April 21, 2016

April 21, 2016

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Verbal Engineer

Dear Reader,

An interesting event took place which can be used to illustrate the difference between Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB) and Noxious Verbal Behavior (NVB). I know a schizophrenic man, who rents a room from an older lady. He knows me and he wanted to introduce me to her, so when the occasion arose, he told her that I am a psychology instructor at Butte College and that I have developed a view of how we communicate with each other which is based on how we sound. Although he did a pretty good job explaining it to her, she interrupted him with a question. When he replied that he was not finished explaining what he was saying and was just about to explain to her what she was asking, he became upset with her for cutting him off. She justified this by saying that she didn’t want to be on the receiving end of his tangential explanations, which often are all over the map. He left us in frustration, indicating to me that this is what often happens between the two of them. 

It was clear that she wanted him to listen to her and he didn’t want to listen to her because he wanted her to listen to him.  They both of them engaged in NVB, in which other-listening is more important than self-listening. He was not listening to himself and she wasn’t listening to herself either, but each demanded to be listened by the other person. I explained this to the lady. She understood me. She acknowledged it was true and admitted she had no idea this was continuously happening. This example maps onto so many other of our problematic conversations. We are not stimulated to listen to ourselves as we were repeatedly told to listen to others.  We have been conditioned to listen to others. That is why we don’t listen to ourselves. Of course, we can and should listen to ourselves. As long as we don’t listen to ourselves, we cannot and will not be able to listen to each other. Although some of us may have been listened to a little more than others while growing up, nobody was ever taught that self-listening is the basis for other-listening.