March 16, 2014

March 16, 2014

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Verbal Behaviorist

Dear Reader, 

Yesterday, March 15, will be forever engraved in my memory. I gave a successful  seminar for the teachers of Butte College, where I teach two psychology classes. Teachers are the perfect audience because they are involved in teaching. This set the stage for my ability to explain things accurately and coherently. Everybody who was in that room understood Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB).

I was so excited about the reinforcement which I received that I could not sleep the whole night. It is now early in the morning and I am feeling calm and satisfied. I have composed a new announcement for the upcoming seminar in which I state very clearly that in order to be able to listen to ourselves we must stop listening to others and instead become speakers, who listen themselves.  

When my wife got up, I wanted to tell her more about the seminar, but she was not interested, although she was happy with my success. I have been in that situation many times, where I want to talk, but she, or someone else doesn’t want to talk. If in such a situation I say something to someone who doesn’t want to hear what I say, my ability to say it immediately decreases. If I continue to speak in such a situation, what I say gets further and further of the track. In the seminar, where people were ready to listen to me, I could be an effective speaker, but under circumstances in which this is not the case my speech is not as clear.  Due to my success and my previous experiences, I am now determined to not say anything anymore under unfavorable circumstances. 

I am not getting in trouble for something I haven’t said. Moreover, when I don’t say anything, there is nothing to say! I experience the relief that comes from not being too eager or too impulsive. I often got in trouble for saying something when I shouldn’t have said anything. I knew way back that the environment wasn’t there, but I said something because I didn’t trust what I knew. Yesterday’s seminar restored my sense of self-respect. I verified with the audience whether what I said was true. To me the effectiveness of speech is not a personal but an empirical matter. As we put together the necessary ingredients for SVB, it was self-evident that the things that were said by me and by the audience fit. 

There are many ways to describe that fit. What I said seemed to make sense because it fulfilled a need. Another way to describe it would be to say that I spoke a language which they could understand. I spoke as a fellow teacher. It could also simply be argued that I spoke English. As a function of all these environmental stimuli meaning could be communicated and reciprocated.

I kept thinking about our need not to listen to each other, but to ourselves... Ironically, relationships that work are those in which partners inadvertently have decided not to listen to each other. In such relationships there is a much higher probability that both partners begin to listen to themselves. This in turn will make them more true to what they think and feel and more likely to have an authentic relationship in which they will truly listen to each other.

This is not to say, of course, that all this occurs without problems or risks of breaking up. However, these risks would be drastically reduced if people had been told and stimulated to listen to themselves in the first place. Indeed, a lot of problems would never even occur and our relationships would be genuine and effective. We are free to choose not to listen to each other. Besides, our ability to admit that we are not willing to listen will make us better listeners.

We are often not listening to each other, because we don’t even seem to notice.. that we are not listening to each other. The fact that we are not listening must be acknowledged before we can again listen to each other. Moreover, that we are not listening, that we are not behaving in ways in which others would like us to behave, is a function of the stimuli that are available. 

If stimuli which produce the required behavior are present, that behavior will occur. The lawfulness of this environment-behavior relationship becomes evident when we give more thought to the fact that something or someone is always in control of what we do or do not do. Behavior never occurs out of the blue, it is caused. Our behavior is always a function of our environment.

Our language is a function of where we grew up. If we grew up in another environment, we might have spoken Arabic, because we learned how to speak, read and write in an Arabic verbal community. We learned our language from the verbal community in which we grew up, not because we adapted to that environment, but because we learned that language in that environment. As a response to stimuli, operant behavior is more or less likely to occur due to its consequences. In an Arabic verbal community mainly Arabic will be reinforced. This is not to say that English-speaking Arabs wouldn’t be able to reinforce English, they would, but only English-speaking Arabs would be able to do that. Without English-speaking Arabs nothing stimulates English.  

The idea that individuals of an English-speaking verbal community would be responsible for learning Arabic with no one to teach them is ludicrous. The teacher is the environment for the student, but the student is of course also the environment for the teacher. Whether or not the student learns, depends on whether the teacher creates the environment in which the student can learn.

Failure of the student signifies the failure of the teacher to create the proper environment in which the student can learn. Likewise, the doctor, not the patient, is responsible for the patient’s recovery from an illness. Those who possess the knowledge which other people don’t have are responsible for how they use that knowledge. They alone know how it works. That is why they speak.

Students in Math class don’t know what the teacher knows. They listen to the teacher who uses his or her knowledge and authority in such a manner that the student learns. Although the teacher speaks and the student listens, this isn’t uni-directional communication in which the teacher speaks at the student, not with the student. The teacher who teaches speaks with students and students sense that. They are in the same class, but the environment for the teacher is not the same as the environment for the student. The teacher has private speech which is mostly about the topic he or she teaches, but students have private speech, which may distract them from what the teacher teaches. In the latter, the student's private speech prevents learning. The teacher who wants to teach the student whose private speech distracts from his or her public speech, must realize that he or she must provide the necessary stimuli that will make this happen. It may be difficult, but it is not impossible to figure out what these stimuli are. There was distraction because the stimuli that evoke concentration were absent. This has to do with how the teacher speaks. If the teacher says that the student should read and study the chapter, this is not likely to maintain the student’s behavior of reading and studying the chapter. The teacher may become more adamant in instructing his or her students to read and study the chapter in response to finding that they are not reading or studying. Reminders often are perceived as a putdown. In behavioral terms, the teacher punishes the student.  

Punishment always leads to the decrease of behavior. If the teacher had wanted to create or increase reading and studying behaviors, he or she should have used positive reinforcement. To expect that behavior can be increased by punishment is as unrealistic as expecting that objects fall toward the sky. The lawfulness of human behavior is such that it will occur more often only if it is reinforced.  

Only the teachers who know how to reinforce can stimulate the right kind of behavior in their students. If teachers want the private speech of their students to match with their public speech, a necessary condition for learning, they must make those stimuli available that make this possible. One way to do this is to encourage the students to describe their distracting private stimuli. Many times the thoughts and feelings of students are about different things than what the teacher is talking about. Their inability to focus on the lecture, on public speech, is because of what occurs within their own skin, private speech. They may feel tired, sad, drowsy, fearful, anxious and experience a variety of negative emotions. However, teachers must provide stimuli that reliably generate positive emotions. Furthermore, they must be able to accurately describe the contingencies of reinforcement that make both positive and negative emotion possible, and they must provide only the stimuli that evoke positive emotions by talking about what makes them possible and what prevents them. If done correctly, this process will be enhanced by their students, who contribute to and are rewarded for their elaborations about their experiences of positive emotions.

March 15, 2014

March 15, 2014

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Verbal Behaviorist

Dear Reader, 

 

Because of my behavioral history, I have become capable of understanding why most human interaction doesn’t work and can’t work. Yesterday, I was talking with someone, who was diagnosed with schizophrenia. He lives in a transitional group home, where presumably he learns skills how to become independent. I explained him about Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB), he understood it completely. We laughed at the irony that most people don’t realize their own habits prevent them. Although he understood it, he recognized there was a difference between understanding it and producing it. Although he had enough behavioral history to recognize SVB, he doubted if he had enough to continue it. I asked him to listen to his voice while he speaks and then say something about this doubt. He then said with an accepting calm smile that his voices weren’t all that bad after all and that he had somehow always tried to listen to them. While saying this, he knew and acknowledged that he was producing SVB. 

Since we have accepted as normal a way of communicating in which our public speech excludes and dissociates us from our private speech, most treatment of people who are mentally ill is rooted in Noxious Verbal Behavior (NVB). The inevitable negative consequences of such a treatment, iatrogenic effects, are caused by well-meaning mental health professionals who are incapable of facilitating SVB. Thus, when people with mental health problems express the wish for SVB, this is not supported, it is seen as part of pathology.  However, the same is true for people who are not diagnosed. Their wish for SVB is rejected too, because nobody really knows how to produce SVB, let alone that it is possible. It is truly amazing that we still doubt the fact that real human interaction exists and must be had. The idea that we cannot have it is in itself destructive and violent. As long as we don’t see each other as our environment, we can’t have SVB. We are on this earth for the length of a life time and during this time we will only be able to have SVB to the extent that we can depend on each other.

March 14, 2014

March 14, 2014

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Verbal Behaviorist

Dear Reader, 

 

Another reason I began to listen to myself more and more was that I talked about the need to listen to ourselves while we speak with others. I had to admit  again and again that even though I talked about it, I was often not listening to myself. In spite of that, I began to listen to myself more and more. Often I only found out later, not during the conversation, that I must not have listened to myself. How the conversation went demonstrated whether I had been listening to myself or not. Every time I was having a negative experience in conversation with others, it was because I had stopped listening to myself. It puzzled me that this was the case. Like everyone else, I believed I should be able to keep listening to myself if I decided to do so, but apparently this was not the case.

It can be said that I still have a problem with listening to myself while I speak. Even today I stop listening to myself. I am more at ease with it now, but was very upset about it in the past. I was often enraged about the fact that I was unable to listen to myself. Other thought of me as a complete idiot, because I couldn't do what I preached. Frustration still flairs up in a situation in which it is impossible  to listen to myself. I know that such situations exist and I know I don’t create them. If it was up to me, I would create the circumstances in which everyone would be able to listen to themselves while they speak. I have done that as often as could and will continue to do this. I have come to understand  that under circumstances in which it is impossible to talk about listening to one self while one speaks, it is impossible to listen to oneself while one speaks! We must talk about listening to ourselves while we speak in order to be able to listen to ourselves while we speak. It took me years to find that out and I don’t claim to have known this from the start. I knew it implicitly, not explicitly. Only now in this writing I am able to articulate it, but I wasn’t capable of saying in the past: there are situations in which I can’t listen to myself while I speak. To expect myself to be able to do it was utterly self-defeating and frustrating. 

I have suffered while finding out that it was not up to me to speak in the way which I like best. Because I have always been willing to admit what was going on with me, I was more capable of describing that than most others. I recognize that this is the fate of everyone who develops this skill. Let it be said again: nobody can listen to themselves regardless of the circumstances. The belief that this is possible is false. This is not to say that we don’t have a need to talk in a way which pleases us and fits with us, we do, but we can only achieve it when others agree to have it with us. We can’t decide on our own for others to have it. We also can’t decide as a group, who supposedly believe the same thing that others must listen to themselves while they speak. It just doesn’t work that way. 

Others will only listen to themselves while they speak if the circumstances are such that it becomes possible for them to listen to themselves while they speak. The creation and the maintenance of these circumstances can only be done by someone who knows what it takes to listen to one self while one speaks. The notion that we all individually need different circumstances to achieve this is wrong. The circumstances in which we are stimulated to listen to ourselves while we speak are exactly the same for everyone. This is why we can recognize in each other when listen to ourselves while we speak. We can all hear in each other if others listen to themselves while they speak or not. 

To the extent that we hear ourselves while we speak, we hear whether others listen to themselves while they speak. Our other-listening is only as accurate as our self-listening. When other-listening becomes problematic this signifies that our self-listening isn’t happening. We misunderstand each other because we misunderstand ourselves and we understand each other only to the extent that we understand ourselves. When we begin to listen to ourselves while we speak, we begin to understand ourselves and as a consequence we begin to be able to understand each other. Although we can of course listen to others, we can’t do their self-listening. Self-listening, like breathing, has to be done individually. Self-listening only makes sense if one speaks, so self-listening sets the stage for everyone to become a speaker. When we listen to ourselves while we speak, we realize that we are simultaneously the speaker and the listener. 

The realization that we simultaneously speak and listen makes us better speakers. We have emphasized listening to others way too much. That is why we don’t listen to ourselves. We have to speak to be able to listen to ourselves. There are too many listeners in the world and too few speakers. When people begin to speak more there is more opportunity to listen to ourselves while we speak, but when we speak less, there is less opportunity to listen to ourselves. This also causes our private speech to be disconnected from our public speech. As private speech becomes more and more separate from public speech, it become more and more out of touch with reality, less real and more problematic. 

We tend to think that we don’t understand each other because we don’t listen well enough to each other, but that is not the problem. The problem is we don’t listen to ourselves. We want others to listen to us because we don’t listen to ourselves. Once we listen to ourselves, we can stimulate others to listen to themselves. We achieve a new way of communicating once we listen to ourselves while we speak and once others are listening to themselves while they speak. Central to Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB) is that we listen to ourselves while we speak. This is made possible by identifying and preventing Noxious Verbal Behavior (NVB). The process in which this can occur requires the exploration of the link between our private and our public speech. 

The absence of the stimuli that make NVB possible signifies the presence of the stimuli that make SVB possible. This needs to be talked about. It can’t be achieved by reading or writing. SVB involves the acceptance and re-introduction of private speech into public speech. In NVB our private speech is excluded from our public speech. When our private speech is excluded from our public speech, even when we speak, the speaker is not really speaking. Since we are so used to this, we don’t realize anymore that although we may be speaking all the time, we are in fact not speaking at all. Once we acknowledge the difference between SVB and NVB, we know that most of our speech isn’t really speech at all because it leaves out and it disconnects from our private speech, from what we really think and feel. That we have accepted as normal a way of communicating in which our private speech is constantly excluded and dissociated from our public speech signifies the pervasiveness of our mental health problems.

March 13, 2014

March 13, 2014

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Verbal Behaviorist

Dear Reader, 

What set the stage for me to carry on listening to myself while I speak? How did I get so involved, so convinced and so committed? Why did nobody else come up with this? What in my history made it become possible? Why did I have an epiphany when I found that gong while I was sitting in that lonely attic? What made me capable of recognizing that I must listen to my own sound? I have been listening to myself ever since I found that gong, but why? 

During my early adulthood I had felt rejected and misunderstood. One afternoon I was listening to some music with a friend. She played along with the melody on a recorder and showed me how to do it. It was not difficult. I put my  my fingers on the holes and a nice, warm sound came out. It was such a pleasant experience that I got myself a recorder and tried to play the tunes that I knew. I remember liking the sound and this translated into play and practice. It felt as if I was exploring new sound possibilities while playing. 

Years went by and I loved the sound of my flutes. My flutes gave me a reason to be alone. I was always looking for the right place to play my flutes and did not play for others very often. I mainly played for myself because I found it soothing. Although I was not very good at it, I was good enough to enjoy it. Playing the flute gave me a sense of flow and being in touch with my environment. I would play underneath a bridge where the sound would echo across the water. Also, I would play at night in the park. Although I didn’t go to church anymore, like I used to as a child, I still went there once in while to play my flutes. The priest had given me permission and sometimes he sat in the back and listened. During his final days he had pneumonia and I visited him in the hospital. His breathing made a wheezing sound and he was getting oxygen through pipes connected to a mask on his face. While listening to the whistling sound of his last breath, he joked that he was also playing the flute now. After this he died. He was the same priest, who had failed me as an altar boy. While kneeling at the altar, I had to ring the bells to announce that it was time for Holy Communion, but they fell out of my hands and they rolled down the stairs. 

Another memorable event was my love affair with a girl from high school, who would later became schizophrenic. She liked me, but she was not in love with me. She played a silver flute and was very good at it. While she had her first psychotic break her flute had disappeared. It may have gotten stolen. I visited her in the psychiatric hospital and she asked repeatedly for her flute. Her sister got her another one and when she began to recover, she began to play it again. Whenever she had to be hospitalized, she had stopped playing and when she was recovering, she would start playing her flute again. Eventually, she lost her flute and her mental health declined. I was feeling helpless to see her go through this. She always spoke kindly of me and we know each other for many years. She was my oldest friend, but she no longer responds to my letters and I lost contact with her. She loved music and my best memories are when we enjoyed listening to music together. When she was feeling well, she would dance gracefully. 

Many other experiences have made me aware of the importance of sound. One day I saw a movie about a war-ravaged village somewhere in Asia. One guy, who had survived, was given the task to restore the village bell. The Buddhist monks used to strike this bell when they had their sermons and the village had been peaceful and harmonious before the war. With the bell gone and only a few survivors left, this anxious man was trying to make sense of it all. One of the two surviving monks told him that he was the only one who could restore the bell and the peace. One monk, who was mortally wounded, showed him a piece of paper, which detailed the ingredients needed to build the bell and the procedure to make it. The other fat monk urged the nonviolent man to hit him with club until he would produce the sound of the bell. This seemed ridiculous and the terrified man told him he could not do it. The monk would not leave him alone and challenged him to the point that he took the club and beat him ferociously. The monk said the most horrible things to offend him and in rage he trashed him with his stick. Eventually, the bleeding monk opened his mouth and miraculously a sound of bell was heard. It sounded loud and impressive and then the monk died. After fear turned into rage the man became calm. He set out to collect the metal he needed to rebuild the bell. With only a few survivors in his village and everything of value stolen by the soldiers, who had destroyed the place, he was considered insane by the other survivors that he wanted to restore the bell. Some people, however, gave him the metals they still possessed, but it was not enough and he had to go to other villages, to see if he could get metal from there. Initially, people thought of him as a nuisance, but as he brought back more and more metal, they slowly became interested in helping him. In the meantime, there was a woman, who fell in love with his passion and she became his wife. Inspired by her he became practical and less emotional. He turned into a leader and many people had been mobilized to help gather the metals that were needed to rebuild the bell. Years went gone by and the moment had come to melt the metal and pour it into the shape. There was great activity and anticipation and everyone had done their part. The bell cooled down and was hoisted up by a few strong men, but when the bell was struck, he disapproved because it didn’t sound right. People confessed to have lied about the metal they had contributed. There was too little copper in the mix. The leader took a sledge hammer and struck the bell which broke into big pieces. An uproar happened, because many people thought that it sounded all right, but others wanted to redo the procedure in the correct way, with the right amount of metals. Fights broke out and people killed each other, but there were still a few people left who were committed to rebuilding the bell. Again they ventured out to other villages to collect copper and the big pieces were melted on the enormous fire. Although new fights broke out, the bell finally was ready to be poured once more. It cooled off and was hoisted up once again. The fighting had stopped and everyone was gathered to hear the new bell. When it was struck the leader approved of it's sound and the village was once more at peace. However, disgruntled opponents had set fire to the leader’s house and had killed his wife. He folded his hands and walked into his burning house. This movie gave this writer the courage to restore the sound of our spoken communication. It had to be the right ingredients and it had to be the right procedure. Also, his fear had to be overcome. Others had to be energized to make it happen and purposeful behavior had to be developed. Relationships had to be strengthened by trust, morals and truthfulness.