August 9, 2014

August 9, 2014

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Verbal Behaviorist

Dear Reader, 

Yesterday afternoon this writer was reading “Stream of Energy: Using Elementary Principles of Behaviorology to Describe Progressive Neural Emotional Therapy (PNET) by the John B. Ferreira (2013). His applied approach fits exactly with this writer’s description of Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB). When he was done reading the paper, he was so excited that he wanted to talk with the author and so he tried to find his number online. 

Then, this writer had a great conversation with this wonderful man, who totally acknowledged him. It was amazing how his ideas matched with this writer, whose clinical experience had led him to think in the same direction. SVB is the process in which Ferrreira’s “Stream of Energy” is talked about. This needs to be done of course in behaviorological terms and this author is so happy to be learning more about that from him. 

Ferreira makes a very useful distinction which this writer will  use from now on. Like B.F. Skinner and other behaviorists, he speaks about the environment, which is both inside as well as outside of a person’s skin. The former he calls endovironment and the latter he calls the ectovironment. The constituents of operant conditioning: stimuli, behaviors and consequences, occur in one or the other and need to be separately considered. 

From Ferreira's writing, this writer deduces that the experience of  SVB relates to homeostasis, that is, to endostimuli, endobehavior and endoconsequences. In Noxious verbal Behavior (NVB), on the other hand, one very important ectostimulus (there are others) is our voice. Communicators in NVB participate in ectobehavior, which has ecto - and endoconsequences. Another way of describing SVB is that the harmony that is experienced between endo – and ectoenvironment is achieved and maintained by how we speak. When a verbalizer speaks  at a mediator, this happens in the absence of consideration for the endoconsequences that are experienced by the mediator. This is an example of NVB. When  the verbalizer speaks with the mediator, the endoconsequences of the mediator determine the ectostimulus (voice) of the verbalizer, which causes SVB.

However, for the verbalizers and the mediators of SVB, there is no difference between ectoenvironment and endoenvironment, in other words, communicators only experience one environment. This experience of oneness is very tangible and only occurs in the absence of any reference to an inner self or a higher power. In sharp contrast to the positive and peaceful experience of this shared environment that only occurs in SVB is the negative, coercive and stressful separation that characterizes NVB. The homeostasis experienced with our body, requires a new way of communicating, SVB, which represents the bi-directional relationship between ectoenvironment and endoenvironment.

August 8, 2014

August 8, 2014

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Verbal Behaviorist

Dear Reader, 

 

Whether people are depressed, criminal, delusional, psychotic, manic, impulsive, defiant, sleep-deprived, suicidal, unable to focus or addicted, they manifest symptoms that indicate the lack of exposure to and the lack of knowledge about Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB). The absurd notion that something can be done about mental health problems without first addressing the fact that people talk the way they do, because of how others have talked with them, is only making things worse. Nobody is responsible for their so-called mental illness, because nobody is causing their own behavior. Once we have SVB, it will all become clear that the majority of secular and non-secular people have no clue about how our environment always selects our behavior. 

This writing is meant for all the person who are suffering with mental health problems. They can read these words and recognize the healing effect of this text, because it addresses the issue of verbal behavior. However, this writer also wants readers who don’t have mental health problems to understand that verbal behavior plays an important role in how we behave non-verbally, that is, in what we do. It is not needed to give any examples, because we all know that our problematic communication involves negative emotions.  Communication which doesn’t work creates stress.  

It is parsimonious to read, learn and talk about variables in the environment, which set the stage for our Noxious Verbal Behavior (NVB), which elicits psycho-pathology or Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB), which evokes well-being. Problems that pertain to how we behave verbally are going to be dissolved when we distinguish between these categories. SVB always signifies absences of NVB.

Most of psychological problems are caused by our verbal behavior and can never be properly addressed unless we first learn how to speak more effectively about functional relationships. SVB is the language of functional relationships, that is, of how what we say is determined by our environment, by other people, but NVB is my-way-or-the-high-way, which presumably is caused by a self, or some behavior-causing inner agent. Only in SVB can and do we communicate, because we reciprocate and enhance each other’s positive emotions, but in NVB we express stressful, negative emotions, because we talk in a coercive, uni-directional manner. In NVB people often accuse each other of causing their stress, but this doesn’t have anything to do with a functional account. 

Although people experience the many negative feelings involved in their troublesome relationships and attempt to move away from this as much as they possible, they are convinced that they don’t cause it, but that others do. Generally speaking, as long as things go their way, they will claim that they themselves have caused it, but as soon as something gets in their way, others are to be blamed. Supposedly, the causation of their behavior keeps shifting. Depending on who can get away with what, we hold  others or ourselves responsible, but this is very unscientific.

July 24, 2014

July 24, 2014

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Verbal Behaviorist

Dear Reader, 

It is 1:30am in the night and this verbalizer is sitting in a chair (which belonged to his beloved father-in-law) near an open window. Nearby a bird is singing beautifully. The air is cool and the monotonous moving sounds of cars driving by in the distance create a contrast to the variation of the song. What an elaborate repertoire. The bird sings something new every moment. It goes on and on.

How wonderful to just sit here and to write these words. How peaceful and calm is this moment in which thoughts don’t seem to have any importance.  My skin, the circumference of my body, enjoys this freshness and my sleepiness will soon be satisfied when I go back to bed again. Once my head will land on my pillow, I will be fast asleep, no questions asked, because there is nothing to think of.

Before I go, I like to praise this blissful moment and be absorbed in it with all my heart. I dedicate it to those who don’t experience this. I hope they too find this peace. We can all have it. It is there for everyone if only we would wake up to it, hear it and relax into it. It is 2:00am and the midnight concert keeps going.  A dog nearby is barking. The bird responds and the barking soon subsides.  

When sentences like these are spread out over time and only as few as eight words per minute get written onto this page, there is a lot of space for them to come together. This joining is happening due to natural circumstances in which the verbalizer, the writer, the speaker is attuned to and in harmony with the mediator, the reader, the listener. And, the sky is clear and full of stars...

When the sleep sets in and no more words are added, the bird's serenade will still continue. Waiting for that moment is so rewarding and when that good old friend arrives, gifts of love and goodness are exchanged in a speechless embrace. We knew we would meet again to have this reunion.  We are grateful and we acknowledge that everything that has happened made our connection possible.

August 7, 2014

August 7, 2014

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Verbal Behaviorist 

Dear Reader, 

Whether we want to hear it or not, are willing to study it or not, or are offended by it or not, it is a fact that all forms of behavior,  the verbal behavior of human animals included, are environmentally selected by its consequences. Meaningless nature versus nurture debates continue only among those who don’t know what they are talking about. It is not circular to insist that the functional analysis of our verbal behavior is impossible without words, but that our words depend on others.

It makes no sense to address functional relationships without also considering the forms that emerge from them. Since one needs the other, and since form can be verbal and nonverbal, we need a way of speaking about the action that is our verbal behavior, which is based on the events that control it. 

What we say is a function of how we say it. In other words, when we are angry, anxious, frustrated, sad, or terrified, when we have negative emotions, we speak a different language than when we are safe, supported, happy, trusting, peaceful and excited. We will not produce Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB) under the former conditions, which will elicit Noxious Verbal Behavior (NVB). However, scientific verbal expressions, which are the precise and sensitive descriptions of verbal and nonverbal behavior, are less likely to occur when we experience negative emotions. 

The aversiveness of our negative emotions sets the stage for Noxious Verbal Behavior (NVB) and makes us produce a sound with our voice which is an aversive stimulus. In NVB, there is no necessity for describing our negative emotions. Negative emotions go unchecked, because nothing in NVB stimulates us to develop a language to accurately describe our emotions. In SVB, by contrast, there is more a likelihood that we develop what we have normally described as consciousness. Indeed, only when we experience positive emotions will we be stimulated to talk about talking and think about thinking. 

Paradoxically, we will only be able to meaningfully think and talk about our negative emotions if we can stimulate, achieve and  maintain our positive emotions again. Recognizing our negative emotions is important because they perpetuate NVB. Only when negative emotions have been analyzed in SVB, can they be recognized as NVB. During healthy development the positive emotions of care must come first. Of course, there will always be exposure to negative emotions, but these can be accepted, expressed and understood due to the conditioning of SVB. To the extent that we have received SVB, we will be able to learn how to deal with our negative emotions. Our inability to deal with negative emotions has nothing to do with negative emotions itself, but with the absence of positive emotions. SVB is based on the ongoing expression of our positive emotions.

August 6, 2014

August 6, 2014

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Verbal Behaviorist

Dear Reader, 

After weeks and weeks of heat it has started raining and it is suddenly pleasantly cool. The air is fresh and a new energy is felt by everyone. Meanwhile this writer has done his audition and has also given a presentation of Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB) at his work. The committee that was judging whether this writer was going to be able to do a presentation for a bigger audience consisted of people who were not very open. The five minute audition didn’t go as well as the presentation for the parolees and the probationers who this writer is working with.

When attention is given to the antecedent control of verbal behavior, to what discriminative stimuli caused people to say what they said, we talk about the environmental independent variables which have an effect on the dependent variable, the body of the communicator. It is important to realize here that this interaction between environment and the body of the verbally behaving organism is a completely natural and continuous affair. When we think about how a single verbal episode came about, we easily lose sight of how all our verbal behavior is continuously caused by our environment. So, when we are verbally trying to predict variables that define the nonverbal environment and the nonverbal body, we are likely to get out of touch with the nonverbal functional aspects of our behavior.

The aforementioned disconnect between the verbal and the nonverbal causes us to communicate in a manner which this author describes as Noxious Verbal Behavior (NVB). In NVB our fixation on the verbal takes our attention away from what we nonverbally experience while we speak. Our attempts to find behavior-controlling antecedent stimuli for our verbal behavior, which are measurable and thus verbal, are instances in which the verbal inevitably becomes more important than the nonverbal. Once verbally analyzed, while manipulating these antecedent stimuli, we still maintain our verbal bias. 

  

We unknowingly become ‘disembodied’ when our own verbal behavior is the environmental event on which we focus our science. The amount of reinforcement we receive for our verbal behavior depends on the extent to which others, who are our environment, embody or disembody our language. So-called equality or inequality among people pertains to how we speak. In the former, we have an instance of SVB, because we speak with each other, but in the latter, we have an instance of NVB, because we speak at each other. 

Only SVB is embodied communication, but NVB is disembodied communication. In our search for behavior-controlling antecedent stimuli, we overlook the physiological responses of our own body as part of the environment. By asking ourselves how we speak, we find out about why we say what we say in the way that we say it.