Co-regulation & Self-Control

Dear Reader,

In this writing, I started out by writing what I have already written so many times. I slept on it and continued with it this morning. Initially, it felt like boring writing to me, but as I continued with it after I woke up, I liked it much better, as it addresses, in a new way, the issue we usually describe as self-control. Our self-control is only as good as our conversations with others. How can our conversation with ourselves be any good if our interactions with others aren’t? The often made emphasis on self-control is punitive and perpetuates the superstitious folklore that we cause our own behavior. The real issue is how we communicate, co-regulate and, thus, are able to self-regulate. We may do a whole lot of talking, but we don’t really connect, we disconnect, we alienate, we dysregulate each other and our involvement doesn’t reinforce self-control, but it reinforces negative, autonomic responses, such as fleeing, fighting and involuntary freezing.

I wrote this first paragraph to introduce you to the writing I did yesterday evening. Please take my writing serious, read it out loud so that you can listen to your own voice. It doesn’t matter how you sound, just listen to your own voice. You can make a big difference. You don’t need to affect anyone other than yourself. Yes, I am not telling you to save the world, but I am telling you to save you. The world will take care of itself. The world doesn’t need to be saved, but you need to be saved. You need to be saved from yourself and only you can do it. Nobody except you can save you. You are doomed if you don’t save yourself. To save yourself you must talk.

The only way to save yourself is if you talk out loud with yourself about what is going on with you and about what is going on with you in this world. Yes, you need to talk with you. You don’t need to talk with others and you also don’t need to listen to what others have to say. You need to take control over your own life and the only way to do that is to listen to what you have to say to yourself. Yes, you have a lot to say to yourself, but you have never said it out loud and you have never really listened to the sound of your voice.

What you need to say to yourself is only known by you. It cannot be learned from a book or from someone else. If you still believe that you have nothing to say to yourself then it is more than time to let yourself know this isn’t true. What is bothering you? Of course you have something to say to yourself. Get rid of your opinion about who you believe to be, who you are supposed to be and just be who you are. Tell yourself what you want to say and who you want to be. It is up to you, nobody can tell you who you are, only you can. You can and must try to figure out what you really want to say. What you want to say has nothing to do with others, it only has to do with you. There is no one to help you with this.

Stop being busy with trying to figure out your dealings with others and get involved with who you are. Who are you? You are definitely not who you want to be or try to be. Who are you when you no longer try to be someone else? What is left of you when you are talking with yourself? Who are you when you are no longer proving your point, trying to impress, claiming to know? What is your answer to the question only you can ask yourself? What can only you say to yourself? What can you say? What is true of what you say? Why don’t you say what is true?

If you do this and listen to the sound of your voice while you speak, you will find, with great certainty, you are not doing this because you are expressing something that is or was inside of you, but you are only expressing something that you are now capable of saying because you have given yourself permission to say it. You are also not saying what you are saying because you now have a clear, open, non-judgmental mind, but you are saying what you are saying because it is now possible for you to say it. And, since you are listening to the sound of what you say, you can say more than you usually say. Moreover, since you enjoy what you say, you can say many things which you couldn’t say before because you were conditioned by Noxious Verbal Behavior (NVB).

As you engage in Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB) on your own, you become absolutely certain that you can have SVB with others, who, like you, can also step out of their NVB conditioning, just like that. As you explore SVB on your own and let yourself know you can already have it and talk very differently with yourself then with others, who talk at you, but not with you, you will find the people who will reinforce your SVB, who you can have SVB with. You will recognize them as they will validate you. Just like you, they were there all along, but you couldn’t recognize each other as you didn’t yet know SVB on your own.