June 23, 2015

June 23, 2015

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Verbal Engineer

Dear Reader, 

This is my third response to “A Rose by Naming: How We May Learn How to Do it” by Greer and Longano (2010). I just woke up from a restful long sleep. I had a dream about my estranged brother. He was wearing his police uniform, but I hugged him. Yesterday, while writing a cover letter for my job application for counselor of veterans, I had been thinking of him. The letter had come out nicely and I will complete this job application today. I was laughing with my brother and saying how odd it was that yesterday he still hated me, rejected me and didn’t want to see me or talk with me, but now we were amazingly brothers again.

Our next-door neighbor was also there and approved of our reunion as if she herself had arranged it. May be she did? We need to talk with her as we are going to have our house painted this week. The painters need to have access to her property because our house is adjacent to hers. She is not happy as we are having the house painted in a yellow color she didn’t approve. It is called Chinese Lantern. We had coffee with her the other day and when we brought up the painting of our house, she urged us to paint it in the grey colors that she likes. Of course, we are going to paint our house the way we like it and we look forward to seeing the combination of colors which we have chosen. 

 

“It appears that learning a word-object relation in both the listener and speaker function constitutes what is referred to in lexicons as “becoming acquainted…with the essentials of an unfamiliar object or topic.” The learning process of “Naming” Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB) requires us to experience it. With Noxious Verbal Behavior (NVB) we always over-emphasize the importance of information and we underestimate the importance of what we experience while we speak. During NVB we are on automatic pilot. The ability to catch ourselves with NVB and to stop it develops gradually after sufficient experiences have happened in which we could take note of the difference between SVB and NVB. 

Every time we go back to SVB, we experience something different from what we have had before. It is mostly in retrospect that we realize that we were having NVB again. During SVB everyone’s experiences are of equal importance, but during NVB, one person’s experiences are supposedly more important than others.   

NVB is determined by hierarchical relationship in which one person tells the other person how it is. This means one person can curb, distract and oppress the language capabilities of another person. A person may have learned to name and discriminate SVB, but he or she may still be stopped from having SVB by one person with NVB. Even if an entire group has acquired the ability to “name” SVB and NVB and is able to discriminate these two universal subsets of vocal verbal behavior, it only takes  one person with NVB to make the production of SVB impossible. 

It is should be clear to the reader how subtle SVB is and how blunt, destructive and ubiquitous NVB is. If one musician in an orchestra plays a wrong note the conductor and other musicians hear this. Due to experience they are capable of that. One wrong note can destroy the music. The community of musicians, like the community of speakers, concurs “a speaker [who] sees an object and says a word [the musician reads the music score and plays the right note]” (words between brackets added). Furthermore, the community of musicians has, due to their musical training, a greater sensitivity to sound than any other verbal community.  Verbal communities with a cultural history of classical music are more likely to engender more subtle verbal behavior. I grew up in Holland and I studied classical singing for many years. This set the stage for my discovery of SVB. Due to singing I became intrigued by the sound with which I speak.

The importance of “naming”, what Skinner referred to as “tacting”, is not only about a child’s “ability to learn language”, but also about an adult’s possibility to have SVB, that is, great conversation. “Tacts involve saying or signing the word (a tact) in the presences of nonverbal, visual, auditory olfactory or gustatory stimuli under control of general social reinforcers.” Likewise, SVB is under joint control of multiple variables, which can only be discriminated while we are engaging in it. 

“Skinner describes the listener and the speaker as two initially independent repertoires and there is evidence that these two repertoires initially develop independently during language development.” Given the fact of the independent development of listening and speaking repertoires, it is, as with any other independently learned behavior, important that at some point these behaviors become integrated with other behaviors. I concur with the authors who state that the “two independently evolved functions” are “joined by cultural contingencies”, but I believe that in some cultures more joining goes on between listening and speaking than in others. It is apparent to me that in Dutch conversation there is a greater connection between listening and speaking behavior, a more developed congruence between verbal and nonverbal behavior than in American conversation. 

There is more SVB in Holland than in America. I am reading this paper about language development in children, but my writing is about language development of adults.  “Before the listener and speaker are joined, mastery of the listener and speaker responses in the presence of the same stimulus requires separate and direct instruction.” To be able to tact SVB and NVB the same process is necessary for adults. “The environmental sources of Naming” SVB and NVB has to be a capable teacher, who reminds NVB communicators to listen to themselves while they speak, who reinforces SVB and who extinguishes NVB. 

“When children cannot acquire both listener and speaker responses by observation of others tacting the stimulus, they lack Naming as a behavioral developmental cusp.” Let’s be upfront about the fact that we don’t know how to get along as we don't really know how to talk with one another. Everyone is having communication problems everywhere and things are only getting worse. The adult-behavioral cusp to listen to ourselves while we speak, which is what makes SVB possible, was never taught or reinforced. Certainly, we have learned to say shoe when someone showed us a shoe and we know many words, but we have never been instructed to pay attention to the sound of our voice while we speak. Thus, listening for most of us equals listening to someone else. Many new reinforcing communication experiences are possible when we speak and listen to ourselves, but these reinforcing, more intelligent conversations become possible only if our environment supports SVB and extinguishes NVB. 

As we have learned to speak and listen separately, we go on our entire life missing out on the exquisite possibility of speaking and listening simultaneously. The worst part of our stunted development is that we are occasionally in environments in which SVB is possible. Whenever we are at ease and relaxed, as we would be with our friends, family or people who are friendly and supportive to us, we will have SVB, our natural way of speaking. Oddly, these moments haunt us because we don’t know how to create while we talk the situation in which we can continue to be completely at ease with one another. If we knew that, we would have SVB, but we don’t know and that’s why we have NVB. 

If “Naming” is characterized as “a higher order verbal operant that is one of several verbal behavioral developmental stages that have been identified experimentally in several studies” then the “Naming” of SVB and NVB must occur with utmost urgency.  Everyone who has acknowledged the SVB/NVB distinction has agreed that they acquired a valuable “behavioral cusp”, that is, a dramatic change and improvement in repertoire, which allowed them to “come in contact with parts of the environment they could not contact prior to the acquisition of the cusp.” In its magnitude it is comparable to learning how to walk or speak.  

 “Once [an adult] can learn from observing others receive instruction [on SVB and NVB], he or she not only observes the responses and consequences received by others but learns what those he or she has observed learn” (word in brackets added). Familiarity with the SVB/NVB distinction gives people the “ability to learn from different forms of contact with the contingencies of reinforcement and punishment.”  

Once the SVB/NVB distinction has been made clear, NVB, which before learning about this distinction was accepted as normal, is  experienced as punishing, while SVB will bring many new forms of reinforcement to us which were previously unavailable. Moreover, once the SVB/NVB distinction has been acquired, many experiences are interpreted in a different, more positive manner and will be recognized as “prerequisite behaviors” which were never before properly put into context. While learning SVB, people often discover that what they struggled the most with was the fact that they already knew about it. It was due to their high rates of NVB that they were unable to properly articulate it. 

When children “could not progress verbally, in listener or speaker repertoires, the investigations sought procedures to overcome the developmental obstacle that thwarted learning.” It was found that “the obstacles" which "appeared to be missing" were "developmental cusps,” especially the cusp called “Naming.” By engineering the procedures that helped children to overcome these obstacles to learning, the authors came close to SVB without knowing it. 

Only in SVB will the speaker and listener repertoires become and remain perfectly joined. Of course, this merging of speaking and listening behavior extends throughout our lives. We diagnose autistic children, but how about all those people, who have learned to how to listen, speak, read and write, but who still can’t talk with each other? Doesn’t mankind have a great communication problem? The answer is yes! Denying this is just more NVB. Pretending that we generally have great conversation is NVB. 

We don’t even know what it is like to talk positively with one another. We may know how to occasionally, accidentally have it, but for the most part, we don’t know how to continue with it. Only SVB creates the environmental support that is needed to continue our positive interactions, because after learning the behavioral cusp called SVB, we can learn from the environment, that is, from each other in ways that we could not before. For both NVB and autism we can say “no further learning was possible in this realm.” In NVB “we lack the necessary ability to contact the experience or the capability to learn from the experience.”

June 22, 2015

June 22, 2015

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Verbal Engineer

Dear Reader, 

This is my second response to “A Rose by Naming: How We May Learn How to Do it” by Greer and Longano (2010). I just came back from my friend Tanya, who puts videos of me on YouTube. We were walking over the Chico State University campus, trying to find the right environment. After checking out several places we ended up in front of a redwood tree. The recording went well and was finished within minutes. It brought home the important message that we don’t cause our own behavior, but that different environments cause us to behave the way we do.

In yesterday’s writing I was quoting the authors who wrote “naming is one of the three types of speaker-as-own-listener behavior.” I wrote about the second one “self-talk involving rotating speaker and listener responses aloud”, but didn’t go into the third one “correspondence between saying and doing.” 

In SVB saying equals doing, but in NVB there is a difference between the two. Similarly, in SVB, speaking is listening and listening is also, as Schlinger (2008) has reported, behaving verbally. However, in NVB, the speaker speaks at the listener, not with him or her as the speaker creates the illusion that he or she is separate from the listener. Separation of the speaker and the listener goes hand in hand with the false notion that individuals cause their own behavior. Due to SVB, the process of “naming” is “learned without instruction”, but due to NVB, due to coercive ways of talking, at an early age problems begin to occur as this important skill of "naming" will not be properly acquired.

Due to SVB, children at around age 3 experience “an explosion in vocabulary”, which was previously believed not to be “attributable to direct instruction,” but recent behavioral research “supports the notion that the mechanisms for children’s learning of words the things incidentally is, in fact, traceable to instructional histories and the ensuing stimulus control that lead to Naming as a, or the source of incidental language learning.” 

The lack of correspondence  between saying and doing, which co-occurs with the separation between the speaker and listener, is characteristic for NVB, because in NVB the speaker forces the listener to do as he or she says. In SVB, by contrast, the speaker controls the behavior of the listener with an appetitive, a positively reinforcing contingency and correspondence between saying and doing occurs as naturally as water flowing down. 

Absence of correspondence is an indication that NVB was going on. The not-doing or the occurrence of what is considered to be the inappropriate response is explained as by me as counter-control to NVB.  This brings us to the issue of iatrogenic effects. Due to NVB, which is as ubiquitous in mental health as anywhere else, many people are continuously harmed and re-traumatized by the very treatment that is supposed to alleviate their symptoms. 

Many students in my Principles of Psychology class have mental health issues or have family members who struggle. After they learn about SVB they realize how little SVB they have gotten from those who were supposedly helping them. They realize they were mistreated over and over again. To put this in perspective, NVB is everywhere, in parenting, nursing, teaching and in work situations. As it is happening everywhere It is not the fault of anyone in mental health that people are not getting the help they need. As long as SVB is not taught in colleges and universities we are not the getting the education we need, we are not getting the parental care we need, we are not getting the medical care we need and, we are not getting the leadership or government we need. The order of society will be changed by SVB. The disorder was a result of NVB. Diagnosing a person with a disorder is stigmatizing and ineffective, but talking about disordered environments leads to recovery from NVB.  

The child, but also the adult, must have “Naming experiences” in which “a child and a caregiver [or teacher and student] are simultaneously looking at, or in some other way sensing, a stimulus (referred to by other developmental psychologists as joint-attention) as a caregiver [or teacher] produces a vocal or signed response in the presence of a stimulus (e.g. an object).” 

Likewise, a learning process is involved in differentiating between SVB and NVB. If given enough time I can teach any adult about this distinction. Sensing SVB is more important than understanding it. Questions about SVB arise always in the absence of experiencing it. We are not experiencing SVB when we don’t listen to ourselves while we speak, that is, when our environment is aversive and we remain on guard. 

Although SVB can be seen, listening is of course of greater importance. However, listening is not our usual listening to others, but listening to ourselves. As will become clear in SVB, self-listening includes other-listening, but our previous focus on other-listening excluded self-listening. In NVB, we fail to listen to others as we are not listening to ourselves. We cannot listen to others if we are not listening to ourselves. If we are forced to listen to others, as we are in NVB, we cannot really listen to them and therefore we can only pretend to be listening. 

The best way to learn about the distinction between SVB and NVB is by “Naming” the voice of the SVB speaker, an appetitive stimulus or Voice II and the voice of the punitive stimulus, the aversive-sounding speaker, Voice I. The voice of the SVB speaker is Voice II and the voice of the NVB speaker is called Voice I. Unless we recognize Voice I, we cannot and will not recognize Voice II. Ideally, this distinction is learned in childhood.

The previously mentioned “joint-attention” which “requires both the auditory stimulus of the word that is spoken by the caregiver and the child attending to another feature of the stimulus” is also needed to learn SVB. When I teach about SVB, I explain what it is and then the student tries it out. When the student produces Voice II, I say this is Voice II, but when he or she produces Voice I, I say that is Voice I. It only takes a couple of such trials before the student is able to recognize NVB as NVB and SVB as SVB. This illustrates that the student already has a behavioral history in which he or she learned about SVB and NVB, but it only wasn’t named that way. Now that these universal subsets of vocal verbal behavior have got their name, things begin to  fall into place while experimenting with the great difference between SVB and NVB. Students are stimulated to explore the different features of Voice I and Voice II. Also, as part of this naming process, many circumstances are discussed and revisited in which the student was involved in a SVB or NVB conversation and a contextual understanding emerges as to why it happened. 

“Speaker-as-own-listener behavior” requires 1) “naming” and 2)  “self-talk involving rotating speaker and listener responses aloud” and 3)“correspondence between saying and doing.” The “self-talk involving rotating speaker and listener responses aloud” requires reinforcement to get it going. As adults learning about the SVB/NVB distinction students start with speaking and then they begin to take note of when they are listening and when they are not listening to themselves while they speak. As a teacher I enhance their ability to listen to themselves. Somewhere during this process students often remark things like “so, are you saying that when I am tense I am not listening to myself?” I then simply say to them: “I am not saying it, you are saying it” and then they usually get it. Suddenly they hear themselves and they realize the speaker-as-own-listener. 

When this learning process occurs in a group, other students who go through similar experiences serve as a good example.  This enhances the accuracy with which others are able to recognize SVB and NVB in themselves and each other. When someone speaks and I ask the others if they recognize it as Voice I or Voice II, they learn quickly. Students are also encouraged to stop me if I produce NVB. I then remove myself from where I was lecturing and when I produce SVB they have learned about the difference between the two. Certainly, this brings out negative and positive emotions, which are involved in NVB and SVB, but during this “Naming” process there is no need to delve into these emotions, that is, by thinking about these emotions a “multiple stimulus control” for SVB and NVB is created. What can then be called ‘conditioned listening’ involves “many speaker and listener bidirectional components of Naming.” Furthermore, “naming” of SVB and NVB not only results in “multiple stimulus control, it also results in multiple responses.” In SVB we all come alive.  

While learning about SVB and NVB students hone in on “role of environmental experiences.” Similarly to teaching children with autism spectrum disorders, who “would not have talked (or used substitute productive language), each new speaker often needs to be taught by direct reinforcement and correction” (underlining added). The speaking done with the purpose to hear ourselves, the integration of our private speech in public speech, has not been reinforced and will only occur if it is reinforced. Unlike those with autism spectrum disorders, we have talked, but it was mainly NVB and we haven’t had ongoing SVB. The reason we didn’t have it was because nobody taught it or could teach it. The environmental support was only there in moments of friendship, togetherness, trust and respect.  Learning SVB requires reinforcement of a student’s speaking and listening behavior.

To speak with the sole purpose to listen to it is a different way of speaking than the way of talking that we are used to, in which we speak to make others listen to us. If we don’t speak there is nothing to listen to, but if we speak, we are usually having NVB, because we don’t listen to our sound while we speak. In SVB, however, we speak and simultaneously we listen ourselves. “Naming results in the exponential expansion of vocabulary, or more specifically, the joining of the listener and speaker functions for observed stimuli.” This is joining creates SVB.

June 21, 2015

June 21, 2015

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Verbal Engineer

Dear Reader, 

In “A Rose by Naming: How We May Learn How to Do it” by Greer and Longano (2010) the authors write about what “naming” means in the analysis of verbal behavior. The meaning of “naming” is as we usually understand it, except that “in the analysis of verbal behavior the integration of behavioral processes involved is identified as a particular higher order verbal operant that is an important milestone in a language development.” “Naming” also involves “integration of the initially separate listener and speaker responses.” 

I am interested in “naming” as Horne and Lowe (1996) wrote about it as “the beginning of becoming truly verbal, because it fused the listener and speaker functions” (underlining added). I discovered that in Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB) “beginning” of merging “listener and speaker functions” finally matures. In SVB the speaker listens to him or herself while he or she speaks. 

In Verbal Behavior (1957) Skinnner had already described the process of “naming” as “speaker-as-own-listener.” When a child learns to say shoe, he or she does so because as a listener he or she responds to a speaker, who says shoe in the presence of a shoe. The child learns to respond to shoe with the word shoe and when someone else says shoe, the child knows what it is. 

These responses happen under different circumstances and thus, listening and speaking behaviors were acquired at different times. The saying “waiting for the other shoe to drop”, derived from a living situation in which one person is awakened by an upstairs neighbor, who is taking off his shoes and drops them on the floor. Interestingly, the person who was woken up, first is a listener, but then becomes a speaker. However, this listener had already acquired the word shoe and so the saying came about naturally and “without any instruction.” 


Another way of thinking about this is that the listener was talking with him or herself, while being annoyed by the regular noise he endures from his upstairs neighbor. Proper use of this saying involves more than only the shoe and comes about when the “speaker-as-own-listener” describes to him or herself what is happening and subsequently waits for the other shoe to drop. This private speech is essential to SVB, because in only SVB the mature adult, who knows that a shoe is a shoe and a spade a spade, can become more complex in his or her use of language. 

I have verified and explored with thousands of individuals that there are basically only two ways in which we talk: one is called SVB and the other is called Noxious Verbal Behavior (NVB). Once we listen to ourselves while we speak, we are embarrassed by the fact that we seldom do this. In NVB speaking and listening behaviors are out of sync and disjointed. When we don’t listen while we speak, we actually neither listen nor do we really speak. 

 

Our talking has become so superficial, because in most of our verbal episodes we are not a “speaker-as-own-listener”, that is, most of our interactions are NVB and only very few are SVB.

Only if we name it that way will it change, but since we haven’t even done that, we keep beating around the bush. SVB exists and since it is defined as the “speaker-as-own-listener”, it is key to “the advancement of a science of verbal behavior.” 

If we want to have a complete account of verbal behavior, we need to have, as Skinner once emphasized, “separate but interlocking accounts of both speaker and listener” (underlining added. This interlocking account must necessarily be able to emerge while we speak. Writing and reading about “speaker-as-own-listener” is not the same as talking about this very important topic.

Greer and Longano, who look at children’s verbal development, emphasize “Naming seems to have been overlooked.” Indeed, without being able to name things children are unable to learn language. I look at adult’s verbal development and I observe that without being able to name and discriminate SVB and NVB, we remain unaware, mechanical and insensitive in each one of our conversations. Certainly, for children “Naming is foundational to more advanced verbal development, including how to read and write” and to development of “functions such as intraverbals”, but “naming" is also important for adults as it is necessary for becoming a conscious and mature communicator. 

Shouldn’t adults know how to “name” and differentiate the difference between the pretension of talking (NVB) and real talking (SVB)? The only reason we don’t think there is real talking is because we have gotten away with our NVB. There has to be a process as real talking. The extent to which our talking is real determines what we are able to accomplish with it. However, since most of our talking is NVB, we are not accomplishing many happy, healthy and supportive relationships. For that SVB is needed. Certainly, we accomplish many other things, but all of that is achieved at the expense of our relationships.

Horne and Lowe (1996) have defined “naming” as becoming acquainted with the “essentials of an unfamiliar object or topic.”  It is awkward for adults to admit that they are “unfamiliar” with something so common as talking and listening. It may seem as if we know, but when we look into why we have such high rates of NVB and such low rates of SVB, it is obvious while we talk that most of our attention goes to our speaking behavior and hardly any attention goes to our listening behavior. 


The reason for this great discrepancy is that in NVB the speaker aversively controls the behavior of the listener. In NVB, we are and we have to be on guard. We don’t and we can’t let our guard down as we feel continuously threatened, attacked, intimidated, pushed around, dominated and coerced. As most of our attention goes to speaking, we don’t and can’t create, let alone maintain, the safe environments in which SVB will occur. 

“Fusion of speaker and listener within the individual” will reliably occur if we “name” and identify, that is, experience, SVB. The experience that the speaker can in fact be his or her own listener is new to anyone who is introduced to SVB. Although many people recognize it as a possibility, it is new in that they have never experienced continuous support for it. 


We know SVB instances from being with friends, loved ones and people we care about and who care about us. However, we have at best achieved only a few moments of SVB, which happened accidentally, but we were unable to have SVB deliberately, consciously, skillfully and knowingly. “Integration of the listener and the speaker repertoires of human behavior” requires a unique environment, one which is free of aversive stimulation. 

Interestingly, the authors write about “naming” as “one of three types of speaker-as-own-listener behavior.”  The other two are “self-talk rotating speaker and listener responses aloud” and “correspondence between saying and doing.”  Yet, the authors have only thought about “when a young child rotates speaker and listener roles during solitary play” (underlining added). In SVB, adults rotate speaker and listener roles, while talking aloud with others, but they can also have SVB by themselves. 

“Typically developing 5-year-olds emitted distinct speaker and listener responses as they talked aloud to themselves while playing” (underlining added), when they feel safe. The same is true for adults; it is only when we feel safe enough with one another that the contingency is created and maintained in which SVB reliably occurs. The absence of playfulness in our way of talking is our response to an aversive environment. 

Usually, other people are that environment. The existentialist Jean-Paul Sarte correctly stated “Hell is other people” in his play called “No Exit.” However, it is not simply other people, who cause us to feel a particular way, it is our relationship with them or rather the lack of it, which determines that we end having NVB. 


In 1965, Sarte explained in a speech which preceded performance of his play that his statement “hell is other people” has often been misunderstood. He said “it has been thought that what I meant by that was that our relations with other people are always poisoned, that they are invariably hellish relations. But what I really mean is something totally different. I meant that if relations with someone else are twisted , vitiated, then that other person can only be hell. Why? Because when we think about ourselves, when we try to know ourselves… we use the knowledge of us which other people already have. We judge ourselves with the means other people have and have given us for judging ourselves. Into whatever I say about myself someone else’s judgement always enters, but that does not at all mean that one cannot have relations with people. It simply brings out the capital importance of all other people for each of us. “ Sarte sounds like a behaviorist!

Sarte gives an analysis which is in tune with SVB. To the extent that private speech is a function of NVB public speech, we are stuck with a judgment of ourselves, with negative self-talk. He  said that blaming others was not what he meant. He referred to the disconnect which occurs within the “speaker-as-own-listener.” When Sarte points to “someone else judgments” he acknowledges the gap between the speaker and the listener. Obviously, “twisted and vitiated relationships” cause this gap, while supportive and positive relationships will close this gap. 

The “other” who Sarte refers to in his quotation, is “that by which we define ourselves, and the punishment of his three characters is that they will only ever be able to define themselves through the distorting mirrors of other people who reflect them badly, while at the same time they see themselves reflected badly in others as well” (Woodward, 2010). Thus, the existential crisis Sarte talks about is brought about by NVB, but can be solved by SVB.

Estelle, one of the characters in Sarte’s play says “When I can’t see myself in the mirror, I can’t even feel myself, and I begin to wonder if I exist at all. Inez promises to be an accurate mirror for Estelle in order to seduce her. Sarte used the idea of the mirror to great effect in the play – there are none in hell, and in order to see themselves, as it were from the outside, the characters have to rely on the way that others see them” (Woodward, 2010)(underlining added).  Our covert private speech is a behavior which is caused by the overt public speech of others, who are our environment. 

June 20, 2015

June 20, 2015

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Verbal Engineer

Dear Reader, 

TodaY, I was having an appointment with someone who didn't show up.  Later, I saw him at the Open Mike. He apologized for not getting back to me. I had looked forward to working with him and so it was a disappointment. 


While seated and ready to see the performances, a lady came in who sat in front of me with her laptop open. It distracted from the performance. When I asked if she could  close her laptop she became angry and said “I am working.” Also, I saw a person from the radio station, but he barely said hello. I felt ignored because he sat and talked with other people. 

When it was my turn to perform, the CD didn’t play as it had been printed on a computer and I sang another song than I had planned. It went well, but it was without music. I felt vulnerable to the  rowdy crowd. The place was hot and noisy. It was still nice to see a few of the regulars and I enjoyed some of their songs and acts. It now seems the positive barely outweighed the negatives. 

Events effect us in an accumulated manner. I saw one singer who sang a beautiful song last week. I was hoping to hear him again, but for some reason he left and he seemed worried about something.Earlier that evening, when the lady with the laptop came to sit in front of me, I somehow knew it was not going to be an enjoyable event. A moment I had thought of leaving, but I decided to stay as the two people, I talked with, who were waiting to hear me sing. They were a brother and a sister, but they had to catch the last bus home and so they had to leave before I sang. 

They were the best part of the evening. I had explained to her about Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB) and, like her brother last week, she totally got it. She said it meant a lot to her and I asked why? She explained she always believed she was not deciding her own behavior and that others were influencing her to be one way or the other. She spoke of her experience as a mother and stated that she had to distance herself off from her addicted daughter who was negative towards her. I validated her and I praised her decision to live with her brother as they could be the positive support to each other, which they hadn't been able to find alone.