Dear Reader,
I am a proud behaviorist, not one who was drilled by an educational system in which people are instructed not to be open to or experiment with the difference between Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB and Noxious Verbal Behavior (NVB), but a self-taught behaviorist, who reads and knows more and keeps getting better at arranging his own environment to make his own behavior more effective. Although my behaviorism, of course, includes many others, it starts with me. If your knowledge about behaviorism doesn’t improve your life, you are incapable of improving the lives of others. If behaviorism doesn’t make your life better, you lack the skills to be able to make other people their lives better. And, if you pretend to make other people their lives better by bragging about you grand knowledge about behaviorism, you are causing harm.
To be a behaviorist, I don’t have to be talking about behaviorism all the time. Actually, I would be a bad behaviorist if I would be talking about behaviorism all the time. Those people who talk about behaviorism all the time are horrible behaviorists. I don’t agree with that kind of fanaticism and I don’t think it is productive. It is totally off-putting as it presupposes that you are somehow better than others. You may be right that you know more about the laws of human behavior, but the way in which you talk with others still determines whether that knowledge is accepted.
Unlike behaviorism, the SVB/NVB distinction is a topic which can and must be brought up every day. It deals with how we talk with each other and how your conversation not causes, but co-occurs with how you talk with yourself. Conversations with others relate to how you talk with yourself. The false notion that you are responsible for what you say to yourself, that you can cause what you think and believe, disconnects and dissociates you from how others have talked and still talk with you and how you have talked and still continue to talk with them. In NVB nobody is talking with anybody, but everybody is talking at each other.
The difference between talking at each other versus talking with each other is the difference between NVB and SVB. It can and it should be repeatedly described and explained as the difference between uni-directional and bi-directional interaction. I don’t think that uni-directional NVB, in which people talk at each other, push each other around, struggle and argue and put each other in their place, is interaction. NVB, which sadly is our common way of talking, is in fact a form of abuse. We have all heard about verbal abuse, but NVB is much more than that. The reason that NVB is so hard to analyze and hasn’t been touched by any behaviorist, is because it creates and maintains the illusion that we are behaving verbally, while in fact our words inaccurately describe and therefore make us disown our nonverbal behavior.
In NVB we pretend as if there are two environments: the environment which within our own skin and the environment which is outside of our own skin. You keep talking nonsense as long as you believe the lie which has been perpetuated by NVB that there are two environments. SVB, however, teaches you that there is only one environment. Thus, SVB considers private speech as a subset of your public speech. It is absolutely astounding behaviorists aren’t endorsing this more often, as the separation of our private speech from our public speech is the proverbial elephant in the room of human interaction. Freud with his free association technique comes closer to addressing the SVB/NVB distinction than Skinner, who as we all know focused on operant conditioning.
I am a proud behaviorist, not one who was drilled by an educational system in which people are instructed not to be open to or experiment with the difference between Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB and Noxious Verbal Behavior (NVB), but a self-taught behaviorist, who reads and knows more and keeps getting better at arranging his own environment to make his own behavior more effective. Although my behaviorism, of course, includes many others, it starts with me. If your knowledge about behaviorism doesn’t improve your life, you are incapable of improving the lives of others. If behaviorism doesn’t make your life better, you lack the skills to be able to make other people their lives better. And, if you pretend to make other people their lives better by bragging about you grand knowledge about behaviorism, you are causing harm.
To be a behaviorist, I don’t have to be talking about behaviorism all the time. Actually, I would be a bad behaviorist if I would be talking about behaviorism all the time. Those people who talk about behaviorism all the time are horrible behaviorists. I don’t agree with that kind of fanaticism and I don’t think it is productive. It is totally off-putting as it presupposes that you are somehow better than others. You may be right that you know more about the laws of human behavior, but the way in which you talk with others still determines whether that knowledge is accepted.
Unlike behaviorism, the SVB/NVB distinction is a topic which can and must be brought up every day. It deals with how we talk with each other and how your conversation not causes, but co-occurs with how you talk with yourself. Conversations with others relate to how you talk with yourself. The false notion that you are responsible for what you say to yourself, that you can cause what you think and believe, disconnects and dissociates you from how others have talked and still talk with you and how you have talked and still continue to talk with them. In NVB nobody is talking with anybody, but everybody is talking at each other.
The difference between talking at each other versus talking with each other is the difference between NVB and SVB. It can and it should be repeatedly described and explained as the difference between uni-directional and bi-directional interaction. I don’t think that uni-directional NVB, in which people talk at each other, push each other around, struggle and argue and put each other in their place, is interaction. NVB, which sadly is our common way of talking, is in fact a form of abuse. We have all heard about verbal abuse, but NVB is much more than that. The reason that NVB is so hard to analyze and hasn’t been touched by any behaviorist, is because it creates and maintains the illusion that we are behaving verbally, while in fact our words inaccurately describe and therefore make us disown our nonverbal behavior.
In NVB we pretend as if there are two environments: the environment which within our own skin and the environment which is outside of our own skin. You keep talking nonsense as long as you believe the lie which has been perpetuated by NVB that there are two environments. SVB, however, teaches you that there is only one environment. Thus, SVB considers private speech as a subset of your public speech. It is absolutely astounding behaviorists aren’t endorsing this more often, as the separation of our private speech from our public speech is the proverbial elephant in the room of human interaction. Freud with his free association technique comes closer to addressing the SVB/NVB distinction than Skinner, who as we all know focused on operant conditioning.
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