June 9, 2016

June 9, 2016

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Verbal Engineer

Dear Reader,

I had a busy, but successful day during which I saw seven different clients. This writing, however, is not about them, but about how I feel after I have treated them. The fact that they all responded so well to me makes me very happy as what I do seems to be working.

I don’t feel like getting into detail about what was said, but I like to sit back now and relax into this feeling of satisfaction that comes after a productive day. I think that many people could not have imagined that I would be feeling so confident about dealing with people who have such serious mental health problems.

I am not surprised. Everything I do is a continuation of what I have done before, but it is also a better version of it. I am on top of my game and I think that my work has greatly matured. My verbal interventions were leading to powerful results in each of my clients.

It is a thrill to be seeing and hearing these positive effects in people who so direly need it, who feel so relieved and grateful about having a positive learning experience with me. Although I could say all kinds of things about that, what interests me at this moment is that I am fulfilled, satisfied and feeling peaceful. 

I just rode my bicycle in the evening breeze and I was listening to reggae-music. It is so pleasant to let the listener-part of me speak during this writing. I wait for something to write and I feel good about my ability to wait. I am not the least concerned with the outcome of my patience, as being patient is already rewarding. 

I have come to that point where I can somehow allow myself to go as slow as I want to and I sometimes like to go really slow. Only when the speaker in me slows down, the listener in me is invited to have his say. The listener in me speaks in a different way than the speaker in me. He only speaks when he the speaker in me is quiet and listening. I am also discovering together with my clients. I learn it by pointing it out to them.

June 8, 2016

June 8, 2016

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Verbal Engineer

Dear Reader,

I was exploring with a depressed client what he was thinking about his depression. As we were exploring his private speech, he discovered and acknowledged that he was continuously saying negative things to himself. 

After expressing and listening to his depressive thoughts, he suddenly blurted out: “the speaker does all the talking in my depression!” He had unknowingly constantly only been ‘listening’ to his own thoughts. 

By expressing his private speech in his public speech, he realized for the first time there was a difference between the speaker and the listener within him. He said: “the speaker keeps on speaking and speaking, but the listener doesn’t want to hear any of it.”

Thus, the listener began to speak to the speaker and tell the speaker that he didn’t like what the speaker was saying. While doing this the client realized that his inner dialogue could only be paid attention to by expressing it out loud and attentively listening to it.

The client had been unable to consciously take note of what he had been saying to himself covertly as long as his private speech was not expressed overtly into his public speech. By speaking out loud, he was at long last able to listen to what he had said to himself.

The client not only listened to what the speaker was saying, but he also listened to when the listener began to speak. By becoming a speaker, the listener regulated the speaker, who was finally able to become a listener.

The client experienced that a big shift occurred in his inner dialogue. He created peace between the speaker and the listener within himself. Furthermore, because the listener was able to now become the speaker, the speaker could become a listener. Stated differently, the speaker had now become a conscious speaker and the listener had now become a conscious listener.

As long as the client had not listened to what he had been thinking covertly, neither speaking nor listening was consciously experienced. It was only once he began talk out loud about his thoughts that SVB was possible as speaking and listening happen in the here and now.

June 7, 2016

June 7, 2016

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Verbal Engineer

Dear Reader,

In Operants, the behaviorist’ online magazine, the daughter of B.F. Skinner, Julie Vargas writes about men’s inability to deal with the facts of human behavior. “Science does not include non-material agencies as causes of physical, biological, or behavioral events”. The only reason she needs to write about this fact is that we still can’t talk about it!

If we could talk about facts, there would be much less of a need to write about them. We no longer write about the fact that the earth is round because we talk about it. It should be clear by now that the way of talking which makes dissemination of scientific facts possible cannot be the same as our usual way of talking.

I call our unscientific way of talking Noxious Verbal Behavior (NVB) because the speaker aversively affects the listener. This happens and is allowed to happen as the speaker is presumably better, higher or more powerful, important or intelligent than the listener.

What the NVB speaker says is true, not because he or she expresses facts, but because he or she can force his or her bias onto the reality, the listener. In NVB there will obviously be no turn-taking. Thus, it is the separation of speaker and listener which perpetuates the pre-scientific idea of a behavior-causing self.

If Vargas had acknowledged this fact, she would address our most important failing “procedure”: how we talk. Moreover, if she would explore the SVB/NVB distinction, she would acknowledge that these universal response classes occur because of two different contingencies.

Rather than beating a dead horse and for the fifth million time lament the belief in a behavior–causing inner-agent, she would describe the contingency which is necessary for the stimulation and maintenance of SVB and discuss the contingency which perpetuates NVB.

Interestingly, Vargas writes “behavior exists within our skins of course.” My question is: to what extent are we allowed to express, and capable of expressing, what occurs within our own skin in our public speech?

We find ourselves mainly in circumstances in which expressing what is within our skin is not allowed, in which SVB is impossible. Thus “the relation between existing actions, their results and the circumstances in which those relations exist” cannot be talked about.

June 6, 2016

June 6, 2016

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Verbal Engineer

Dear Reader,

The question “What do you do if your usual procedures aren’t working?” is answered by the president of the Skinner Foundation, Julie Vargas with a statement by her father. He described science “first of all as an attitude. It is a disposition to deal with the facts, rather than what one has said about them.” 

Julie asks “What are “facts?” She answers “Facts are descriptions about how the world works”. I think about Skinner’s words. According to him, what we say about the facts is not as important as what we do with them.

If we take into consideration the sad fact that most spoken communication in academia is Noxious Verbal Behavior (NVB), it is understandable Skinner didn’t care very much for what people said about the facts. 

Dealing with the facts of behavior was more important to him than talking about it in a Noxious Verbal Behavior manner which ignores the facts, which shuts us up and which makes environmental variables inaudible.

Skinner pretty much felt that his involvement in NVB was a total waste of time. It is important that we now finally learn to recognize NVB as an unscientific way of talking. It is only in Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB) that we can talk about and thus acknowledge the facts. 

We can only have scientific conversation as long as we engage in SVB and adhere to the facts about speaking and listening. Each time the speaker aversively affects the listener, our communication breaks down. NVB is NOT communication, but coercion, separation, alienation,  domination, exploitation, alienation and dissociation.

The most important fact about our spoken communication is that it can only occur in an environment which is free of aversive stimulation. So-called communication or NVB, which goes on in aversive environments, has been accepted as normal as we don’t know how to create and maintain the environment in which SVB can occur.      

June 5, 2016

June 5, 2016

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Verbal Engineer

Dear Reader,

I received the latest edition of Operants, the online magazine of the B.F. Skinner Foundation. On the first page, the president, Julie Vargas, raises the question: what do you do if your usual procedures aren’t working?

Let’s face it, our spoken communication isn’t working. Behaviorism and behaviorology are not well-accepted and are most of the time not even part of the conversation. In spite of the empirical evidence people are not open to the facts about the science of human behavior. 

Those who are informed about behaviorism primarily talk among themselves. Actually, that is not true either, there is not enough real conversation going on. There is an almost sectarian quality to those few who are familiar with the workings of operant conditioning. 

Sadly, even behaviorists or behaviorologists have mainly Noxious Verbal Behavior (NVB) instead of Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB) among themselves and with others. This distinction matters as it depicts the difference between unscientific and scientific ways of talking.

Only in writing have behaviorists and behaviorologists adhered to their science, but not in their speaking. Julie Vargas, who answers her own question and writes a president’s column, brings her private speech into her public speech. Interestingly, by writing about it, she describes what needs to happen to make SVB possible. 

In NVB our private speech is excluded from our public speech. Thus, behaviorists and behaviorologists are just as stuck as everybody else with the false notion of a behavior-causing self. Once behaviorists and behaviorologists explore the SVB/NVB distinction, they will have to admit to this crucially important fact.

Unless we change the way we talk, we cannot extinguish our pre-scientific inner self. As even behaviorists haven’t changed their own way of talking, they weren’t able to change other people their way of talking. Only to the extent that they were able to change their own way of talking were they capable and have they been capable of changing other people their way of talking.