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An inspirational read – whether or not you stutter

January 21, 2013 by Leave a Comment

I would like to share this motivational speech that one of my clients gave. It’s worth a read whether or not you stutter. I hope it will inspire you as it has inspired me.

To download the PDF book, click here.

Here’s an excerpt from the first pages…

PART I – CLASSROOM PARTICIPATION

Sitting backstage I had that wonderful combination of smile and tears that I always got when I was about to speak,when I was about to share my story. There is no doubt in my mind that God has blessed me. No doubt in my mind that God has been with me every day of my life and that my stutter has truly been a blessing. I would have missed so much of the world around me if I wasn’t slowed down by my speech impediment. I would have missed the very life God had wanted me to live!

Tonight I was going to speak to sales agents of a large Insurance Company. Imagine, I was to be the motivational speaker to a group of highly motivated and successful salespeople! Indeed I have been blessed beyond my wildest dreams.

Filed Under: clients

What’s Wrong With Spontaneous Fluency?

January 2, 2013 by 1 Comment

Several years ago I was invited to a fluency shaping practice group. The group leader suggested that I have my clients join the group, so I went to see what it was all about. As we sat in a circle, each person spoke about what he (they were all males, except me) had done about speaking during the week. As one young man spoke, I wondered what he was doing in the group. He spoke with natural fluency and apparent ease. When he finished talking, the group leader and other participants came down on him quite hard. He was doing it all wrong. His fluency was spontaneous. He wasn’t monitoring. One would think he hadn’t learned a thing. Later another person who I would roughly rate as being in the 88th percentile of stuttering with a lot of secondary symptoms was praised for his exceptional monitoring.  This might make sense to some, but I felt that I had entered the world of the mad hatter.

This experience is not out of the ordinary. Many people believe that spontaneous fluency is a negative, while controlled fluency is the gold standard. I think I understand why they feel this way. Controlled fluency gives you something to do. Our ethic is that if you try hard, you will succeed. After all, we’ve all heard it time and again, “Get control of yourself; keep it under control” People really believe that their hope for speaking fluently lies in doing some technique i.e. stretching syllables, taking a full breath, making light articulatory contacts, and pulling out of blocks, etc. They believe that there is power in control. The hope is that by controlling your speech every time you talk, you will be fluent. The problem is that monitoring and using speech controls takes lots of effort, sometimes even more effort than it takes to stutter. It is too bad that most people don’t realize that spontaneous fluency also means doing something. It means letting go, giving up the monitoring. Conceptually, this may seem strange, but when my clients do give up trying to control their speech, they do have the spontaneous fluency that comes from doing what everyone else does to produce speech.

Filed Under: controversy, dynamic stuttering therapy

Thoughts For The New Year

December 30, 2012 by Leave a Comment

As we approach 2013, I want to wish all my friends and followers a very Happy New Year. I also want to tell you one of my big hopes for the coming year, because if it is fulfilled, it will give people who stutter the ability to speak fluently. My hope for 2013 is that what happened to medicine in the mid 19th century will happen to stuttering treatment in the coming year.

By 1800 there were good anatomical textbooks. People thought that these books and knowledge about anatomy were nice and scientific, but no one thought it had anything to do with medicine. Disease was defined by symptoms, and no one really paid much attention to what was going on in the body. If you had a fever, the doctor treated the fever. If you couldn’t breathe, you probably had to learn to live with it, until you didn’t live at all. No one connected the symptoms to an anatomical malady. This was because no one knew what was going on inside the body and even if they did, they didn’t know what to do about it.

This reminds me of how we look at stuttering even today. Stuttering is still being defined by the symptoms we see. It is thought that stuttering is repetitions of speech sounds, blocks, laryngeal tension, anxiety, bad breathing, etc. Furthermore treatment is still symptom oriented. People who stutter try to overcome their symptoms i.e. stuttered speech. This is because they don’t know that what is going on inside their brain that unifies the many symptoms they are experiencing. Even though researchers are finding evidence that stuttering is related to a malfunctioning speech production system, this is ignored in treatment, because people don’t know what to do about it and think nothing can be done to change it.

My hope is that next year will be the turn around year that goes down in history as the year when stuttering becomes widely accepted as only a symptom of the way the speech production system is functioning. I know the day will come when, just as anatomy became connected to medicine, brain processing will be connected to stuttering. It will be known that there is something that can be done to effectively treat people who stutter, because changing system function does make people who stutter symptom free. Let’s not wait any longer. May the coming year be the end of the era of treating symptoms, instead of the system that causes stuttering.

Filed Under: history

Free to Speak Freely

October 18, 2012 by 1 Comment

I recently had an opportunity to be interviewed by Pam Mertz on her podcast Women Who Stutter: Our Stories. I particularly liked the title she gave to the episode, Free To Speak Freely. It is the essence of what I know from my experience in working with people who stutter. Giving up control and allowing yourself to be free from planning, trying to get words out and consciously monitoring what you say and how you say it is the key to enjoyable, comfortable and fluent speaking. I invite you link to this podcast and to the many other podcasts that Pam has posted.

Filed Under: fluent speech, nature of stuttering

Not to Be Missed – Top Papers from the ISAD Conference 2012

October 14, 2012 by Leave a Comment

October 22nd, International Stuttering Awareness Day, is fast approaching and the countdown is being celebrated in the form of the ISAD Conference, A VOICE AND SOMETHING TO SAY, that began on October 1st.  I have found the papers extremely interesting, so if you haven’t already joined in, I highly recommend that you do. Judy Kuster, the conference chair, once again deserves deep gratitude for putting together a conference that is very interesting and informative to professionals, people who stutter and anyone who wants to know more about stuttering. Kudos to Judy!

I have to admit that I still haven’t read all the papers yet, but before I do, I want to bring to your attention two that I found to be especially meaningful, because they put us in the direction of greater light and clarity in understanding how to treat stuttering. First, A preliminary survey of vocal tract characteristics during stuttering: implications for therapy by Anelise Junqueira Bohnen
from Brazil points out some of the laryngeal characteristics that can be seen better internally with a flexible fiber optic laryngoscope than externally by the observer. She even links to YouTube videos of the vocal folds. If you have never watched vocal folds in action, you will find these videos very fascinating. I think it would have been nice to watch a side-by-side video of a fluent speaker saying the same sentence, because it would have made the differences in functioning clearer. Nonetheless, her study shows that there are indeed differences in laryngeal function.

Of course, we have to be careful not to infer that laryngeal differences are the only important feature of stuttering. I am hopeful that more research will be done that will investigate the interaction of the laryngeal function with the functioning of the articulators, and the interaction of the articulators and larynx with language planning and the thoughts and feelings of the speaker.

This brings me to the second paper that I want to bring to your attention, What is stuttering: Revisited by Eric Jackson, Robert Quesal, and J. Scott Yaruss
from New York, Illinois, and Pennsylvania. This paper gives me hope that the perspective that I have been purporting since 1993 when I gave my first talk at the Oxford Dysfluency Conference will finally enter the mainstream. In 1993 I said that the definition of stuttering should not be based on a description of the speech produced …i.e. repetitions or prolongations of speech sounds, physical blocks or hesitations in the flow of speech. At the time, I suggested that stuttering is a condition in which the speaker distorts one or more of the processes involved in the planning and production of speech. At the time, one of the leaders in the field Hugo Gregory congratulated me on my presentation, but warned me that my ideas would not be accepted in our lifetime. Hugo who passed away in 2004 was partially right, but I am pleased to be here in 2012  and read that leaders in the field are suggesting the following definition:

“Stuttering is a neurobiological lack of integration of the underlying processes of planning and producing language and speech that, upon verbal execution, can lead to interruptions in the acoustic speech signal (e.g., blocks, part-word repetitions, disfluencies) and physical struggle (e.g., tension). These surface behaviors may not be present, however, when the speaker exhibits communicative avoidance (e.g., circumlocutions, fillers). The underlying features may lead to surface behaviors, as well as emotional and cognitive reactions. Depending on the individual, these may result in significant difficulties in communication and an adverse impact on the speaker’s quality of life. The physical symptoms, emotional and cognitive reactions, and impact on the speaker’s life all comprise the disorder of stuttering.”

This definition may still need to be tweaked and refined, but it is a definite shift from the usual definition that focuses on the speech that has been produced. Some people may still disagree with this shift in perspective, but I believe that now that professors are suggesting it, acceptance will come at a much quicker pace.  This will influence the direction of research in the future. It will also impact the way people will approach the treatment of stuttering. It is very possible that more people will want to explore a therapy model that has already been successful in treating the integration of the underlying processes of planning and production of language and speech. This model is called Dynamic Stuttering Therapy.

 

 

Filed Under: dynamic stuttering therapy, general information
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