November 25, 2015

November 25, 2015

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Verbal Engineer

Dear Students,

While reading your papers, I was inspired to write this short booklet for you about the fundamentals of Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB). It must be read it out loud so that you can listen to the sound of your voice.  It is not important that you try to sound a certain way; what matters is that you listen to yourself while you speak, regardless of how you sound. These words have been written to stimulate you to do only that. 

The essence of SVB is that the speaker listens to him or herself while he or she speaks. (Please, keep reading out loud.) In Noxious Verbal Behavior (NVB), the speaker doesn’t listen to him or herself, while he or she speaks.(Please, continue to read out loud.) In other words, the distinction between SVB and NVB can only be made if you focus on the speaker (you), who can also simultaneously be his or her own listener.

Although SVB focuses on the speaker, the crux of it is how the speaker as his or her own listener experiences his or her own sound. In other words, what do you feel like, now that you listen to your own voice while you speak? (This text only gives you a reason to say something, so that you don’t have to think of something to say). Of course, it is not the same when you talk with others or read these words out loud.

Because there are no others to talk with and because you are reading this by yourself, it is easier to tune into your sound. It is easier to listen to yourself while you speak when you are alone, when there are no distractions. Because you are simultaneously the speaker and the listener, you can have a conversation with yourself. In such a conversation you can let yourself know how you are affected by others.

The one, who lets him or herself know how he or she is affected by his or her interactions with others, is, of course, the speaker, and, the one, who is ‘catching’ up with him or herself (yes you, the speaker), is also the listener. In your conversations with others you may have been sometimes a speaker and sometimes a listener, but how often have you been able to simultaneously be the speaker and the listener? 

In SVB, the speaker experiences oneness with the listener, because he or she is him or herself the speaker and the listener. (That is why I urge you to verify by reading this text out loud.) This oneness is not experienced often in most your interactions. In most conversations you experience a separation between the speaker and the listener. What you say or think to yourself afterwards is caused by such public speech.

Although oneness between the speaker and the listener, which signifies instances of SVB, was sometimes experienced, compared to how often it was not experienced, which signifies instances of NVB, NVB happened at a much higher rate. Conversations in which you (yes, you dear speaker) felt understood, acknowledged, validated, accepted and listened to, were accidental, momentary, once-in-a-blue-moon, but never ongoing. 

Regardless of whether we are speakers, listeners, or both, most of our public speech was NVB and, consequently, most of our private speech is based on the imaginary separation of the speaker and the listener. Now that you listen to yourself while you speak, you can accept that your different rates of speaking and listening behavior were conditioned during different stages of your early development. You listened first. 

When you were born nonverbal, you could only listen and make sounds. If these sounds were positively responded to by your mother, your father or those who were in your immediate environment while you grew up, you felt your nonverbal expression mattered, but if that didn’t happen, if crying for food and attention didn’t result in feeding and soothing, then, your sounds, the beginning of language, were rejected.  

Only by crying can a baby let its mother know that he or she is hungry or uncomfortable. However, if your ecstatic babbling wasn’t met with joy and delight, also the sound of your wellbeing wasn’t reinforced. Your verbal development was based on preverbal experiences. The point of this text is to make you say to yourself (by reading out loud) that the separation between the speaker and the listener happened early on.

Before you spoke your first words, you had already done a whole lot of listening. Initially, words like “mammy”, “daddy” and “doggy” were praised, since they were milestones in your language development, but after you became a full-blown speaker, overt expressions like “car” or “cat” were no longer reinforced, because you had already learned them. Thus, overt speech became covert and speech receded to a covert level.

  

Another phase in the development of verbal behavior that required overt speech to become covert was learning how to read and write. In the beginning, you were saying out loud what you wrote and read, but soon you learned how to write and read quietly. In school, you were taught to pay attention and use nonverbal behavior, like raising your hand, to get permission from the teacher to become overtly verbal.

As you were conditioned to have covert verbal behavior, you were often rejected, disciplined, humiliated, ridiculed and abandoned. While you became older, less and less overt verbal behavior was reinforced. In conversations, you learned how to be polite and how to be a respectful listener to the speakers who have authority. Only with family, friends and loved ones could your speaking and listening behavior harmonize.

Long, attuned conversations, which are characterized by turn-taking, are possible because circumstances are such that you can be a speaker and a listener. When someone is speaking and you are only listening, you don’t stop being a speaker. And, when someone else is listening and you are speaking, you don’t stop being a listener. Such authentic conversation is based on the oneness of the speaker and the listener. 

In SVB there is no separation between the speaker and the listener. In NVB, on the other hand, you can only be one or the other. Since NVB is based on the speaker’s ability to dominate, manipulate, exploit and force the listeners as well as the other speakers, there is only room for a few highly competitive speakers. Most likely, in NVB you were a listener, who couldn’t speak with the speaker who was speaking at you.

In SVB you are both the speaker and the listener. In SVB separation of these two behaviors doesn’t make any sense, because the separation of speaking and listening makes conversation impossible. When we have NVB there is no communication. In NVB we pretend to have conversation. We pretend because we don’t know what is required to have a conversation. In SVB speaking and listening are joined because we know it is needed.

As you read this text out loud, you should be able notice the effect of this joining of your speaking and listening behavior. It is very soothing and relaxing because there is no effort involved. Do you hear how different you sound, now that you speak and listen simultaneously? The voice of the SVB speaker has a different effect on the listener than the voice of the NVB speaker. SVB induces only positive emotions.

This is an important criterion to be noticed: human interaction always generates only positive emotions. When our verbal behavior generates negative emotions, it is no longer interaction. Stated differently, if we engage in NVB, we talk at each other and our so-called conversation is uni-directional, it is a one-way street. In SVB, on the other hand, we talk with each other, which involves a bi-directional conversation. 

My-way-or-the-highway or NVB generates negative emotions because it is threatening and intimidating. Most of the so-called conversations that are going on everywhere are determined by hierarchical differences. It is because humans became verbal somewhere during evolutionary history that they have the ability to talk about these biologically determined differences. Of course, this possibility can only be achieved in SVB.

In SVB we transcend all the differences which have prevented us from becoming fully verbal. We can listen to ourselves while we speak because we are reinforced for being exactly such a speaker. In NVB only the few people talk who presumably are specialists, experts or authorities, but in SVB a multitudes of listeners, at long last, emancipates into speakers, who make these NVB speakers sound boring.  

Most conversation is stress-and anxiety-inducing and energy-draining because the speakers don’t know how express their wellbeing. We have, of course, all had moments in which this was the case, but this was never done for very long. Now that you turn the page on your verbal development, you realize that SVB is without any aversive stimulation. Yes, just imagine that all conversations make you and others happy?!

You should not expect this to happen overnight, but as instances of SVB increase and instances of NVB decrease, you will find that your happiness grows and that your problems become less. You can already sense this is happening while you read. If you don’t have this sense, you are most likely trying to sound in a certain way. If you try to have SVB, you are not going to have it, because you don’t cause it. 

SVB is energizing and novel because we are not predetermining what we are going to say. In NVB everything we say is scripted and rehearsed. The reason we are predetermined in NVB is because we were coerced to communicate that way and we were punished for not talking like that.  In NVB the speaker always aversively influences the listener. In SVB there is no aversive stimulation, because we co-regulate each other. 

When you listen to yourself while you speak, you listen to others in a different way than you have been used to. You were used to having two completely different ways of listening; one in which you listened to yourself and another in which you listened to others. Due to NVB, you listened to others differently than you listened to yourself. In SVB, you listen to yourself in the exact same way as you listen to others. 

In SVB you can be in contact with others, because you are in contact with yourself. In NVB, however, you are not in contact with yourself and, therefore, you cannot be in contact with others. In other words, self-listening, which is the basis of SVB, makes other-listening possible, because self-listening includes other-listening, but NVB, which is based on other-listening, always excludes self-listening.

In NVB, you either try to make others listen to you or you try to listen to others, but in both cases your attention goes to others. In SVB, however, because you listen to yourself while you speak, your attention goes and stays with you. In NVB, you are outward-oriented and, consequently, all over the map, but in SVB, because the attention goes to your sound, you are conscious and centered in the here-now. 

The oppressor and the oppressed maintain NVB together. Therefore, NVB is the language of oppression. In SVB there is neither an oppressor nor an oppressed. SVB is the language of freedom. Freedom of speech can only be attained if the speaker is stimulated, by the listener, to listen to him or herself while he or she speaks. Yet, in NVB both the speaker and the listener are imprisoned by and fixated on words.

SVB and NVB never meet because they are mutually exclusive; instances of SVB alternate with instances of NVB. When NVB begins, SVB stops and when NVB stops, SVB begins. Any verbal episode exists of x-amount of SVB and NVB instances. The total amount of instances of SVB and NVB in a conversation determines if this conversation is classified as SVB or as NVB. No 50SVB/50NVB is possible; always one is more than the other.

A 60SVB/40NVB ratio is a SVB conversation, but a 90SVB/10NVB ratio has much more SVB momentum. Likewise, a 40SVB/60NVB ratio is definitely a NVB talk, but a 10SVB/90NVB ratio has more NVB momentum. We cannot have ongoing SVB as long as we don’t discriminate between SVB and NVB. We must go back and forth between SVB and NVB many times before we become accurate in our ability to differentiate between SVB and NVB. 

In NVB, what you say is different from how you say it. In other words, in NVB, what you express verbally is not aligned with your nonverbal behavior. There is a struggle going on between the verbal and the nonverbal, between the speaker and the listener, between one speaker and another speaker, between this and that topic, between how we would like to be perceived and how we are experienced by others. 

Always NVB communicators are struggling to get and to keep getting the attention. All these matters can be identified when you listen to yourself while you speak. In SVB, there is no struggle, no discrepancy between what you say and how you say it. There is inward-orientation due to self-listening and effective communication, because of the nonverbal focus on your voice. Nonverbal focus enhances your verbal fluidity, but your verbal fixation in NVB disconnects you from yourself and from others.

As you explore by yourself what SVB is, it becomes clear that the way in which you talk so calmly and clearly with yourself is possible with others. They can do the same as you. This doesn’t mean they speak the same words, but only that they also listen to themselves while they speak. In SVB nobody is telling anybody what to say or when to say it. The turn-taking in never scheduled, but is decided on in the moment.

All the rules we have around our communication pertain to NVB. In SVB there are no rules. Moreover, you don’t know what you are going to say next and you don’t know whether you will be speaking or listening. You do know, however, that SVB is profoundly different from NVB and that things are said because they can be said, by you as well as by others. 

Furthermore, there is unanimous agreement that we have SVB together. 

As SVB continues, we achieve a deeper sense of relaxation, health and wellbeing. SVB is rejuvenating, because it gives energy and NVB is draining, because others take advantage of us or we take advantage of them. In the latter case, the speakers do not only pretend to have interaction with others, but they also pretend to enjoy their power. Once they discover SVB, however, they find that this was make-belief. 

Another discovery waiting to happen is that you become conscious of your actions because of SVB. You are unconscious because of how others have talked with you. Although it is not a matter of good or bad, NVB doesn’t and can’t describe the reality, only SVB can do that. Only to the extent that you have been in the circumstances to have SVB were you able to accurately describe your reality and thus stay conscious.

In NVB you are on automatic pilot and you talk in a mechanical manner. You only find out about NVB retrospectively, after it has stopped. Usually, it is an experience of meaninglessness, a sense of tiredness and despair, a feeling of running on empty, disappointment, agitation,  frustration, depression, hatred, fear, anxiety and stress, which is so disturbing and annoying, because no matter how hard you have tried, it wouldn’t go away.

By listening to the sound of it, you can accept it. When you are happy, you are not trying to be happy. You are trying to be happy only when you are not happy. Likewise, when you have SVB, you are not trying to have SVB. You were only trying to have SVB, when you were having NVB. Probably, when you try to have NVB, you will find yourself having SVB instead. You neither cause your SVB nor your NVB, but by realizing that, SVB begins to increase and NVB decrease. You give up trying, because if it can happen, it will happen. 

People freak out when they hear there is no such thing as a behavior-causing self. There is empirical evidence to back up the fact that each behavioral response is preceded by and thus, caused by, environmental variables. This is not the place to elaborate, but your verbal behavior is both respondent as well as operant, that is, it is maintained by pairing of stimuli and the consequences of your response. That is why some people veer toward SVB and others to NVB. Only you have access to that part of the universe which is beneath your skin. Nobody can feel what only you feel and nobody knows what goes on inside your head. Yet, what you think to yourself, privately, covertly, is always a function of what others have said to you overtly, publicly. 

NVB public speech causes NVB private speech or negative self-talk and SVB public speech causes SVB private speech or positive self-talk. A change in public speech will reliably result into a change of private speech. You don’t need to wait for others to make it possible or to approve. You can already describe to yourself what you feel or think and listen to the sound of it. Even all alone, by just listening to yourself while you speak you can bring out your private speech into public speech. It got separated from public speech due to NVB public speech and you are able to trace back your private speech to public speech.  

All negative self-talk is caused by NVB public speech. Once you listen to your own thoughts and feelings, SVB reveals itself in your own pace and rhythm. Don’t take my word for it, try it out and experiment with others how it works. I wish you happiness and success in your career and your relationships.    

Happy Thanksgiving, Maximus