Speech Therapy Students Attending NSA Meetings - Who Benefits?

I'm hopelessly computer illiterate. I wanted to enter a post on our blog & I entered it as a comment instead. So here it is again:

At the last meeting,we talked a little about the grad students from Cal State Fullerton who often attend our group. These same students also often attend the Riverside group & the North Orange County group. We talked about just how much, if anything, these students add to our group. I think they get more from us than we do from them. One member of our group mentioned that we never get back the results of various forms we fill out for the students. They attend our group at the direction of Dr. Tsao, the department head, to get course credits. They're not coming out of their own free will. Cal State Fullerton's speech department doesn't have a specialty in stuttering. The students there can take one undergrad course & one grad course in I believe what is called "Fluency Disorders", & these may be electives. So, most or all of them are not going to go on to be SLPs focusing on stuttering. I've always had mixed feelings about the students attending NSA groups. They're friendly & pleasant enough, but the groups don't really flow the same as when they're not there. I don't feel as "natural" as I do when they're not there. If we're going to keep allowing them to attend our groups, we should try as much as possible to conduct the groups as if they weren't there. The students should be neutral observers & not participate in our activities. Taking time at the end of a group to field their questions may be of some value as far as educating them for possible use in their careers, but even this takes away from our time at the meetings. Again, most or none of them will become SLP's who treat stutterers exclusively, although they may encounter stutterers at times. I don't think that a planned activity of a group should ever be cancelled or cut short for the sake of the students. The suggestion was made that we hold an extra meeting (each month?) with just the students in mind. This at first sounded like a good idea to me, but on second thought I don't think it would work. It's tough enough already to get enough members to come to our regular meetings. If there were another meeting just to accommodate the students, the turnout would be very low. Also, it could reduce the turnout at our regular meetings - who can go to 3 meetings a month? I suggest we allow the students to come to ONE of our meetings each of their semesters. This would come to two meetings a year. Either that or just not have them come at all. Comments?

International Stuttering Awareness Day Online Conference

This conference is an amazing undertaking, and all the papers presented are available online here. I encourage you to visit the conference website. The amount of information there can seem daunting, but it's well worth exploring. We build our small local communities of people who stutter through our support groups, and it's very humbling and inspiring to realize that we're part of a global community too, whose voices we don't often have the chance to hear.

October 8 Meeting Update: Peak Experiences

Image courtesy of Sierra Mountain Center

I came away from our last meeting feeling inspired. Our group members shared some great stories--of reaching out, opening up, keeping their cool in a challenging situation. They took charge of the circumstances that life threw them in and shined.

One member noticed that the manager at a store he frequents stuttered. Instead of taking the easy way out and not saying anything, he reached out. He shared information about the NSA and support group meetings in the area. He planted a seed that one day might grow into something unexpected.

Another group member found himself, after a tiring out-of-state drive, standing in front of fifteen people and being asked to introduce himself. He didn't let the hurry and surprise get to him but took control of the situation, set his own pace for speaking, and made his way fluently and easily through the whole process.

Another member shared with his family, for the first time, the challenges that he's been facing and trying to work through in his speech. It takes a great deal of courage to break the silence in this way. Honesty is sometimes painful. The fear that by being honest you're letting your loved ones down in some way can be overwhelming. But people who truly care about you will support you through the awkwardness and discomfort, and appreciate you all the more for trusting them enough to open up.

We also had a lively conversation about pills used to treat stuttering. While acknowledging that in some cases pills might offer some relief, none of us thinks they're a good idea in the long run. They treat stuttering as a chemical imbalance in the brain and give short shrift to the emotional and intellectual aspects of our speech. Those of us who've had long-term success dealing with stuttering can attest that it has taken a great deal of effort to examine our attitudes, habits and personalities and understand how we work so that the changes we made in our speech are constructive and profound.

To use a group member's analogy, we've walked in the valley and reached the peak, then descended back down and made our way back up again and again. We know there's no quick fix, just each day with its challenges and victories, big and small.

September 26 Meeting Update: What Works

We began our meeting as usual by introducing ourselves, but this time after saying "I am a person who stutters," we made a point of adding, "I am also a person who...." and filled in the blank with other aspects of our lives: the work we do, the interests and hobbies we have. It's all too easy to forget that we're so much more than people who stutter.

Once again we had students from a graduate speech pathology program as guests at our meeting. As always, they were interested to find out what, in our group's opinion, makes for effective speech therapy. We came up with what I think are some really good guidelines. First, effective therapy puts you in charge of your own speech. There may be special tools you use (like SpeechFlare or SpeechEasy), but ultimately you're the one who's making the changes happen. Second, effective therapy is well-structured and systematic; it teaches you a variety of techniques and shows you how to use them gradually, building up the difficulty as you're ready. Finally, it's all about practice, practice, practice.

One of our group members has shared that every single morning for the past few decades he has spent twenty-five minutes practicing voluntary stuttering while reading out loud. Another group member uses being stuck in traffic to practice easy-onset on feared words. At our end-of-the-month meetings we consistently practice public speaking. Sometimes we don't really feel like it. Other times the practice isn't as good as we expected. But we always learn something from it.

For me, the best thing about practice is this: it shows me that I can do what I set out to do. Maybe I didn't do it that well, but I did it. There's no more empowering feeling than that.

September 10 Meeting Update: What Is Stuttering?

A guest at our last meeting shared a curious thing about her speech: sleep-deprivation makes her stutter. The rest of the time she's a fluent speaker and thinks of herself as a person with "normal" speech. She only slips out of this "normal" pattern when she's extremely tired. It makes one wonder about the concept of "normal" and, conversely, "abnormal" speech. Where do you draw the line?

People who stutter know painfully well what stuttering feels like. But it's actually quite difficult to explain exactly what stuttering is. It's a question impossible to sort out in one meeting, or, for that matter, ten. That's the reason I want to open up the discussion here and ask what stuttering is to you. There are a two definitions that resonate with me:

• Stuttering is the feeling of loss of control over one's speech.
• Stuttering is what we do to try to avoid stuttering.

I like these definitions for what they say about the opposite of stuttering: one, it means having a sense of control over one's speech; and two, it involves letting go of avoidances. This is a good reminder for me that what's important isn't so much never to stumble on words, but not to let stuttering run my life. I'm in charge, not my blocks.

We tackled another complex issue at our meeting: how to be open about stuttering without apologizing for it. A group member confessed that he's still working on not saying I'm sorry I stutter when he's talking to a customer service center, for example. It's essential to educate others about what stuttering is but at the same time to stand up for ourselves as stutterers. The feeling of being less than can be deeply ingrained, especially in adult stutterers; learning to think of ourselves as equal to people who don't stutter is probably the most difficult but at the same time most rewarding work we can do.

Finally, I'd like to pass on a book recommendation given to me by a group member: John Harrison's Redefining Stuttering. It's a PDF-format book you can download for free. It approaches stuttering in a sophisticated, thoughtful and holistic way, which I find extremely useful.

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. 

July 9 Meeting Update: Being Open about Stuttering

One of my hardest challenges in speech therapy was to say this sentence out loud: I am a person who stutters. I was afraid that I'd stutter on the word stutter and sound completely ridiculous. Most of all, I was afraid of the other person's reaction. I couldn't imagine any response except contempt or embarrassment or confusion, and I had no idea how to deal with any of them. Better, I thought, to keep my mouth shut.

At our last meeting we talked a lot about how to be open about stuttering. It feels weird--to say the least--to come out and admit to someone else that you stutter. But it feels weird not to admit it. The elephant is in the room and no amount of pretending it isn't will make it go away. 

Refusing to pretend takes a lot of courage. And more often than not people recognize that and react positively to it. Speaking the truth--if you do it with kindness and humility--makes a good impression. It's something to keep in mind when you're hesitating about being open about your stutter. Many people appreciate someone who isn't afraid to tell it like it is.

For a long time it seemed a paradox to me that being a stutterer doesn't have to stand in the way of speaking openly, of being a good communicator. You can stand up for yourself and get your point across even if you don't do it fluently. At our meetings people often tell great stories and make really funny jokes. Sure, sometimes there are bumps in the road and they stumble. But sometimes the road becomes really smooth. It's amazing to watch how, in the excitement of the moment, some of us even forget that we stutter and are able to speak fluently without effort.

If only we could forget that we stutter on a regular basis! But the fact that we sometimes do forget proves that we have the ability to be fluent. With hard work and patience, that ability can be cultivated until it blossoms into easy, smooth, fluent speech that we can count on every single day.