May 7, 2015

May 7, 2015

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Verbal Engineer

Dear Reader, 

My reason for teaching Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB) is because it has the potential to transform human relationship. I am confident we can solve all our problems and achieve a better way of life. SVB improves how we talk with each other. I speak of teaching, because SVB can be taught and learned. To my knowledge nobody is teaching it. The reason that nobody is teaching it is because nobody knows enough about it to be able to teach it. However, people are trying to learn it on their own without having anyone to teach them. They know it is possible, but they can’t continue it as they don’t know how to. Due to my personal circumstances, I was not only motivated to continue, but upon discovering Skinner’s Radical Behaviorism, I found out about how it actually works. SVB is a scientific account of our vocal verbal behavior. 

It has taken me years to come to terms with my lack of understanding and my inability to accept the undeniable fact that I have discovered something entirely new, which no one else has discovered. If others discovered and understood the far-reaching implications of SVB, they too would have been compelled to teach it. However, the reality is that SVB isn’t taught by anyone, anywhere!

I am not saying that we don’t know about it at all, but the little we know about it is simply not enough to be able to continue with it. Although we achieve it in moments, we can’t continue SVB, the vocal verbal behavior in which the voice of the speaker has an appetitive effect on the listener, as we are unfamiliar with what happens when we shift from SVB to Noxious Verbal Behavior (NVB). 

Unless we know how SVB and NVB work, we will not be able to increase SVB and decrease of NVB. Although behaviorists, in their writings, acknowledge the well-documented scientific fact that we don’t cause our own behavior, they too don’t know how to create, let alone continue SVB, which would allow them to instruct and demonstrate during actual conversation, that our speaking and listening behaviors a caused by existing traceable environmental variables. However, these nonverbal independent variables, called stimuli, which set the stage for how we talk, exist primarily within our own skin. 

When we say that someone’s voice sounds like “music to our ears” or “makes our blood boil” we refer to experiences that are taking place inside of the body of the listener, which can only mediate what is outside the skin of the listener,  because of how that body was conditioned by past experiences.

How is one to differentiate between SVB and NVB if one seldom hears the former and mainly the latter? In most of our conversations, speakers control the behavior of the listener with an aversive-sounding voice. The speaker and the listener have been conditioned mainly by NVB, the vocal verbal behavior that is characterized by hierarchical differences, in which our speaking and our listening are predetermined. Although NVB is based on the continuation of our negative emotions and the exploitation of our positive emotions, we accept it as our normal way of talking. Granting that some of us have been conditioned by more SVB than others, the fact remains that most of us have been mainly exposed to and conditioned by NVB and are more inclined to reinforce NVB. 

  

Conditioning processes are lawful. The probability of behaviors which are reinforced increases, while the probability of behaviors that are punished decreases. In operant conditioning the event after the response changes the future probability of that response. SVB and NVB are two subclasses of vocal verbal behavior, which increase due to reinforcement or decrease due to  punishment. SVB or NVB have nothing to do with being right or wrong. Stimuli presented by speakers, inadvertently affect the body of the listener, some of whom become speakers, but most of whom let others do the talking. 

In NVB the behavior of listeners is under control of strict rules. Listeners are expected to listen to the teacher, parent, preacher, politician, leader or the authority. In SVB, by contrast, there is fluid turn-taking between the speaker and the listener. In SVB, at any given time, a listener becomes a speaker and a speaker becomes a listener. Moreover, in SVB the speaker is his or her own listener. The listener listens to the speaker in the same way as he or she would when he or she would listen to him or herself while he or she speaks. Likewise, also the speaker listens to him or herself in the same way as he or she would, when he or she would listen to someone else. In SVB there are no hierarchical differences between the speaker and the listener. SVB can only happen in the absence of aversive stimulation. Many SVB instances are needed to recover from the conditioning effects of NVB, our problem behavior.  Only appetitive vocal verbal behavior is capable of reconditioning our nervous system. 

Let it be said in a straightforward fashion: no matter what we believe, know or assume, most of our common way of talking concerns the subset of vocal verbal behavior classified as NVB. However, nobody produces this problem behavior because he or she likes like to, wants to or chooses to. We behave the way we do because of how we are affected by others, who condition our behavior. It is not our choice to behave this or that way. As long as we think it is our choice, we will create NVB and make SVB impossible. We are either involved in SVB or in NVB as our neural behavior was stimulated and shaped by our previous environments, that is, by certain people. Although we may believe otherwise, we are tremendously burdened by the fact that we are so often involved in arguing, fighting, dominating, coercing, pretending, struggling, humiliating, defending, posturing, distracting, manipulating and agitating, while we speak. Yet, the distinction between SVB and NVB can only begin to become clear to us if we are start to listen to ourselves while we speak.

I claim that even the most stressed out person; the psychotic; someone who is depressed or suicidal; someone who is manic; someone who is morning the loss of a loved one; someone who was abandoned; someone who has been neglected and rejected; someone who was falsely accused; someone who was tortured; someone who was misunderstood and not validated; someone who was sexually and physically abused and enslaved; someone who is suffering from the traumatic experiences of war; someone who was betrayed; someone who was discriminated; someone who was imprisoned; and someone who was addicted, will find relief by simply listening to themselves while they speak. 


When two people listen to themselves while they speak they will know that they have SVB. They will experience and express what is real. However, we need to talk in order to be able to hear ourselves. We need to talk and be unconcerned about what we say, so that we can pay attention to how we sound. When we do that, experiences which made no sense to us will begin to make sense to us again. Our sound nonverbally expresses the conditioning we have endured, survived and suffered. We need to hear the sound of our pain, our sadness, our loss, our confusion, our rage, our hate and our loneliness. 


We must first listen to Voice # I, the sound of our NVB. Only then can we begin to acknowledge that when we don’t speak with Voice # I, we speak with Voice # II, the voice of SVB, the voice of hope, health, love, support, peace, safety, stability, sensitivity, togetherness, strength, grace, creativity and gratitude.