November 18, 2015

November 18, 2015

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Verbal Engineer

Dear Reader, 

It is so incredibly satisfying to have Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB). Even if you are engaging in SVB just by yourself you will realize the benefits. At some point SVB will increase and there is nothing you do to make this happen. It can and will increase as you finally understand that you are not causing it. This is, in my view, one of the most important aspects of behaviorism: that you don’t cause your own behavior. As long as you think you cause your own behavior you will be in trouble. However, as long as you still believe in some esoteric explanation of why you act the way you act, instead of how your behavior is shaped by your environment, you will have no reality to your life whatsoever.

Stated differently, as long as you try to change your behavior, you misunderstand how it actually works. This misunderstanding will be evident in your covert, private speech, in what you say to yourself, as well as in your overt, public speech, in what you say to others. What you think and how you talk will be part of what I call Noxious Verbal Behavior (NVB). In NVB you think that you cause your own behavior and you also believe that other people are causing their own behavior. This unscientific view about yourself and others inevitably gives rise to problems. If talking misrepresents the reality, you are in constant conflict.

The conflict which occurs in NVB is between the speaker and the listener. In NVB, you construe these two as if you are either one or the other. However, you are both. Whether you know it or not, you are simultaneously the speaker and the listener. You cannot get away from this fact and you will be troubled by it as long as you have not understood it correctly. Since the speaker and the listener are one within each person, there must be a way of talking in which this oneness is properly expressed and can remain intact. This is SVB. You can have SVB all by yourself. By talking out loud and by listening to yourself, you can verify that indeed the speaker and the listener are one and the same person. By exploring SVB on your own, you will also find that although this way of talking is possible with others, it is most of the time impossible. In other words, in most conversations the speaker and the listener are experienced as separate. You accept that one person is the speaker and the other is the listener; one person presumably sends and the other receives. In this process of sending and receiving we assume that disembodied information floats miraculously from the sender to the receiver, who subsequently encodes, stores and retrieves this information. All of this is not how Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB) really works.