January 8, 2016

January 8, 2016

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Verbal Engineer

Dear Reader,

If you are not deaf or speech-impaired there should be no problem for you to learn about Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB). However, in Noxious Verbal Behavior (NVB) the speaker doesn’t listen to him or herself and demands that others are listening to him or her. The fact that in NVB the listener is always someone else than the speaker determines that the NVB speaker becomes deaf to his or her own sound. This is not due to a defective auditory mechanism, but due to conditioning. When you don’t listen to yourself while you speak and nothing is stimulating you to do this, you are bound to become insensitive to that which is most delicate: the sound you only produce when you are completely at ease. 

Stated differently, due to aversive environments you are so often in a fight-flight-freeze response while you speak, that you don’t produce the sound which you make in the absence of these threatening vocal stimuli which are produced by NVB speakers. Moreover, when the sound of your relaxation and wellbeing is repeatedly punished, your ability to hear this sound will slowly extinguish. 

There is a lot of stress and anxiety in everyone because NVB happens everywhere at a high rate, but SVB happens at a very low rate. In other words, our way of talking conditions us to be and remain anxious, upset, stressed, dysregulated, angry, agitated, fearful and worried. This can be heard in how we sound. During NVB we all sound horrible. Our voices grab, stab, push, pull, choke and drain, and, consequently, NVB is an exhausting and energy-consuming affair. SVB, by contrast, gives us energy. In SVB our voice has a soothing effect on both the speaker as well as the listener.