August 8, 2014

August 8, 2014

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Verbal Behaviorist

Dear Reader, 

 

Whether people are depressed, criminal, delusional, psychotic, manic, impulsive, defiant, sleep-deprived, suicidal, unable to focus or addicted, they manifest symptoms that indicate the lack of exposure to and the lack of knowledge about Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB). The absurd notion that something can be done about mental health problems without first addressing the fact that people talk the way they do, because of how others have talked with them, is only making things worse. Nobody is responsible for their so-called mental illness, because nobody is causing their own behavior. Once we have SVB, it will all become clear that the majority of secular and non-secular people have no clue about how our environment always selects our behavior. 

This writing is meant for all the person who are suffering with mental health problems. They can read these words and recognize the healing effect of this text, because it addresses the issue of verbal behavior. However, this writer also wants readers who don’t have mental health problems to understand that verbal behavior plays an important role in how we behave non-verbally, that is, in what we do. It is not needed to give any examples, because we all know that our problematic communication involves negative emotions.  Communication which doesn’t work creates stress.  

It is parsimonious to read, learn and talk about variables in the environment, which set the stage for our Noxious Verbal Behavior (NVB), which elicits psycho-pathology or Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB), which evokes well-being. Problems that pertain to how we behave verbally are going to be dissolved when we distinguish between these categories. SVB always signifies absences of NVB.

Most of psychological problems are caused by our verbal behavior and can never be properly addressed unless we first learn how to speak more effectively about functional relationships. SVB is the language of functional relationships, that is, of how what we say is determined by our environment, by other people, but NVB is my-way-or-the-high-way, which presumably is caused by a self, or some behavior-causing inner agent. Only in SVB can and do we communicate, because we reciprocate and enhance each other’s positive emotions, but in NVB we express stressful, negative emotions, because we talk in a coercive, uni-directional manner. In NVB people often accuse each other of causing their stress, but this doesn’t have anything to do with a functional account. 

Although people experience the many negative feelings involved in their troublesome relationships and attempt to move away from this as much as they possible, they are convinced that they don’t cause it, but that others do. Generally speaking, as long as things go their way, they will claim that they themselves have caused it, but as soon as something gets in their way, others are to be blamed. Supposedly, the causation of their behavior keeps shifting. Depending on who can get away with what, we hold  others or ourselves responsible, but this is very unscientific.