Language Enlightenment

Saturday, March 12, 2016

May 6, 2014

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Verbal Behaviorist

Dear Reader,

If prediction and control is what behaviorists aim to achieve, they must acknowledge the natural order of phenomena that are occurring during our spoken communication. Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB) and Noxious Verbal Behavior (NVB) are easily identifiable categories of verbal behavior, which amazingly have not yet been scientifically recognized for how they organize all human interaction.

The fact that scientific validation continuous to be dependent on written descriptions which cannot explain the phenomena of spoken communication, has prevented behaviorists and non-behaviorists alike from exploring our spoken communication while it is happening. The distinction between SVB and NVB only makes sense during our spoken communication, but gets lost in translation when it is written.

This doesn’t mean that SVB and NVB don’t exist, nor that these categories wouldn’t be useful in predicting and controlling our verbal behavior. This writer, who conducted hundreds of seminars on this topic, has reliably and repeatedly re-created the situation in which participants from every culture, form all walks of life and from every level of intelligence, have validated this distinction.

It is only during our spoken communication that we can experience the SVB/NVB distinction. When we experience it, we sense that we do and there is really nothing much to think about. It is like being in a hot or cold room. There is no doubt for anyone which room is hot and which one is cold. Similarly, there is no doubt in anyone, which is SVB and which is NVB, because we all experience the difference.

We don’t need to understand the distinction between SVB and NVB. Our tendency to want to understand it prevents us from experiencing it. Reading about SVB and NVB gives the reader the false impression that there is something to be understood. This writer insists that there is nothing to be understood about SVB. Understanding is a function of our experience in the communication process in which we are able to make this distinction. Thus, experience of SVB comes first and the understanding of SVB is an outcome of our experience.

With our emphasis on understanding we throw out the child with the bathwater over and over again. We are so fixated on words that we fail to recognize that verbal behavior emerges from and always remains embedded in its nonverbal origins. Behaviorists, who should be familiar with animal research, ought to know that the principles of behavioral control apply to all levels of behavioral complexity. Thus, the lawfulness of behavior should be as apparent in a rat, who presses a lever, as a human being, who practices meditation. The let-go of what some have called the chattering monkey-mind is needed to experience nonverbal well-being. To be without words, is to be quiet and enhances our ability to be with words. What has been called inner peace or meditation is positive self-talk, which is possible as there is no need to be on guard about NVB public speech.

Increased focus on how verbal behavior emerges from our nonverbal, embodied, proprioceptive experience, within our own skin, indicates the great difference between SVB and NVB. Certain things can only be understood if certain experiences facilitate this learning. In NVB, in which communicators disconnect from their own and each other’s experiences, there is no possibility to gain understanding. What a person experiences privately, covertly or subjectively, is explained by the same lawfulness of behavior as what a person experiences publicly, overtly and objectively.

May 5, 2014

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Verbal Behaviorist

Dear Reader,

Today I gave a fiery lecture about the Milgram Obedience study. I brought home the powerful message that our behavior is not, as most of my students are inclined to believe, caused by ourselves, but by our environment. I was congratulated for my presentation. The message hit home and a dynamic, lengthy discussion occurred. We talked about evolution and the extent to which our individual survival is often overemphasized, while the importance of social survival behaviors is often underestimated. Another issue was the fear of being called crazy or of going crazy when one deviates from the norm. In addition, we analyzed culture and how it relates to our belief in and need for authority and conformity.

Our behavior can be arranged in any particular way. We can use this to determine positive outcomes. I referred to my seminar yesterday as an example. At the start I told participants what was going to happen and it happened exactly as I said it would. This is because I know how Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB) works. If what I said didn’t happen, it couldn’t happen, because certain things were overlooked. If these things, such as discriminative stimuli, reinforcement history and operant conditioning etc., terms belonging to behaviorism, would have been taken into consideration, we should be able to predict the outcome. If I didn’t get the outcome I said I was going to get, I didn’t know what I was talking about.

As a teacher, I have the authority to convey this message, which many have never heard. One student, who was argumentative and repeatedly interrupted me, admitted that he had never been able to differentiate between talking WITH versus talking AT each other. Because I affirmed that I was talking AT him and because I agreed with him that I was talking AT him, he was able to grasp the difference between talking AT and talking WITH me and then he felt that I was talking WITH him.

This confrontational process of teaching is important because without this intense interaction he and the rest of the class wouldn’t have been able to make this distinction and their verbal behavior would not have been shaped into understanding the distinction between SVB and Noxious Verbal Behavior (NVB). The aforementioned student also stated that people often pretend to be talking WITH each other, while in reality they are talking AT each other. This pretension is a form of bullying. As we feel intimidated and are often socially not in the position to address this matter, we are never capable of putting our finger on it. It took a person like this writer, who would risk being rejected, to discover that such a difference exists and is tangible.

Those who talk AT others, but who pretend to be talking WITH them, do not allow those who they talk AT to discover and pinpoint that they are lying. Whenever a person, the listener, who feels that he or she is being talked AT, complains about this, by becoming a speaker, the person who talks AT them accuses the person who refuses to be talked AT, that they are talking AT them. The thing which goes often goes completely unnoticed in this picture is that the speaker, who initially talked AT the the listener (the other person or persons), who pretended to be talking WITH that person, is actually correct!!! When he or she is saying that the person who complains is talking AT them, he or she is 100% right. In other words, he may have been lying before, but in that moment he is not lying because, unlike his lying behavior, his current behavior is shaped by the listener, who became the complaining speaker. The fact that the person who initially talked AT the other person (or persons) is able to turn the table on the person who doesn't want to be talked AT, doesn’t change the fact that those who complain, also talk AT others, that is, to the person who was talking AT them. Because the difference between talking AT and talking WITH each other has not become clear, people often end up talking AT those who are talking AT them. In their attempts to talk WITH others, listeners who become speakers inadvertently start acting exactly like those who talk AT them.

April 4, 2014

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Verbal Behaviorist

Dear Reader,

Today I will conduct another one of my seminars. This time we will focus on the pain and stress-reducing properties of Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB). We need those to remediate the effects of Noxious Verbal Behavior (NVB), which maintains our stress and pain. Special attention will be given to different kinds of pain and the extent to which these in turn cause different kinds of stress. In addition, we will talk about eustress, the optimal, positive stress that is needed to perform effectively. Also, we will explore how NVB ties in with issues of codependency, enabling and addiction, which all should be simply explained as maladaptive ways of dealing with our stress.

My wife and I had a beautiful hike this morning in Upper Bidwell Park. We walked along paths with lots of rocks and followed the Yahi Trail that runs along the creek. It was so peaceful and the morning was cool and pleasant. We made two stops and sat on the rocks next to the creek. We didn’t say much and just enjoyed nature and we felt so happy that we had decided to do this today.

As we were walking, I was looking at the ridge of the Bidwell Canyon. I just love that view. Also the rocky path was so nice to look at. I was in awe by all the plants, bushes and trees that grow between the rocks. There were lots of birds singing and it was a glorious spring morning. We hardly met anyone on the path, but when we got back to our car many people had arrived. We were glad that we had left early. We love nature and the tranquility of the morning. On the way back, I heard the soft rushing sound of the creek and I thought of how this sound also represents Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB) to me. When one gets closer to the creek, one is able to hear it more clearly.

May 3, 2014

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Verbal Behaviorist

Dear Reader,

If we want to increase our Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB), we will have to be able to decrease our Noxious Verbal Behavior (NVB) first. These mutually exclusive, but alternating ways of communicating are caused by contingencies, which are phylogenetic, ontogenetic and cultural. This means that the transition from NVB to SVB involves changes in the way we talk about our biology, our inherited, innate biological processes, which are know as classical or respondent conditioning. The more instances of SVB we achieve, the more the content of our conversations will be about what we are able to learn, why we should learn it and how we can learn it.

SVB distills the best from each culture, but it discards any elements which prevent it. Normally this function of what is right or wrong is determined by the culture itself, but with SVB we find that ongoing conversation is the determining factor. Obviously, there never really was any significant ongoing conversation between cultures although many have imagined and fantasized about it. There couldn’t be any ongoing conversation as long as there was no understanding of SVB.

It is important to understand that what we have proudly called the multi-cultural dialogue, was not a dialogue, but a uni-directional monologue. We yet haven’t started a culture-inclusive conversation, because we don’t know how to have that conversation. We know very well and have been conditioned to exclude from our conversation what doesn’t belong to our culture, but we haven’t gotten much practice analyzing, understanding and deliberately, skillfully and reliably excluding from our conversation the cultural aspects that undermine our human relationship. As long as our outdated survival skills still do the trick, nothing stimulates us to have SVB. We will only be motivated to learn about SVB by realizing the great threat of NVB.

May 2, 2014

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Verbal Behaviorist

Dear Reader,

This writing is purely for the fun of it. There is no need for me to focus my attention on anything in particular. My attention was focused on something for four days, I was responding to a paper that I had read, but now that this focus is no longer there, I experience a sense of relief. The experience I am having is made possible by the deprivation from this experience which accumulated during these four days. It is not anything world-shocking, but it is quite profound. A tension that was with me for four days is now gone.

As I was making coffee, I thought of my family back in Holland. I haven’t had any contact with them for more than a year and my life has never been so good. Occasionally, I still have thoughts about contacting them, but when I think of how peaceful my life has become now that my family members are out of it, I resist my old tendency. I imagine that my mother is sad about not hearing from me. I assume that my father is displeased that I am letting my mother down. I think that my sisters still bear grudges against me and that my brothers aren’t the least interested in me. They are all going on with their lives and basically they have forgotten about me.

I was talking the other day with a behaviorist friend and telling him how my life has changed in ways which are new to me. In the past I tried very hard to change, but I don’t try to change anymore. My behavior has come under discriminative control of my knowledge about behaviorism. Certain behaviors which I used to have are decreasing by themselves while others are increasing by themselves. I experience myself no longer as the doer of my actions, but am more aware about how the environment or the situation affects my behavior. Especially my anxiety is much less.

This free flow of language is something I always enjoyed. It reminds me of my younger brother with whom I shared a room throughout my childhood. We would sleep as kids in a double bed and we would have long conversations about nothing for hours on end. Sometimes we would be bored, obnoxious or funny. We would try to imagine things and come up with something new to amuse ourselves. Those are my happiest childhood memories. My parents often had to quiet us down, because we were getting so excited that it was keeping us awake at night. Also, if we got up early in the morning, there was always a lot of conversation going on between the two of us. This too was getting too loud and often our laughter and bantering around was punished.

It feels I am coming into my own because I am successful in my current two jobs as a psychology instructor and as a mental health worker. Both jobs require repertoires of my behavior which are well-developed. Also, my relationship with my wife is better these days and she is appreciative of me. We have lived in our comfortable home we bought at the end of 2013 and we are working together in our garden. We are planting vegetables and we have made friends with our neighbors and colleagues, which is very nice. It seems that we are both more capable of having our needs met and we are keeping our eyes open as well for even better opportunities.

I was just looking at a lamp, which I choose and I remember how we deliberated with each other whether we should buy it or not. Seeing this lamp is reinforcing to me and making me aware of other things in our house which I find pleasant. For instance, we have the walls painted light blue in our living room and in our kitchen and we have a special kind of orange in the office, where I often spend time studying or doing my work for school. It feels so much better than the rental apartment. I feel fortunate to be in the position I am currently in and I appreciate the trouble it took to get us here.