It was a powerful experience to spend last Saturday together with people so passionate about speaking out about stuttering, and so eager to support people who stutter as well as their families. For me, the best thing was to be reminded, in the words of one teen, that, though we're stutterers, we're normal kids, too--granted, of a wide variety of ages! A parent drove the message home even more strongly: everyone struggles with something, he said. For us it just happens to be stuttering.
The speakers, panels and workshops addressed a wealth of topics: what parents can do to be there for children who stutter, how to build confidence in ourselves as communicators, ways to respond to bullies, the newest medical treatments, the importance of continuing to educate ourselves and others about stuttering, how to trust ourselves and participate in our speech therapy actively as experts--after all, who knows more about our stutter than we do? This means indentifying what works best for us and practicing those techniques as often as we can. I'd like to share some of the techniques that stutterers of all ages found the most useful.
- PHRASING: breaking down what you want to say into small, more manageable chunks.
- EASY ONSETS: when a word begins with a hard sound (like p or b), use little pressure (instead of heavy pressure) to enunciate that first sound, so that you can ease into the word, or slide into it smoothly.
- CREATING A RHYTHM (by discreetly tapping your fingers, for example) for your speech, so that your words and your breathing move at a comfortable, even pace.
- JUST DO IT: the only way to build your confidence about speaking is to speak. Several people said that they were grateful to their speech therapist for pushing them to get out there and speak, because the more they did it, the more they believed they could do it, and the better they became at it.
- RECORDING YOUR VOICE: There's a software program, called SpeechFlare, that allows you to record your voice and see it mapped out on the screen: the rhythm and inflection of your speech graphed out, with the places you stumbled clearly marked. It's a good tool to figure out exactly what happens when you stutter, and to help you focus in on the specific things you need to work on.
- HUMOR: a light-hearted approach to your speech can work wonders. Of course for many of us this isn't easy at all. In fact, it can seem downright ridiculous. But I can attest to the fact that it's possible: so many stutterers at the conference are witty, funny people and I laughed out loud at their jokes and wry comments.
- SELF-ACCEPTANCE and SELF-RESPECT: a stutterer at the conference said that all the techniques she learned in speech therapy really started working when she began to believe that as a stutterer there was nothing wrong with her, that she wasn't an inferior human being but someone worthy of respect and love. Believing in yourself is the foundation for everything else.
- SUPPORT FROM OTHERS: when it's hard, and it may even seem impossible, to believe in yourself, having someone who can do that for you, who is on your side, whom you can count on is invaluable. Pay attention: that someone may be closer and more accessible to you than you think.
- EXPERIMENT: Treat your stutter the way a scientist would treat an unknown aspect of the natural world. Examine it, research it, experiment with it, come up with hypotheses and test them. Stuttering is a really fascinating phenomenon when you look at it this way. Holding on to that sense of wonder about what's happening to you can help you honor who you are. Yes, we are imperfect, but our imperfections are actually quite interesting!
What do you think? Have you tried any of these techniques? How have they worked for you? Have you gotten together lately with other people who stutter? What was it like? Be part of the conversation. Make your voice heard.
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