August 13 Meeting Update: Stuttering Isn't Just About Speaking

Stumbling on words is such a big part of our experience as stutterers that it's easy to equate it with stuttering itself. We often go into speech therapy seeking out techniques to change how we articulate sounds and words; we assume that if we learn the "trick" that fluent speakers seem to have been born knowing, we'll stop being stutterers.

If you've met other people who stutter, you may have noticed that some of them don't stutter at all for long stretches of conversation. They sound perfectly "normal." You may have noticed that you yourself don't stutter when you tell a joke to a friend, but when you tell that very same joke to a co-worker the blocks crop up like mushrooms after rain.

It's this unpredictability that makes stuttering so infuriating and difficult to change. If stuttering were only about the way we articulate words, we would always stutter on the same words and once we learned how to say those words fluently, we'd never get stuck again.

But we're not dealing just with words but with people in all their complexity. Some of us are introverted, some outgoing. Some are perfectionists, others more easygoing. Some are energized by the fast pace of everyday life, others made anxious by it. Speech is connected to all these aspects of our personalities.

So when we set out to change how we speak, the hard work isn't only in learning how to articulate words differently. Far more challenging is shifting our perspective, changing how we look at ourselves and the world. Getting really good at practicing fluency shaping techniques is essential. But it's not enough. We have to dig deeper, as one member of our group put it. We have to get to the part of the iceberg that's under the surface.

For me, that means asking myself what is it really that I'm afraid of. Is it stumbling on words? Or is it the negative judgments I make about myself because I stumbled? It means acknowledging that I can't control a speaking situation completely and that's okay.

My goal isn't just how to stumble less, but how to judge myself less. I'm committed not only to getting as many fluency tools in my toolbox as I can, but putting myself in situations where I have to use them and see for myself that I can be really good at doing it. My ambition isn't to get to 100% fluency. (I'm not saying it wouldn't be nice!) Rather, it's to look at the whole process as an opportunity to constantly get better at communicating and at knowing who I am.