January 2, 2016

January 2, 2016

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Verbal Engineer

Dear Reader,

In today’s writing I want to describe the relationship between you and me: I am the teacher and you are the student. I know something you don’t know and I can teach you about it if you accept this as a fact. I am not interested in convincing you. My promise to you is that you will learn about Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB) if you allow me to teach you. 

You don’t have to do much to learn from me. Let me do the teaching and take note of how it affects you. There is nothing esoteric about the teacher-student relationship. In any discipline there are those who know more than others. You can learn from them by accepting and by acknowledging this difference. I was once without this knowledge. 

In my search for it I could not find the person who knew about it. Already in my early years it was painfully clear to me that nobody knew about what I was looking for. I kept being rejected because my need for this knowledge wasn’t met. At some point it felt I had discovered something, but since there was nobody capable of confirming my finding, I had to find ways to confirm myself. This is, I now know, the process of automatic reinforcement which is the essence of SVB. 

Verbal behavior is mediated by others. We become literate due to the reinforcement provided by members of our verbal community. Those who didn’t speak, read or write Dutch couldn’t reinforce it. At the early stages of development you were pre-verbal, but as you grew up, you were conditioned by the verbal behavior of the community in which you happened to grow up. Ideally speaking, your verbal behavior became self-reinforcing after it receded to a covert level.  However, that would have only been the case if you had been conditioned by SVB.