October 11, 2016

October 11, 2016

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Verbal Engineer

Dear Reader,

Once you are familiar with the distinction between Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB) and Noxious Verbal Behavior (NVB) you will notice it is not you who decides to have one or the other, but it is the situation in which you find yourself which will make one possible or the other.

The people you are with and have been with determine whether you will have SVB or NVB. In my situation, as a married man, as a teacher and as a therapist, it is my wife, my students and my clients, who are making it possible to have high rates of SVB and low rates of NVB.

By now I have met thousands of people with whom I have had SVB. As I am getting older, I am having more and more of it. Yet, this was not always the case. Although there certainly was some SVB in the family in which I grew up, it was not in any way different from other families.

My SVB only began to increase after I had discovered the difference between SVB and NVB. Without this distinction I was basically unable to recognize the situation I was in. Without analyzing how other people affect the way we speak, we don’t know how we would like to speak.

We may think we know how we want to speak, but once we acknowledge our high rates of NVB, we realize that our belief that we were causing our own behavior wasn’t true. As our rate of NVB goes down and our rate of SVB goes up, we increase our awareness about our environment.

Someone who never suffered the bad consequences of his or her NVB is unlikely to be motivated to figure out what increases his or her SVB. My development as well as the development of those who are learning from me, was preceded by a lot of rejection and search for meaning. 

Although I didn’t know as a child that I wanted to have SVB, it now seems as if I have always longed for it. NVB has never really worked for me. I don’t think I was born that way, but I did grow up in a family in which a fair amount of attention was given to how one interacts.

My father often said: no matter what it is we can always talk about it. It turned out not to be true, but it set the stage for my exploration. My aim with this writing is to stimulate you to explore interaction. I predict that your exploration, like mine, will result into an explanation.

I cannot explain to you how you were and how you are affected by the people in your life. Only you can know whether all the talking made you happy, got things done or if it made you unhappy as it created chaos.  I simply ask you to categorize the former as SVB and the latter as NVB.

How were you and how are you affected by the talking of others and how did that affect the way in which you talk with yourself? I am not asking you to look inside yourself; I am asking you to consider how you are affected by those people who were and are in your environment.

How your environment has affected you and is affecting you is needed in a functional analysis. Your rates of SVB and NVB are the dependent variables which are caused by the people that you have met and by the people you are currently with. They are the independent variables.

My search for my real self was a haphazard attempt to find the causes of my own behavior. Our rates of SVB and NVB describe events which occur within our skin. Physiological instead of psychological events can be measured: heart rate, galvanic skin response and blood pressure.

There is nothing inner about these events as they are audible in the sound of our voice while we speak. We can all discriminate the great difference between SVB and NVB, but only if we don’t get carried away by our false inner explanations of our talking and listening behavior.