July 25, 2014

July 25, 2014

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Verbal Behaviorist

Dear Reader, 

This writer is now in the habit of writing every day about the things that he is thinking about. Because he mainly reads about behaviorism, he thinks a lot about it. His thoughts and feelings are no longer reinterpreted as being caused by him, but by his environment. Although he understands this premise, this understanding is also mediated by his environment and this means that in certain environments this understanding is enhanced and acknowledged, while in others, it is punished and misunderstood. It is important to realize that those who punish and have punished this writer’s understanding, do so and did so not because they individually decide or decided to do so, but because their behavior too was, is and will always be a function of environmental variables. 

To understand and to know this scientific truth changes a lot about how this writer thinks and feels. Many thoughts and feelings, which this writer was having in the past, were troubling him because he thought and felt that only he was responsible for having them. He constantly thought and felt that he needed to control or change himself or others. This inevitably led to a set of behaviors which are not all of a sudden stopped because he now knows about behaviorism, but which have slowly began to decrease because he is now aware that these behaviors are and were maintained by previous and current environments.  The common way of describing this process would be that this writer is trying to get his mind around this idea that his behavior is caused by his environment. 

As long as this writer keeps using this kind of language, he is unlikely to see much change in his behavior.  It is a conundrum because, although he has read a lot about behaviorism, he has not yet fully acquired the behavioral terminology that would make him speak and write in a different way. Changing himself, which sadly was the motto of the first 55 years of his life, is now out of the door. What is slowly replacing this anxiety-provoking life style is the steady comfort that comes from understanding something most people don’t understand. It is in his capacity as  a case manager with parolees and as an instructor of psychology at college that this writer is currently consolidating this knowledge.