May 7, 2014

May 7, 2014

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Verbal Behaviorist

Dear Reader, 

 

I woke up from a dream in which my mother saw me standing on a big rock. She was terrified that I might fall, but I was confident that I wouldn’t and I was proud that I had climbed on top of it. Also, I dreamed about a former girlfriend. I still loved her and I wanted to show my love for her. Her face had changed dramatically and was grooved with deep lines of sorrow. Oddly, she had dyed her hair in a pink color. She tried to smile, but it was more an expression of sadness and it was clear that life had changed her completely.

My sleep was deep and I feel fully rested, but my dreams seemed to have squeezed something out of me that could only come out with a great effort. Often it is not the behavior itself which is the problem, but someone’s reaction to it. In the case of my mother, I have been preventing myself from standing on a rock, because I didn’t want her to be afraid. A lot of my emotional reactions in the past were reactions to my mother. In addition, many of my reactions to others have been reactions to their fears and their stress. 

As to my former girlfriend, she looked much older, but her pink hair was meant to make her look younger. I was happy to see her and wanted to share some memories of good old times, but she was too sad, too confused and also too afraid to meet me again. Many people have been afraid for me because I see through their façade. I often reacted to this with frustration and tried to make people not feel this way. The enabling role never held for very long and sooner or later it all come out. Whenever I spoke my truth all hell broke loose. I got rejected, accused, fired and ridiculed for saying what I thought.This sort of thing no longer happens to me because I now prevent it.

Before, I didn’t and couldn’t avoid it. Whenever I stated my case shit hit the fan. Although I have often blamed, I have never enjoyed seeing people in pain or being embarrassed or troubled. Just because I am able to see it and say it doesn’t make me the one who has caused it. Also, the fact that I want to talk about it and can talk about it doesn’t make me the one who is causing the problems which I want to address. I want to talk about it because I can.

Now that I know how to avoid getting blamed for something I didn’t do or am not responsible for, I am more than ever aware that people aren’t able to talk about things in the same way I do. They don’t have the same history. Similarly, no one can jump from adding and subtracting to calculus. To better deal with their problems people must accumulate the knowledge that is needed. People want to be without problems, but they lack the behaviors to make that possible. Their problems signify a lack of skills. These skills are lacking because they were never stimulated to live without problems. Even if such stimulation occurred, it was never enough and this is why they got attached to their problems.

We can’t get rid of problems as long as a part of us holds on to them. That part of us that wants to get rid of the problems is not in touch with the part that holds onto them. We are able to see this verbal process, called thinking, which occurs covertly and maintains our problems, when it is expressed overtly, in public speech. The confrontation involved is inevitable. However, it doesn’t mean we need to get in trouble for this. As long as we get in trouble for bringing out parts of ourselves which contradict each other, we will not be able to accept them. Our ability to accept different parts of ourselves is socially mediated; if others reject them, we will reject them too. Because this keeps happening, we continue our trouble. 

Only when we are stimulated to express what we think and when we are not blamed or shamed for our thoughts and feelings are we able to overcome our contradictions. In fact, there is nothing to overcome. We simply understand that under certain circumstances certain behaviors are more likely to occur, while under other circumstances other behaviors are more likely. This knowledge about how our behavior is mediated not by ourselves, but by our circumstances, brings us to the circumstances which prevent our contradictions from occurring.

Since others fear us for the expression of our contradictions, it is  much more effective if we would learn to express them to ourselves. All this takes is for us to talk out loud with ourselves. We can take note of what we say to ourselves covertly, privately, by expressing it to ourselves overtly, publicly. We don’t need others to hear what we say. However, if others were present, they could hear what we say, because we are saying it. By expressing out loud our silent, private self-talk, we include our private speech into our public speech. Because our private speech continued to be excluded from our public speech, we hung on to our private speech, which we then couldn’t get rid of.

I believe that negative private speech is the reason why many people go insane. Mentally ill people talk with themselves in a haphazard attempt to hear themselves and to come to terms with their negative self-talk, but this process is made impossible by therapists and psychologists who make their clients believe that they are troubled by maladaptive cognitions. The negative thoughts and feelings that clients have are responses to their environments, which are adversely affecting them. To make them believe that these are cognitive distortions is detrimental.