July 19, 2014

July 19, 2014

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Verbal Behaviorist

Dear Reader, 

Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB) focuses our attention on how we speak. It puts us in the shoes of the listener, who experiences our spoken communication. We already pay attention to how we speak, but we don’t pay attention closely enough to actually experience how we speak. Since we pay more attention to what we say than to how we say it, we often don’t experience what we say. In other words, since our focus is mostly verbal, we mainly listen to others, but since we don’t pay much attention to the nonverbal, we don’t listen to ourselves. 

Speaking can be done by others as well as by ourselves. We can listen to each other, but we can also listen to ourselves. We can be our own listener. The importance of listening to ourselves is not emphasized anywhere and is thus ignored. In most of our conversations we don’t listen to ourselves while we speak. We are not going to listen to ourselves as long as there is nothing that stimulates us to listen to ourselves. In Noxious Verbal Behavior (NVB), we talk at, not with each other, because there is nothing that makes us listen to ourselves. In NVB, we are imprisoned by words and disconnected from the nonverbal, because we are neither in touch with ourselves nor each other. 

Nothing stimulates us more to listen to ourselves like the sound of our own voice. Before we learned how to speak, we were making sounds and our voice expressed what we needed as babies. When we were hungry, we cried and when we were at ease, we made sounds and gestures that were the expression of our happiness. Our sounds ideally were reciprocated. The mother rejoiced in her child’s happiness and tried to do what she could to care for it. To the extent that she was able to spend time and had patience to be nonverbally attuned with her child, it recognized his or her own wellbeing by how he or she sounded. When it cried, it knew it was not feeling well, but when it was making happy sounds, it knew, without yet having the words to describe what it was feeling, that it was safe, taken care of and loved. A person is not going to be stimulated to listen to him or herself unless someone speaks with the voice that facilitates what may not have been provided enough during the pre-verbal stages of development.  

  

Most human interaction is NVB. SVB is only occasionally, accidentally achieved, but not in a deliberate, skillful, ongoing manner. During the pre-verbal stages of  development there was not enough reciprocation of our happy sounds. When people learn about SVB, most of them say they have never listened to themselves like this. Obviously, they were not listened to and that is why they didn't listen to themselves. Since speaking is considered to be more important than listening, speaking became more developed than listening. Although others rarely listened to us, we individually always do. In NVB, we hear ourselves differently than we hear others, but in SVB, we listen to ourselves in the same way as we listen to others. In SVB we listen to others like we listen to ourselves.  

    

What someone else is saying usually doesn’t make us listen to ourselves, but how they are saying it indicates that they are at least sometimes listening to themselves. This then may stimulate us to listen to ourselves too. However, the extent to which others are listening to themselves varies from moment to moment and others can at best only inconsistently stimulate us to listen to ourselves. Compared to others, we are individually much better capable of providing the stimuli, to ourselves, that make us listen ourselves. We are more inclined to listen to our own voice, because we are more familiar with our own sound than with the sound of others. Although we are familiar with our own sound, we are still trying all the time to sound a certain way. When we do that, we don’t and can’t embody our own sound. Our own sound is only made when we are no longer trying to make it sound a certain way. This is only happening when we are listening to ourselves while we speak. Only when we listen to ourselves are we capable of listening to each other. We don’t listen to each other, because we don’t listen to ourselves. However, we must say something to be able to listen to ourselves. If we don’t speak to listen to ourselves, we will not be able to hear ourselves. We have not spoken just to hear ourselves. In SVB, we speak so that we can hear ourselves. Our attention is on listening and because of this our words will come out very differently. We choose our words with more care. We will speak consciously, spontaneously and sensitively.