October 23, 2015

October 23, 2015

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Verbal Engineer

                                                                                                                                          

Dear Reader, 

This writing is not to convince you, to sell you on my ideas, to make you buy my book, my videos or to get you to pay me as a so-called public speaker. All of that is a bunch of nonsense. During my high school years I was involved in acting and singing. I remember being in one musical and knowing all the lines of everyone who was in it. After finishing the Dutch equivalent of college, I wanted to go to acting school. I participated in preparatory acting classes for about one year and was delighted to be accepted after my audition. However, it soon became clear to me that I didn’t like to act. Acting had been a way for me ‘to be myself’, but I discovered in acting school that acting prevented me from being myself. After a year, I left acting school in utter frustration. 

Speaking is not acting and speech, which like acting is rehearsed, is per definition NVB. No matter how great an actor may be, nothing replaces real human interaction. Nothing can replace it, no book, text, film, play, adventure, thrill, money, wealth, fame or even knowledge and skill. SVB is only for those who recognize this. Those who remain enthralled with all of this hype will keep on missing it. Be realistic, my dear reader, I am talking about you. Only in certain environments, in certain cultures, is SVB possible and when you create and maintain these environments and cultures with the people who stimulate you in the correct manner, it will predictably happen. It is because you don’t know how to do that that SVB cannot happen. It will begin to be possible by listening to this. 

This text is written so that you can listen to it. This is how you sound. It doesn’t matter whether you like it or not. You sound the way you do and attention for your sound brings you in the moment. Your sound is in the now, listening is in the now. This text gives you an opportunity to hear yourself in the now. There is nothing to do other than to listen to your own voice. You don’t need to understand this and the thoughts you might have about this are not the point of this text. To the contrary, when you calmly read this text, you will find less and less thoughts. It gives you permission to stop thinking for a while. You can continue to read, but there is no need to think about what you are reading, you just listen to how you sound and that’s all. If you notice that your thoughts are calming down that is a good sign. If you notice that there is nothing to grasp or understand, you are on the right track. Be okay with that for a while and let you voice express the relief which comes with that. 

You can also briefly stop reading and be quiet for a while if you feel like it and experience the silence which envelops you by just listening to yourself. This is not hypnosis, but just you listening to your sound, while you are reading these words. Allow boredom or irritation, which may come from reading this uninteresting text. There is not much to these words. They were not written to impress or amuse you. Their purpose is let you speak out loud and to make you listen to your own voice. You can get a lot from doing that. You don’t have to take my word for it. Please, do it. When you do it you hear something you didn’t hear before. Do you hear it? If you don’t hear something new, it means you are not listening to your sound. Probably you gave up reading out loud and you started reading quietly. Reading quietly, like thinking covertly, cannot bridge the gap between private speech and public speech. This bridge cannot be seen, but can be heard.

If others were there, who are familiar with the SVB/NVB distinction, they would acknowledge the difference, but since you are reading this by yourself, you must wait until you hear the difference. Yes, you must listen to yourself, as if you were listening to someone else. This is what happens in SVB: we listen to each other in the same way as we listen to ourselves. In NVB, on the other hand, we have two different ways of listening, one in which we listen to ourselves and another in which we listen to others. The other-listening in NVB prevents and excludes self-listening, but self-listing in SVB includes and stimulates other-listening. 

During SVB your sense of a behavior-causing self disappears and your thoughts about others who presumably cause their own behavior also no longer occur. Stated differently, in SVB we will talk with each other, but in NVB we will talk at each other. Thus, SVB is bi-directional, but NVB is uni-directional. One of the most profound aspects about SVB is that we all agree when we are having it. When that happens we are all in awe that this is even possible. Such a big surprise indicates how stuck we are with NVB. We experience SVB and this experience doesn’t evoke any thoughts. As a matter of fact, the absence of thought makes it very easy for us to think. Our thinking is stimulated in SVB by the sound of our voices. 

Nothing stimulates our nervous system more appropriately than the sound of our own calm voice. Our audience will hear this and validate this. Our unanimous agreement makes it possible for us to say things which could not be said or thought in any other way. We could think them, as we could not say them. In SVB as we can say these thoughts, we can think them. In SVB as we can think out loud, we can understand many things which we couldn’t understand before as NVB was making and keeping insensitive and numb. NVB is really a form of verbal abuse, which prevents us from being conscious and having our own thoughts. All our pathological behaviors derive from our inability to have and accurately express our own thoughts.

October 22, 2015

October 22, 2015

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Verbal Engineer

                                                                                                                                          

Dear Reader, 

This writing is to explain Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB) to you. You have had instances of it, but you have never had it deliberately, consciously, continuously, consistently and skillfully. You don’t need to practice to achieve SVB. In fact, as long as you think you can do it, you are not going to have it. SVB is acquired without any effort once you will become more often involved in SVB. How is that going to come about, you might wonder? Unless you are going to be in my Principles of Psychology class or become my mental health client, I will probably not meet you that much. 

Most likely, you will have to figure out SVB, like I did, on your own. I can tell you how I stumbled on it. I say stumbled as there was really no way of avoiding it. My life at the time was one big mess. I was unhappy and feeling rejected and I didn’t know where I was going. I was especially upset about how people interacted with me, so much so that I decided I didn’t want to talk with anyone anymore. My despair was such that I feared I was going insane. They only way to save myself was to stay put and to allow myself to calm down and think. It was during this period of crisis that I, like many others who went crazy, began talking out loud with myself. It immediately calmed me down and it made me feel so good that I kept exploring it further and further. I explained to myself why I was in the situation I was in. At that time, I sat by myself, on a carpet, in the empty attic of my house. Since I had studied classical singing for many years, I was used to listening to my own sound. I noticed that I sounded calm and that I was feeling relaxed.

It was unbelievable. I was in a deep existential crisis, but by speaking a few words out loud to myself, I regained a sense of clarity which I had been missing for a long time. I felt as if I became charged with energy. I was worried that I was merely fooling myself and went to my friend Lak and told him what had happened. He acknowledged what I said and agreed that I sounded better than last time he had heard me. He liked to listen to himself while he speaks so much that we engaged in a long conversation in which we explored this new phenomenon. It was clear to him that I was more familiar with listening to myself than him. Instead of taking offense, he laughed and fooled around each time I ‘caught’ him while he was not listening to himself, each time he was going on a rant (he used to drink and smoke pot) or was distracting my attention from something I was trying to point out. He caught on really quickly and noticed that I too was often not listening to myself and he corrected me when that happened. By correcting and co-regulating each other we discovered a new way of talking, which we had never experienced before. It was so delightful and interesting that we would talk sometimes for a whole day while walking through the streets of our hometown, the parks, the beach and the dunes. On our way we met people we knew, but we also talked with total strangers and after we introduced them to what we were doing, they joined our conversation.

I was not as experienced as I am now and our talks often ended in some kind of disagreement, but each time I went back to my attic and talked with myself again, I realized I had stopped listening to myself. By talking out loud with myself, I could hear again how I sound when I listen to myself, when circumstances are such that I am capable of listening to myself. It took me years to find out what is needed to listen to myself. Slowly but surely I became capable of creating the right circumstances. 

As Lak had reinforced my first SVB baby-steps and as we had such fun talking with each other, I organized meetings at my house in which we explored this phenomenon. Lak and many people who came to these evenings were mainly interested in esoteric stuff, but this new kind of talking brought reality back to their lives. Although some meetings were better than others and it was initially difficult to get people to join, the meetings were so successful that I wanted to go on no matter how many obstacles I encountered. It was apparent from the beginning that SVB required an environment in which I made some adjustments. As more and more people became familiar with it, my teachings were reinforced and more and more SVB become available. I am telling you about this history as it helps you to say these words out loud, to listen to yourself and to realize that you can achieve SVB on your own and then begin to share it with your friends or those who are close to you. It can and it will spread in this way and it hasn’t and it couldn’t be spread in any other way as we haven’t explored the interaction in which we can have our unique expression. 

Although you may think you already have SVB, I claim that you haven’t. My claim is based on the thousands of conversations in which people have told me that they realize how little SVB there is in their lives. For many it is quite shocking and embarrassing and our inability to create and maintain SVB environments exposes our lack of knowledge about human interaction. You will find that it is easier to have SVB on your own, by yourself than with others. When you are alone it is easier to equalize speaking and listening behavior than when you are in conversation with others. When you first taste SVB on your own by listening to yourself and by speaking this text out loud, you will be much better prepared to have it with others as you will be able to notice when they are not listening to themselves.

October 21, 2015

October 21, 2015

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Verbal Engineer

                                                                                                                                          

Dear Reader, 

It was because of my dear Dutch friend Bart Bruins, who was the first behaviorist to acknowledge that Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB) is a valid and important new behaviorist construct, that I have started to write to a different audience. A tremendous shift has happened now that I am writing to those who listen to me and speak with me. I came up with the title for a book: Sound Verbal Behaviorism. Unlike the behaviorism with which only few became familiar, this is a behaviorism with which we can all get involved. SVB can be understood by everyone. Besides, we already know it. We have had it every time we were with friends, every time we were feeling support, respect, openness and kindness. SVB is the communication which only happens when we are at peace. 

We sound different when we have negative or positive emotions. We talk differently when we fight and compete or when we enjoy and harmonize. We don’t really talk when we are in conflict with each other. Also, we can’t talk when we are in conflict with ourselves. Rather than separating the speaker from the listener, which always occurs in Noxious Verbal Behavior (NVB), we need to separate SVB from NVB. It is stupid to accept NVB as communication. NVB is not communication as we are dominating, intimidating, exploiting, manipulating and forcing each other. Only SVB is communication as in SVB we are not aversively stimulating each other. Stated differently, during SVB we embody and experience and therefore only express and stimulate positive emotions. 

To be listened to is one thing, but to be speaking is quite another. Most of the speaking in NVB is done by very few speakers. In SVB, however, there are many speakers. It is always in reference to NVB that it is often said that everything has already been said. NVB is repetitive and boring, but SVB is alive and interesting. NVB is the absence of communication, while SVB is the presence of communication. As we mistakenly accept NVB as a form of communication, we miss out on SVB. To have SVB we must speak and listen simultaneously. In NVB, by contrast, we speak more than we listen or we listen more than that we speak. In either case, our speaking and listening behavior is disjointed. In SVB speaking and listing behavior is and remains joined. It doesn’t get joined to be disjointed again. It becomes joined to stay joined. When SVB occurs, we realize what we have missed and this creates the motivation to find it back when it is gone again. People have looked for SVB in all the wrong places. Our thirst for peace can only quenched by our interactions with one another. When speaking and listening happen at the same rate this means that the speaker and the listener are on equal footing. 

Due to the ubiquity of NVB, we were led to believe that there is a problem with listening. However, the problem is not with listening. The problem lies in different rates of speaking and listening. These different rates are maintained by the fact that only a few people do the talking. The rates of speaking and listening equalize when more people will speak. Yet, speaking is only going be SVB if these speakers are going to listen to themselves while they speak. NVB speakers create more NVB; only SVB can create more SVB. As SVB increases, NVB is going to decrease. However, SVB speakers are never going decrease NVB speakers. SVB speakers will avoid NVB speakers as much as possible. SVB and NVB are incompatible. NVB speakers will only be speaking with NVB speakers.  

SVB speakers will only be speaking with SVB speakers. Of course, nobody is really a SVB or a NVB speaker. We speak in a particular way because of the circumstances that we have been in and because of the circumstances that we are currently in. For instance, we speak English as we have learned to speak it in an English verbal community and as we find ourselves in an English-speaking environment. If we were in Mexican family, we would perhaps speak Spanish, even though we are currently living in an English-speaking environment. In other words, our history and our current situation determines our behavior. No matter how much we have been conditioned by negative, stressful, violent or abusive circumstances, we still have the tendency to want peace. And, no matter how conditioned we are by NVB, we still want SVB. Although, due to our different behavioral histories, with for some SVB it is more possible than with others, SVB is possible with everyone. It may take some more time, but as more time is spend with these individuals they begin to respond, no matter how presumably mentally ill, demented or indoctrinated they are. These results are predictable and measurable. 

Our individual rates of SVB and NVB behavior tell us more about the circumstances that we have been in than about the circumstances we are currently in. This is such an important point to be understood. We tend to judge others by how they behave. We are inclined to think that they are that way as they behave that way, but this is not true. People behave the way they do due to how others have treated them in their  previous environments. A person’s ‘response-ability’ is determined by his or her environment and not by some imaginary agent inside of that person. SVB will once and for all make clear to us that we are not and we could not be responsible for our own behavior. The more we have  believed that we are responsible for our own behavior, the more of a mess we have created in our lives.   

October 20, 2015

October 20, 2015

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Verbal Engineer

                                                                                                                                          

Dear Reader, 

Let’s get this straight: you are not causing your own behavior. You can read and understand these words as someone taught you how to read and talk. To the extent that teaching was based on the unity between the speaker and the listener, you were in a supportive environment. The absence of this unity informs you about how often you were not supported and therefore basically abandoned and rejected. In your loneliness you may have tried to talk with yourself, but let’s face it, your attempts were as unsuccessful as your conversations with others.

Let me explain something to you about our communication. What goes on in the name of our spoken communication is mostly Noxious Verbal Behavior (NVB). NVB is based on the separation between the speaker and the listener. In Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB) the speaker and the listener are experienced as one. Because of this separation between the speaker and the listener you don’t realize that your private speech, what you say to yourself, is a consequence of public speech, of what others have said to you. In other words, your negative self-talk, your NVB covert speech, is caused by the negative or NVB public speech of others. Likewise, your SVB covert speech, your peaceful private speech, is caused by the SVB public speech of caring others. Stated differently, you neither caused your public speech nor your private speech. What you say to yourself is caused by what others have said to you. To the extent that those who have talked with you themselves had SVB, you have acquired SVB private speech or what we call peaceful thoughts. 

Thinking is a verbal behavior in which the speaker and the listener occur within the same person. The separation you so often notice in your thinking is caused by the way in which others talk with you. When you say out loud to yourself what you think and when you listen to the sound of your voice while you do that, you notice that this separation dissolves. It can dissolve as you are both the speaker and the listener. Also, as you say what you think out loud, you bring out your private speech into public speech. While doing this you realize that you were previously not allowed to say what you think. In other words, the NVB of others have separated private speech from public speech. In SVB, however, covert speech is perceived as a function of overt speech and negative private speech is therefore considered as a consequence of negative NVB public speech. By listening to yourself while you speak, you realize that what you are thinking is simply a continuation of the kind of conversation that you have been involved in. Moreover, if the conversations that you were involved in and exposed to, as they most of time do, separated the speaker from the listener, it is not surprising that your thinking, your private speech, is conflicted. Unless you speak your thoughts out loud, you cannot hear this conflict. You are conflicted with yourself as you do not take time to listen to yourself. If you will do that you immediately hear it and it will dissolve, but since you don’t talk out loud and listen to yourself, you keep having these unexpressed conflicting thoughts. These troubling thoughts will not go away even when someone else is listening to you. If therapy works, and it often doesn’t, it makes you listen to yourself. The speaker and the listener can only be perceived as one, if this speaker and this listener are one and the same person. Yes, you can have SVB all by yourself. These words are written to stimulate you to have SVB on your own.  

These written words are a form of SVB public speech, which stimulates SVB private speech in you, while you read this. I urge you to read these words out loud and listen to your voice. You will find that you sound good. Your relaxed sound makes and keeps you conscious as the speaker and the listener are the same person. You can talk like this with others and others can talk like this with you. The oneness which we experience by ourselves and with each other is maintained by a new way talking in which the speakers listen to themselves and co-regulate each other. Your authentic voice is made possible by these words.

If spoken, these words are sounds. If spoken by you, these words are your sound. If this sound is listened to, SVB is effortlessly achieved. It can’t be missed. If it is missed you are not listening to your sound. If you are not reading it out loud there is nothing to listen to. You must read it out loud, if you want to verify if this is true. Just doing that for only one moment will not be enough. If you keep reading these words and use them to listen to yourself, SVB will begin to reveal itself to you. 

I am very happy to write these words as it is as if I am speaking with you. Not too long ago, I was unable to do this. I was convinced that writing could not affect speaking as I was writing to an audience which was not listening and which was never going to listen. Now that I am writing to you, I am writing to a different audience. I am grateful to you for reading this and for listening to this. I like our conversation and I appreciate your feedback. Writing is similar to speaking to the extent that the writer and the reader are the same person. If the writing or the reading separates the writer from the reader, it is still a consequence of the NVB speaking that we have been involved in. I am thinking about   behavioristic writings which are not read or paid attention to by those who are against it. Such writings were directed at the wrong audience.