October 28, 2015

October 28, 2015

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Verbal Engineer

                                                                                                                                          

Dear Reader, 

Now that I am addressing you individually, my writing has changed. It is under control of a different, more positive set of circumstances. I like to write in this way much more than when was trying to address a broader audience than just you. That was a whole different set of circumstances which somehow excluded you. Not that there was anything wrong with that kind of writing, but it was not personal. I feel more involved in this kind of writing and I am curious where it is going to take me. I led it take me wherever it wants to go. It reminds me of times that I was making audio-recordings of myself. I would start the tape-recorder and just began talking about anything that came to my ‘mind.’ I do the same now while writing to you. In those days I was trying to speak with you on an audio-tape, but now I am speaking with you with written words.  

Looking back on the experience of making audio-recordings of myself, it now seems that I wasn’t really talking with you. I was primarily talking with myself. I needed to talk with myself as I was still trying to find you. This writing is different as I have now found you. Since it is more personal, it is less about me and more about you. Yes, you read that correctly: the more personal we get, the less we will be concerned with ourselves and the more we will be concerned with each other. The opposite is also true: the less personal we get, the less concerned we are with each other. We are not concerned with each other as we are so impersonal. This goes together with my attempts to be scientific.

I was determined to find scientific proof for what I call Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB). I have found this proof in Radical Behaviorism, which explains behavior as a function of the environment. I direct these words to you as I am teaching you that how you talk is determined by your environment. If you feel safe, accepted, validated and supported, you will engage in SVB, because it is possible, but if you feel threatened, on guard, defensive and stressed, you can only have NVB, because only SVB is impossible. Your efforts of ‘trying to be the better person’ are based on the false notion that you can cause your own behavior. That is why you always fail, even though, like a politician you make it seem to others as if you have succeeded. When you learn about the natural science of human behavior, you will come to terms with the scientific fact that you don’t and can’t cause your own behavior. Language is the clearest example of what should have been, but what until now hasn’t and couldn’t be the focal interest of behaviorism. We all accept that a child is born nonverbal and that the verbal community in which it is born is his or her environment from which he or she learns his or her language. This goes for every other behavior. What we do is not caused by some imaginary inner agent, by a self, but by our parents, our family and our community members. 

Our environment equals other people with their specific cultural ways. These other people are stimuli who set the stage for how, when and how much we will behave. Others punish and decrease or reinforce and increase our behavior. What many of us don’t know and can’t seem to acknowledge is that behaviors which are punished cannot and will not be increased, while only behaviors which are reinforced will increase. Such is the lawfulness of human behavior. When we notice an increase in our own or someone else’s behavior, we must assume that something, most likely a person, is causing it.  We don’t have much SVB as we don’t know how to have it. We have it only for a little bit as we only know how to have it for a little bit. 

To have SVB more often requires us to get better at stopping Noxious Verbal Behavior (NVB), that is, we must learn to create and maintain the environments in which SVB can and will reliably occur. We will only have SVB once our NVB has come to an end. Every time NVB comes to an end we will have SVB. You already had SVB and your NVB already came to an end, but it didn’t last long enough for you to be able to continue with SVB. You cannot continue with SVB as long as you don’t recognize why it stops again. However, it didn’t stop because of you. It stopped because of others, who didn’t allow you to have SVB. You were conditioned by others to have mostly NVB and only a little bit of SVB. Even if others allowed you to have SVB, they did so in spite of their misunderstanding about the causation of behavior. They may believe that their behavior was caused by ‘a higher power’ or by trust in an ‘inner self’, but their ability to reinforce your behavior or the behavior of others depended on the extent to which they themselves were reinforced by others. 

Since I am more reinforced for my SVB these days than when I was making these audio-recordings, I am better capable of reinforcing you with this writing. SVB is really the science of spoken communication. In SVB, the speaker and the listener take turns and because of that they co-regulate each other. In NVB, by contrast, we are always dealing with a biased speaker, who forces his or her listeners to listen. In NVB there is no turn-taking; only the speaker is allowed to speak and the listener remains the listener. In NVB there is a hierarchical difference between the speaker and the listener, which ignores turn-taking. In the absence of turn-taking, NVB is uni-directional. The speaker and the listener will dysregulate each other in NVB as there is no real connection.

October 27, 2015

October 27, 2015

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Verbal Engineer

                                                                                                                                          

Dear Reader, 

How are you doing? How do you sound when you say that? If it doesn’t sound good to you, how do you think others must be experiencing your voice? If you don’t like the way you sound, others most likely don’t like it either. You may not have noticed this, but there is agreement on how we sound. We may disagree about what we say, about the content of our conversation, but we agree on how we sound. I became aware of this many years ago because I had been studying classical singing. Since I was trying to make a beautiful sound with my songs, I was listening to my voice. However, at some point, I didn’t want to sing anymore. There was something more important I wanted to do, but I didn’t know at the time what it was. I had to give up singing to allow myself to discover it. 

Those were difficult times as singing was very reinforcing to me. It felt like an enormous loss. It was then that I began to listen to myself while I speak. My singing was replaced by speaking as I found that listening to myself while speaking was even more reinforcing to me than singing. Moreover, in my conversations with others it became clear that they were also intrigued with the process of listening to their own voice while they speak. The wonderful conversations which became possible due to this simple mechanism revealed a solution to many problems. 

Each time I engaged in this novel way of talking, others confirmed that it is indeed something intriguing, alive, real and valuable and because of that I dedicated my life to exploring its workings. I set myself the goal to collect data to scientifically prove the existence of this phenomenon.

Short after immigrating to the United States I went back to school and decided to study psychology. I got an Associate Degree (AA Degree) in Social and Behavioral Sciences, a Bachelor’s Degree (BA Degree) in Psychology and a Masters of Art (MA Degree) in Psychology. However, when I wanted to do my internship to become a Doctor of Psychology (PsyD), I found out that the institution from which I took my education was not accredited and that no organizations in my area would take me as an intern. Then I decided to get a Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) with an accredited institution. I first got my Master of Science (MS Degree) and then set out to achieve my PhD. Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to finish this because of stress, illness, death of a family member and financial burden. 

I was a PhD candidate, had completed all my course work and was writing my dissertation on attachment styles and unresolved loss. Since there was no support at all for me at my university, I withdrew in 2012. My wife and I moved away from our expensive Mountain View apartment and went back to Chico. Our return was a blessing. As I was out of the program, I stumbled on Walden Two by B.F. Skinner and began studying behaviorist literature. I discovered that although I had taken a course in applied behavior analysis, I hadn’t learned anything about the Science of Human Behavior during my years of study. I realized that radical behaviorism explains the process of listening to ourselves while we speak. I have read many books and papers by behaviorists and tried to contact them to talk about what I now call Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB). I have two behaviorist friends, one in Holland and one in Columbia, who have acknowledged that my approach to human interaction is explained by behaviorism. My Dutch friend, who knows how I teach my psychology classes, calls me a behavioral engineer. 

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Since a couple of years I have been an Associate Faculty in Psychology and at the local college. This teaching is a great application of SVB as I can work with groups of students for the duration of an entire semester. Never before was there a situation in which I was able to work with groups so consistently and for such a long time. I love teaching as it allows me to shape the behaviors of the students in my class. Their feedback signifies the results of my efforts and their papers are a joy to read as they report on the discoveries they make due to their explorations of SVB. 

I just started a blog, but I don’t think there is enough feedback to remain interested. This writing, on the other hand, gives me more satisfaction as it is ready to be read, understood and put into practice. I like to write this as it generates positive self-talk in me. My writing is a form of positive public speech which generates positive private speech. That our private speech is a function of public speech only becomes apparent in SVB. The only reason we don’t know about this is because we are usually trapped by what I call Noxious Verbal Behavior (NVB). And, NVB overt speech causes our NVB covert speech. In NVB we don’t listen to ourselves while we speak, but we want others to listen to us or we are straining ourselves to listen to others. Either way, we are outward oriented and remain busy with others. 

In NVB the speaker and the listener are experienced as separate and NVB keeps separating the speaker from the listener. In SVB, however, the speaker and the listener become and remain connected. In SVB there is a sense of oneness and that is why it is so effective. SVB is possible as we pay attention to how we sound while we speak. In other words, in SVB we become and remain attuned to the sound which represents our own well-being. When others hear our SVB, they respond by producing it too.  

October 26, 2015

October 26, 2015

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Verbal Engineer

                                                                                                                                          

Dear Reader, 

These are interesting days. Many positive reinforcing stimuli have become available now that the stimuli which were determining my previous behavior are avoided. In my dream, I was reading out loud the multiple choice questions on an exam about spoken communication. It was impossible to answer any of these questions as the distinction wasn’t made between Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB) and Noxious Verbal Behavior (NVB). All of us have asked and answered many questions in our lives about our interactions, about our relationships, about how we communicate, about what to say and when and why we say it, about how to speak and listen, but none of it made any sense as long as the SVB/NVB distinction wasn’t made. There wasn’t and couldn’t be any progress in the absence of this distinction. Once this distinction is made clear, progress will happen of its own accord. Due to your increased  involvement in SVB your memory will begin to change. 

You will gradually be able to remember more positive communication experiences and this process will slowly unfold. No fast changes can be expected, only almost unnoticeable small changes. These small changes will not be made by you, but they will happen to you. You, to whom these changes happen, are transformed. Your self-concept not only changes, it dissolves as you realize that you are constantly changing as a function of the environments that you are in. No time is lost on being stuck anymore as you accurately discriminate your circumstances.   

Without the SVB/NVB distinction your circumstances cannot and will not change. They will not change as you did not change. With this distinction you will change constantly, even when you may still be thinking that you are not changing. It is only when a whole bunch of small changes have been linked together that you will realize that you have been changing all the time. This accumulative process wouldn’t be possible without constant change. You will not waste time anymore on such nonsense as patience as the SVB/NVB distinction will give you a yardstick to measure the increase of SVB instances and decrease of NVB instances. As your SVB instances will go up, your NVB instances will go down. NVB is the problem behavior, which will be replaced by SVB. 

It can only be replaced if it is first identified as the problem behavior. It was never before identified as such. We are beating around the bush when it comes to human interaction. NVB is not interaction. How can something which prevents interaction be interaction? Interaction is a delicate affair, which is easily made impossible by our insensitivity. The sound of the voice of the NVB speaker will always aversively affect the nervous system of the listener. Even if this listener is allowed to speak by this NVB speaker, which most of the time isn’t the case, he or she will also be a NVB speaker. NVB speakers only talk at NVB speakers, but only SVB speakers can talk with other SVB speakers. In other words, the two never mix, because if one stops the other starts. This phenomenon has remained unknown to us as the moments in which we have SVB were never properly defined. Moments of SVB didn’t and couldn’t be prolonged as negative emotion-eliciting NVB made this impossible and was still considered to be a form of communication. In our schools we teach our students there are five communication styles. This is such total nonsense. It becomes clear when we listen to how they sound.

In what is called the assertive style, the speaker’s voice has a medium pitch, speed and volume. In the aggressive style, the speaker’s voice is loud, but in the passive-aggressive style, the speaker often speaks with a sugary sweet voice. In the submissive style, however, the speaker’s volume is soft, but in the manipulative style, the speaker’s voice sounds patronizing, envious and ingratiating and often has a high pitch. It is evident from this brief summary that only the assertive speaker sounds pleasant and falls into the category of SVB. Only the voice which has a medium pitch, speed and volume will be experienced as an appetitive stimulus by the listener. The other styles fall into the NVB category, because the speaker’s voice is experienced by the listener as a noxious stimulus when he or she sounds too loud, too sweet, too soft or has too high of a pitch. Actually, none of these so-called speaking styles have any validity as in the assertive style the speaker presumably is making his or her own choices and taking responsibility for them. The theory of different speaking styles is based on the common belief in the inner causation of behavior and the speaker supposedly decides on how he or she is going to speak. Fact is, however, that this inner self, as B.F. Skinner, the founder of radical behaviorism, has said, is an explanatory fiction, which doesn’t exist and is maintained by NVB. When we switch from NVB to SVB, this always goes hand in hand with a great sense of relief that our belief in the inner causation of our own behavior wasn’t true. When SVB can be achieved it will be apparent that we are each other’s environment and that we cause each other to have SVB or NVB. Moreover, when we have SVB, the notion of speaking styles becomes irrelevant. In SVB we acknowledge that we all have unique behavioral histories. What we used to think of as ourselves was the accumulative effect of our past experiences. In SVB we can let go of our histories.     

October 25, 2015

October 25, 2015

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Verbal Engineer

                                                                                                                                          

Dear Reader, 

I am so glad you are there. I know you are there. I hope this writing will encourage you to listen to yourself while you speak. Many of my students have done the extra credit assignment, which starts with the simple sentence: “When I listen to the sound of my voice while I speak then I..” The paper has to be two pages long. It helps them to take time and listen to their voice while they speak. It is such a joy to read these papers as each paper confirms how important it is to listen to your voice while you speak. 

If you would do this assignment you would discover for yourself why it is so meaningful. Most likely, like many of my students, you have never really listened to yourself. This is because you were told to listen to others. For most people ‘listening’ means to listen to someone else. Even when others are listening to you, listening is focused on the other and it is outward-oriented. It is no exaggeration to say that our ears are conditioned to listen to others. As of yet, we can’t really listen to ourselves as nobody stimulated it and we are not used to it. There are no situations in which we are stimulated to listen to ourselves, so we keep on listening to others or we keep on trying to make others listen to us. The situation in which you would listen to yourself is one in which you are supported by others to fully express yourself in your own words, in your own pace and in your own rhythm. When does that ever happen? It happens very seldom. And when it happened, it happened accidentally and not deliberately. We never created, maintained and prolonged the situation in which we fully express ourselves as we don’t know how to do this. We wanted others to listen to us and others attempted to listen to us, but we failed. 

No matter how much we have tried to listen to each other, we have not listened to ourselves. We have never recognized that if we don’t listen to ourselves, we cannot really listen to each other. We were never completely satisfied with how others were listening to us as they were always listening to us in a different way than they were listening to themselves. Since we seldom listen to ourselves, there is an enormous difference between how we listen to ourselves and how we listen to others. This difference would decrease if we would listen to ourselves more often. Unfortunately, the exact opposite is happening. We are more and more focused on making others listen to us or on listening to others. The speaker as his or her own listener is almost completely ignored and forgotten. Another reason that this occurs is because we are inclined to attach all sorts of spiritual connotations to this process. This convolutes the simple phenomenon of listening to ourselves while we speak. Only when we do this do we realize that the speaker and the listener are one. This oneness is obvious as the one who speaks is of course the one who listens. There is no difference between the two. This difference is only there because of a particular way of talking, which I call Noxious Verbal Behavior (NVB), in which the speaker and the listener are separated. In Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB) there is oneness between the speaker and the listener. You can explore this on your own and try it out. When you have talked for a while and when you have verified and explored there is a way of talking in which the speaker and the listener don’t separate and remain one, you want to have such a conversation with someone else. After you familiarized yourself with SVB on your own, you can go to a friend and ask him or her to listen to him or herself, while he or she speaks with you. When you will speak with that person, you can now both listen to yourself.

What you will find is that when you hear the other person talk, it is as if you are hearing yourself talk. The other person will also find that he or she feels one with you. An unusual openness reveals itself which has never been felt before. The experience of oneness while talking is of great significance. This oneness is very different from togetherness. In togetherness the communicators still remain separate, but when SVB is expressed by these communicators, the stress that was still involved in the togetherness will be dissolved. This is not a belief or an imagination, but a realistic experience, which can be prolonged for as long as you want. 

Given your behavioral history, in which you have been listening to others, in which you have coerced others to listen to you, in which nobody was really listening to anyone, in which you were hoping, longing and imagining that others would one day listen, in which you have talked and talked and talked, but didn’t listen to yourself, in which others dominated you and forced you to listen to them, but they didn’t listen to themselves either, you are bound to fall back to the communication habit called outward orientation. Self-listening includes other-listening, but other-listening excludes self-listening. The oneness can only be restored if you again listen to yourself while you speak and if any other speaker listens to him or herself while he or she speaks. 

SVB will create a completely new order. We are all unique individuals, but we are no longer separate as speakers and listeners. When someone else speaks, it is as if we ourselves have spoken and everything that is known to others can also be known to us. Likewise, all that we have come to know, due to our unique behavioral history, will be effortlessly shared with others. Moreover, there will be continuous learning due to our stimulation of positive emotions. Our conversations will be dynamic and full of action and less and less time will be spend involved in NVB.