October 26, 2015

October 26, 2015

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Verbal Engineer

                                                                                                                                          

Dear Reader, 

These are interesting days. Many positive reinforcing stimuli have become available now that the stimuli which were determining my previous behavior are avoided. In my dream, I was reading out loud the multiple choice questions on an exam about spoken communication. It was impossible to answer any of these questions as the distinction wasn’t made between Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB) and Noxious Verbal Behavior (NVB). All of us have asked and answered many questions in our lives about our interactions, about our relationships, about how we communicate, about what to say and when and why we say it, about how to speak and listen, but none of it made any sense as long as the SVB/NVB distinction wasn’t made. There wasn’t and couldn’t be any progress in the absence of this distinction. Once this distinction is made clear, progress will happen of its own accord. Due to your increased  involvement in SVB your memory will begin to change. 

You will gradually be able to remember more positive communication experiences and this process will slowly unfold. No fast changes can be expected, only almost unnoticeable small changes. These small changes will not be made by you, but they will happen to you. You, to whom these changes happen, are transformed. Your self-concept not only changes, it dissolves as you realize that you are constantly changing as a function of the environments that you are in. No time is lost on being stuck anymore as you accurately discriminate your circumstances.   

Without the SVB/NVB distinction your circumstances cannot and will not change. They will not change as you did not change. With this distinction you will change constantly, even when you may still be thinking that you are not changing. It is only when a whole bunch of small changes have been linked together that you will realize that you have been changing all the time. This accumulative process wouldn’t be possible without constant change. You will not waste time anymore on such nonsense as patience as the SVB/NVB distinction will give you a yardstick to measure the increase of SVB instances and decrease of NVB instances. As your SVB instances will go up, your NVB instances will go down. NVB is the problem behavior, which will be replaced by SVB. 

It can only be replaced if it is first identified as the problem behavior. It was never before identified as such. We are beating around the bush when it comes to human interaction. NVB is not interaction. How can something which prevents interaction be interaction? Interaction is a delicate affair, which is easily made impossible by our insensitivity. The sound of the voice of the NVB speaker will always aversively affect the nervous system of the listener. Even if this listener is allowed to speak by this NVB speaker, which most of the time isn’t the case, he or she will also be a NVB speaker. NVB speakers only talk at NVB speakers, but only SVB speakers can talk with other SVB speakers. In other words, the two never mix, because if one stops the other starts. This phenomenon has remained unknown to us as the moments in which we have SVB were never properly defined. Moments of SVB didn’t and couldn’t be prolonged as negative emotion-eliciting NVB made this impossible and was still considered to be a form of communication. In our schools we teach our students there are five communication styles. This is such total nonsense. It becomes clear when we listen to how they sound.

In what is called the assertive style, the speaker’s voice has a medium pitch, speed and volume. In the aggressive style, the speaker’s voice is loud, but in the passive-aggressive style, the speaker often speaks with a sugary sweet voice. In the submissive style, however, the speaker’s volume is soft, but in the manipulative style, the speaker’s voice sounds patronizing, envious and ingratiating and often has a high pitch. It is evident from this brief summary that only the assertive speaker sounds pleasant and falls into the category of SVB. Only the voice which has a medium pitch, speed and volume will be experienced as an appetitive stimulus by the listener. The other styles fall into the NVB category, because the speaker’s voice is experienced by the listener as a noxious stimulus when he or she sounds too loud, too sweet, too soft or has too high of a pitch. Actually, none of these so-called speaking styles have any validity as in the assertive style the speaker presumably is making his or her own choices and taking responsibility for them. The theory of different speaking styles is based on the common belief in the inner causation of behavior and the speaker supposedly decides on how he or she is going to speak. Fact is, however, that this inner self, as B.F. Skinner, the founder of radical behaviorism, has said, is an explanatory fiction, which doesn’t exist and is maintained by NVB. When we switch from NVB to SVB, this always goes hand in hand with a great sense of relief that our belief in the inner causation of our own behavior wasn’t true. When SVB can be achieved it will be apparent that we are each other’s environment and that we cause each other to have SVB or NVB. Moreover, when we have SVB, the notion of speaking styles becomes irrelevant. In SVB we acknowledge that we all have unique behavioral histories. What we used to think of as ourselves was the accumulative effect of our past experiences. In SVB we can let go of our histories.