November 22, 2015

November 22, 2015

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Verbal Engineer

Dear Reader, 

What you say to yourself, what goes on ‘inside your head’, what is ‘on your mind’, what you are ‘thinking’, ‘feeling’ and ‘remembering’, is factually a form of verbal behavior, which was once public, but which has receded to and has been reduced to a private event. You don’t think in Russian if you weren’t raised in a Russian verbal community. Therefore, your covert speech is in the language that you grew up in. When you write your private speech in your journal, it becomes public, but you wouldn’t all of a sudden be able to produce a language with which you are not familiar. Although Noxious Verbal Behavior (NVB) conditioned you to keep private speech out of public speech, your private speech is a function of your public speech and it will always remain inextricably connected with your public speech. To make it seem otherwise is like believing things fall upward, not downward.

We depart from the reality every time we think that what we think is our own doing and is caused by us individually. The only thing we can really do is pretend and that is exactly what we do in NVB: we pretend to be who we present ourselves to be. In Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB) there is nothing to pretend as we can be ‘ourselves.’ We experience and, therefore, we understand that what we say to ourselves is caused by what others have been saying and are saying to us. In other words, with our public speech we cause each other to have good feelings and thoughts, that is, positive self-talk and we cause each other to have negative feelings and thoughts, that is, negative self-talk. 

In the same way we didn’t cause our own language, we don’t cause our own feelings either. When we realize this as a scientific fact, that we are indeed each other’s environment and therefore cause each other’s public as well as private verbal behavior, we find that our SVB increases. It is the lack of this knowledge, the lie that we cause our own behavior, which maintains NVB. We have been and we continue to be burdened by prescientific pseudo-explanations of behavior, which couldn’t and didn’t give us means to increase positive and decrease negative behaviors. 

We continuously revert to coercive behavioral control as we fail to acknowledge how behavior really works. It is out of ignorance that we enforce ‘our view’ on how things are supposed to work. Although we will continue to force each other and ourselves to be something which we are not, the reality of how we talk with each other and with ourselves remains the same and is waiting to be discovered by us: SVB is a real thing.