December 31, 2014

December 31, 2014

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M. S. Verbal Engineer 

Dear Reader, 

Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB) always works. This writer can always produce those words, which he enjoys to write. If he would be writing words that have a negative effect on him, he would be putting himself down, but he is not inclined to do that. The careful weighing of what he is going to write gives him peace of mind, because how he talks with himself makes him feel good. When he finds himself thinking negatively about people, situations or things, which are not pleasant, he avoids writing about it. He could write about them, but he chooses not to. He writess about reinforcing matters. 

If he would write whatever ‘came to his mind’, he would write a lot of nonsense, which would negatively affect him and others, but he rather writes something that makes him and others feel good, that will be read  because it makes sense. If these words can’t make sense to those who happen to read them, he doesn’t even want to write them. Any reader can understand that this writer is simply talking with himself. However, the reader also knows that this writer’s private speech becomes public speech and that he simultaneously talks with the reader. What this writer doesn’t want to write about is part of his private speech, where it disappears, because it doesn’t have any relevance to public speech. It is not that this writer doesn’t want the reader to know about it, but that he knows it would be bothering the reader as much as it does him.  This writer selects what matters to himself and to the reader and chooses to only write about what matters to both. The reader too constantly selects what private thoughts or feelings are expressed in his or her public speech.  

  

Many of the private thoughts and feelings of the reader, which are not expressed in his or her public speech, don’t disappear and consequently greatly trouble the reader. The reader often finds him or herself thinking about such thoughts and feelings, which don’t go away and seem to be having a life of their own. This writer wants to let the reader know that he or she is right with regard to not wanting to express his or her private thoughts and feelings in public speech. Whenever the expression of these private thoughts and feelings led to the breakdown of public speech, this surely had negative consequences for the reader. Although not expressing these private thoughts and feelings may have led to the continuation of public speech, they also led to the fact that the reader began to feel negative about having these thoughts and feelings.  Each time the reader was given the signal that expressing such thoughts and feelings was more negative than not expressing them, he or she began to feel more negative about him or herself. The process here described, however, is very different from the one this writer is going through. This writer is no longer bothered by not expressing what he thinks and feels. His ability to not express his private thoughts and feelings in his public speech is a relief. One could say that he has developed in such a way that this is now possible. Because the reader has not gone through the development this writer has gone through, the reader is impaired by spoken communication in which he or she is incapable of expressing what he or she thinks and feels. This writer refers to such a spoken communication as Noxious Verbal Behavior (NVB). He has attained SVB, in which what he thinks and feels is expressed and reinforced often enough to be aware of the effects of NVB. He invites the reader into SVB, in which thoughts and feelings, private speech, can become part once more of public speech. 

The reader probably believes this writer is deciding to write like this, because he has explained why he writes like this. Yet, this writer wants to educate the reader that such a belief is completely wrong. The fact that most people would agree with the reader and not with the writer, doesn’t determine whether the writer decides to write like this or not. What determines the correctness of the statement that this writer decides to write like this is a functional analysis of why he writes like this. 


This writer doesn’t write in Russian, because he has no behavioral history with Russian, he writes in English, because he has a behavioral history with English. From this English conditioning, this writing is not decided in any kind of way, it simply happens, naturally. That he uses certain words and not others is determined by touching buttons on a keyboard and by making words appear in front of him on the screen. This is the only way in which we know what deciding means: we behave in a certain way. In the case of private speech regarding our thoughts and feelings, others don’t have access to something to which we only ourselves have access. In other words, we may know how we behave, while others don’t and can’t. 


We only know how we behave if we have talked with ourselves and have let ourselves know that this is what we really think and feel. Only if we, as speakers, are our own mediator, do we come to know about this. Only if we listen to ourselves, while we speak, do we realize that there are two ways of behaving verbally: SVB, in which our public speech is understood as causing our private speech and thus always includes it, and NVB, in which our private speech is believed to be causing our public speech and thus excludes it. We learn to speak from members of our verbal community and we all start with SVB, but we become conditioned by NVB as our private speech becomes excluded from our public speech. When SVB public speech naturally recedes into SVB private speech, it doesn’t create NVB. SVB public speech always leaves us with SVB private speech.