Five members were present including two new members - welcome Josh & Theo! One new member talked about an intensive 3 week speech therapy program he recently completed in Boston - The New England Fluency Program. The program is run by one Adriana DiGrande, a Speech Language Pathologist and Board Certified Specialist-Fluency. It is very intense, going from 8:30AM to 3:30PM daily plus "homework assignments." The new member had very high praise for the program, saying it changed his life mainly by changing his attitude toward his stuttering. He had been hiding his stuttering a great deal, & one major thing the program did was to get him to stop this or at least do it much less. The program helped him not to avoid or substitute words. One interesting part of the program was a "homework assignment" in which he & others stopped people at random in Boston Common & asked them if they would take part in a survey about stuttering. The new member talked about how once he got past the "mental aspects" of stuttering (eg. the hiding, shame, embarrassment & negative attitude toward stuttering), his fluency got better by itself. One actual technique he mentioned was "stabilizing the 1st sound" - elongating the 1st sound or syllable of a word for 2 seconds.
We then went to the old standby: Table Topics. We each talked for about 5 minutes. Topics included: Baseball, Is there intelligent life on other planets?, World Cup soccer, Vacations & If the opportunity arose would you go to Mars? One member would go to Mars only if there were parking - there's always one wise guy in the group. These topics led to some lively offshoot conversations. A side topic was: Do you stutter in your dreams? One person said lately he has been stuttering in his dreams & even in the same way he stutters when awake - hiding, substitutions, etc. I wonder what the Freudian implications of this are.
We talked a little about stuttering in other languages. Two members that were present speak another language besides English & another member speaks two other languages. All said they stuttered more in the languages other than English.
There was a little time remaining so we began a conversation on: What advice would you give parents of children who stutter? & Do you wish your parents had done anything different in relation to your stuttering? One piece of advice offered was: Don't give advice (such as "slow down") if you don't know what you're doing. Another piece of advice was to get the child into speech therapy as soon as possible. There was general agreement on this one, as it is well established that the earlier a child who stutters starts speech therapy, the greater the chances that he'll stop stuttering. One person mentioned a speech pathologist at Temple University in Philadelphia, Woody Starkweather, who claimed close to a 100% success rate for stuttering children brought to him at a young enough age. I personally think it's crucial to get a stuttering child into speech therapy before he becomes aware of his own stuttering - usually about 7 or 8. One member said he didn't really become aware of his stuttering until age 12, but I think this is an exception. We agreed to continue these two topics at the next "4th Thursday" meeting.
That's it folks. The attendance again wasn't great, but the quality of the meeting made up for it.
The next meeting, led by Matt & Mihaela, is Thursday, July 10 at 5:45 PM at Kaiser. Remember the mantra: 2nd & 4th Thursdays - 5:45 - Kaiser. That's as easy to remember as OOOOMMMMMM. Come to the meetings!
Have a good 4th of July. Remember: light the fuse to the firecracker, not your finger.
No comments:
Post a Comment