One needs to continue experimenting until one knows that one has found it. Once one finds SVB, one knows  one has found it, because when one produces it, one’s body responds with a sense of relaxation and a feeling of rejuvenation. Listening to one’s own voice has a restorative effect on one’s body and on one’s private speech. As long as one is still trying to sound good, which is bound to happen, one notices that the content of one’s private speech, which is made public, is negative: one let’s oneself know that one doubts, unsure, anxious or upset, one feels restless or without any energy. One must listen to the sound of one’s NVB.

When the communicator is alone and is listening to him or herself, he or she is more likely to admit and say what is wrong, what doesn’t feel good, what is frustrating and frightening, what is painful and humiliating. He or she needs to listen to the sound of these expressions. He or she will continue to produce NVB as long as he or she is not really listening to him or herself, but once he or she hears him or herself, he or she will know that he or she is producing SVB... all by him or by herself. 

Too much speaking can mask the fact that listening is happening at a much lower rate than speaking. The opposite can also happen that we listen too much and that we speak too little. If we speak too little, is not possible for us to learn how to listen while we speak. We have to speak in order to learn to listen while we speak. Our rates of speaking and listening can be off from one moment to the next. To have SVB, we sometimes need to speak more and sometimes we need to speak less, sometimes we need to listen more and sometimes we shouldn’t be busy with listening at all and  say whatever comes to our ‘mind’. Adjusting our speaking to our listening and our listening to our speaking creates SVB. 

In NVB our listening and speaking are out of whack. We measure with our body whether we are too close to the fire and we move away when it gets too hot. Likewise, we measure with our body whether we have NVB and whether we need to move away from it and perhaps even stay away from it for good. Since we often cannot express what we are feeling during the circumstances that we find ourselves in, we must at some point catch up again with our private speech, which is a function of the public speech we have endured and survived.  When we sit by ourselves and tell ourselves what we have gone through, when we really listen to our own story as we experience it and want to express it, as we become capable of expressing it, as we understand it and as we are capable of understanding it, we will find words for experiences which have remained unexpressed and misunderstood and which are troubling us. Once we express, in our own pace and rhythm what is the matter with us, we experience a release of the burden and stress that was ‘carried’ on by us in our private speech.  

After finding peace, by listening to our own voice, we can now let ourselves be guided by what sounds good to us. We then begin to act on what we believe and we measure the consequences by what happens in our lives. Once we know that we can have SVB, we want to have it because we have experienced the contrast with NVB. This contrast was missing. Nobody could point it out to us and we had to point it out to ourselves, while we were alone speaking out loud and listening to ourselves. 

In SVB, we listen to others in the same way that we listen to ourselves. In NVB, however, we listen more to others than that we listen to ourselves. When we attempt to listen to ourselves in NVB, we experience a difference between the speaker and the listener. This is because our speaking and our listening behaviors were separately conditioned and therefore began to occur at different rates and intensity levels. In SVB, our listening and speaking behaviors are joined. SVB is a behavioral cusp, which opens us up to new environments and makes new reinforcements available.