January 1, 2015

January 1, 2015

 

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Verbal Engineer

Dear Reader, 

 

By proposing to listen to ourselves while we speak, this writer aims to change the contingency of human interaction. He is not interested in changing the content of the conversation. The content can remain the same, what he cares about is that the context in which we speak is altered. The feedback loop created by hearing our own sound will surely change the content of our conversation. It will show us that the content cannot stay the same if we pay attention to how we sound. 

We can always hear our sound, but if we listen to it deliberately, we will realize that we can only listen to others to the extent that we are listening to ourselves. If we ignore listening to ourselves, as we do in Noxious Verbal Behavior (NVB), we can at best only pretend to be listening to others. In Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB), in which we listen to ourselves, we listen to others in the same way as we listen to ourselves. Stated differently, in NVB, we listen to others in a different way than we listen to ourselves. 

One way of listening occurs in SVB as a consequence of the verbalizer’s ability to focus on him or herself. Thus, in SVB the verbalizer and the mediator is one and the same person. However, in SVB verbalizers and mediators are also different people. SVB mediators understand verbalizers,  because verbalizers do not put pressure on mediators to listen to them. 

Verbalizers who listen to themselves while they speak will change the circumstances in which they speak. Change is brought about by the suggestion of this writer, who, due to his behavioral history knows that this will happen. He has tested this phenomenon many times. The reader can test it too. When a verbalizer, switches from not listening to him or herself to listening to him or herself, this verbalizer is going to talk in an entirely different way. Moreover, both the verbalizer and the mediator(s) will also acknowledge this. In other words, there will be agreement, understanding, validation and reciprocal reinforcement between the verbalizer and the mediator in SVB about what is said and how it is said.

The contingency change that occurs in SVB is a result of the behavioral change: listening to ourselves while we speak. By changing our behavior we change our circumstances.  Yet, behavioral change is not done by some inner agent, who makes us listen to ourselves. The change that changes the contingency comes about because that part of the environment to which we only individually have access is expressed. Nobody can express this part for us. The mediator mediates the verbalizer only to the extent that he or she is one with the verbalizer. Only to the extent that the mediator can be his or her own verbalizer, will the mediator be capable of mediating the verbalizer as another person. 

This poses two problems: 1) the mediator has never spoken to him or herself as a verbalizer or 2) the verbalizer has never mediated him or herself as a mediator. The first problem is a much bigger than the second one. There are many more people, who have never spoken, who have always basically only listened, than that there are people who don’t listen, but who speak all the time. Simply stated, most of the talking is done for us by a few others. If we take care of the first problem, the second one turns out to actually be a cover up of the first problem. We have heard so often, that listening is the problem, that people just don’t listen, but who is saying this? This is not said by those who have been listened to, but by those who people don't want to listen to, but who demand to be listened to. Those who tell others that they don’t listen, seem to have achieved some higher moral ground, but the fact is they determine the contingency for NVB. 

In SVB we don’t tell each other that we must listen. In SVB listening is not the issue at all. In SVB speaking is the issue. Stated differently, we cannot and do not have SVB because of our lack of speaking. We have for the most part been taught to speak in a NVB manner and to the extent that we have been taught to have SVB, we experience constant problems because we find ourselves in environments in which it is impossible to speak the way in which we would like to speak. Consequently, we give up on our speaking or supposedly we ‘pick our battles’, but the bottom line is that we stop speaking, as we must protect ourselves from bad consequences. 

Most people speak hesitantly when they experience the contingency, which brings their attention to the distinction between SVB and NVB. It is only after they experience this contingency for about half an hour, an hour, two hours or three hours that they begin to lose their hesitation and are feeling sure enough that it is possible and okay to continue with SVB. Repeated trials are necessary before people realize that they actually want SVB and not NVB. Initially, the distinction between SVB and NVB shows in what for an upside-down world we live in. It is embarrassing to realize that we are mostly conditioned by and familiar with NVB.

In his book “Running Out of Time” (Ledoux, 2014, p.262) Ledoux states “such bodies are also behaving organisms and, like all organisms, are limited to operantly and respondently conditioned responses that in one way or another change the environmental contingencies on another organism, human or other animal, and these contingency changes bring about change in the other organism’s behavior.”   This author doesn't view himself as Ledoux, as ”behavior modifier” but as a “contingency engineer.” 

His greatest challenge in pointing out the SVB/NVB distinction is that he can only point out so much at any given time. In order to change the operant and respondent conditioning processes, which maintain NVB, people have to become verbalizers, who recognize and acknowledge themselves as their own mediators. That this is accomplished without any effort demonstrates that it is the absence of an inner-behavior-controlling agent which makes SVB possible. This absence is experienced as freedom.