 About the Author:
Jorie (Marjorie) Rosenthal Foer, M.A., CCC-SLP, BCS-SCF, is a speech-language pathologist who stuttered briefly in her twenties and experienced fear of speaking in groups of two or more for over four decades. She is one of the initial cadre of SLPs to become Board Recognized/Certified in Stuttering, Cluttering Fluency. In her private practice, StutteRevolution.com, she delights in helping people discover and identify with their Self Energy/Inner Wisdom and learn to trust their Innate Ability to Speak Naturally. |
I love this year’s ISAD theme, Shades of Stuttering—What’s Yours? People who stutter (PWS) have different histories, patterns of stuttering, beliefs, and ideas about what helps. As Michele Ayoub reminds us, “Every shade is valid.”
That includes techniques, acceptance, somewhere in between—and perhaps possibilities we have not yet fully explored.
As a speech-language pathologist (SLP), I was trained to listen to my clients and follow their lead. There is one shade of their experience that particularly interests me:
What can we learn from the times when a person who stutters speaks naturally?
The Shade We May Be Overlooking
I ask every PWS with whom I work whether there are circumstances in which they speak naturally, with ease and without thinking about their speech. So far, everyone has told me yes.
It may happen when speaking aloud alone, talking to a pet, baby or toy, or with particular people or in particular situations.
For decades, I have wondered why we don’t become more curious about these experiences.
More recently, Jackson and colleagues (2021) gave us a compelling reason to do so. They investigated the “talk-alone effect” by creating a private speech condition in which speech was intended only for oneself and speakers did not perceive that someone was listening.
Twenty-three adults who stutter produced 10,844 syllables during private speech. Only seven possible, mild stuttering events occurred across three participants. When participants produced the same words while addressing two listeners, stuttering returned.
Think about that.
The words did not become harder. The participants had the same speech mechanisms. What changed was the context and, critically, the perception of a listener.
Jackson and colleagues concluded that the perception of a listener, real or imagined, plays a critical and likely necessary role in stuttering events.
But what if speaking naturally wasn’t viewed as an exception to stuttering? What if instead we considered what it reveals about the person’s capacity—and what that might mean for our role as SLPs?
I call this capacity the Innate Ability to Speak Naturally (IASN)—an ability PWS recognize firsthand when their speech emerges naturally, spontaneously and without deliberate management. In those moments, they simply speak, much as a person who does not stutter speaks.
Recognizing their IASN invites PWS to notice, become familiar with, and increasingly identify with who they are when speaking feels natural, comfortable and authentic—because it is all of these!
I ask my clients to become curious about these natural speech moments: What does that feel like? What are you thinking about—or not thinking about? What happens in your body? Where is your attention?
They Already Know How to Speak
If a PWS can speak naturally when they do not perceive a listener, what exactly do we need to teach them about speaking?
Just like people who don’t stutter, when speaking naturally, PWS already coordinate respiration, phonation and articulation, vary pitch and loudness, use rhythm and prosody, and express their thoughts—all without consciously thinking about how to produce speech. Natural speaking is highly spontaneous. We just speak.
They already know how to speak. So why teach them how?
Teaching PWS to deliberately change articulation, rate, airflow, voicing, prosody or other speech parameters directs attention back to how they are speaking. But this is precisely what they are not doing during natural speech moments. When they have freer access to their IASN, they are not managing speech production. They are simply speaking.
Why teach greater attention to speech when PWS tell us their natural speech emerges when they aren’t paying attention to it?
Rather than teaching PWS how to produce speech they already know how to produce, I believe we should help them recognize and trust their IASN and become curious about what gets in the way of accessing it.
The question changes from How can I teach this person to speak differently? to:
What changes within this person when speaking naturally becomes less accessible?
Being Rather Than Doing
That shifts our attention from doing something to speech toward the person’s state of being while speaking.
When my clients describe natural speech moments, I hear qualities such as calm, presence, openness, confidence, playfulness, joy, curiosity about others, and the desire to connect. They are simply being themselves and communicating.
Constantino and colleagues’ (2020) research on spontaneity offers an interesting connection. They describe spontaneous speech as involving little premeditation, effortless production, enjoyment and meaning, with little or no attention directed toward physical speech production. This echoes what my clients tell me about their natural speech moments—the experiences I describe as accessing their IASN. What gets in the way of that access?
One framework that has helped me understand this question is Internal Family Systems (IFS), also known as Parts Work, developed by Richard Schwartz. IFS describes Self Energy through qualities often summarized as the Eight Cs—curiosity, calm, clarity, connectedness, confidence, courage, creativity and compassion—and the Five Ps—presence, patience, perspective, persistence and playfulness. My clients typically refer to these qualities as Authentic or True Self Energy.
I especially value playfulness. Freedom to express ourselves includes the full range of emotions—we can be excited, passionate, silly, sad or angry. I consistently see freer access to one’s IASN when people feel present, open, playful, curious, and connected to their emotions, their Authentic/True Self Energy, and their listeners.
Natural speech is not the thing we make happen. It is what can emerge when we feel free to be ourselves and freely express our thoughts, ideas and emotions.
With IFS therapy, I now recognize the opposite state when it emerges within myself. When something feels threatening, fearful Parts and my nervous system can automatically respond with protection. These Parts may try to “protect” me from sounding inarticulate, being judged for a poor vocabulary choice, not sounding smart, or feeling lesser than. Their fear and resulting “protection” can leave me feeling flustered, jumble my thoughts, and make me want to escape.
These responses don’t happen in isolation; they operate as an interconnected system.
But my ability to speak has not disappeared.
My access to it has changed.
I believe we have mistaken variability in access for variability in ability.
Looking Under the Hood
After many years of listening closely to PWS describe their experiences, I have come to believe that each person develops an intricate and highly individualized Stuttering System of interconnected protective Parts and responses. I refer to these protective Parts as Stuttering System Parts (SSPs).
And that system does not begin when we hear a stutter.
Before speaking—sometimes minutes, days, weeks or months beforehand—SSPs can become activated in anticipation of introducing oneself, giving a presentation, attending an event or saying a particular word. They can begin preparing the mind and body for perceived danger long before the moment arrives.
During the moment, SSPs may automatically respond to the perceived threat of blocking. They may draw upon strategies the person developed themselves or techniques learned in therapy. SSPs may anticipate an approaching sound or word, figure out how best to avoid it, force a sound out to break a block, go silent, or become extremely focused on how the person is being perceived.
Afterward, other SSPs may respond with shame, humiliation, self-criticism, relief or anger. They may replay the block and ruminate about what happened—sometimes beginning the anticipation of the next speaking experience.
If we focus only on managing the observable stuttering event, we’re seeing a few seconds of a system that may have been operating for weeks.
I believe these protective responses become interconnected and strengthened through repetition, increasingly operating outside conscious awareness—like riding a bicycle.
Just as natural speech is highly automatic, protective responses can become highly automatic too. I don’t see the Stuttering System simply as a learned speech behavior, but as a system of protective Parts whose responses have become automatic. And just as terrain changes for a cyclist, speaking contexts change—the listener, situation, anticipated word or perception of judgment. SSPs automatically adjust their protective responses accordingly. This is why stuttering can feel as though it simply happens. The person does not consciously decide, “Now I’ll activate my fight/flight/freeze response, become afraid of this word, try to avoid it, and block.”
The work is to bring more of this protective system into conscious awareness—not to control speech, but to understand what is happening underneath it. As clients become familiar with their SSPs, they can discover the beliefs, fears and protective intentions driving these automatic responses. As clients understand and resolve the fears of their SSPs, they gain greater access to their Authentic/True Self Energy and can increasingly recognize, trust and identify with their natural-speaking experience as their own.
John Harrison’s Stuttering Hexagon captures this systemic interaction through six interconnected elements: beliefs, perceptions, emotions, intentions, physiological responses and behaviors.
Parts Work adds another lens. I see SSPs operating through and across these interconnected elements.
One Part may anticipate a feared sound or word. Another may scan ahead or try to avoid it. A Pushing Part may force a sound out to break a block. Another may focus intensely on how the person is being perceived. A Self-Critical Part may attack afterward. Another may decide that silence or avoidance is safest.
Every Part has a history, a good intention and a desire to be understood.
Watching the Player, Not Just the Ball
Historically, our clinical attention has understandably been trained on the client’s speech: Where was the block? Which sound was difficult? What happened to airflow or voicing? What should the speaker do to manage being a person who stutters?
In a sense, we have been watching the ball.
But what if we turned our attention to the player?
Who is this person when they speak naturally? What might help them gain freer access to their true nature?
Parts Work turns that curiosity inward. Clients might ask their own Stuttering System Parts: What does this Fear Part believe when I am about to say my name? How does this Fear Part show up in my body? Why does this Part feel the need to “protect” me by blocking me on my name? And my clients find the answers within.
I believe one’s IASN is in alignment with their Authentic/True Self Energy. When Stuttering System Parts feel understood, the person is freer to connect with themselves and others and express what they genuinely think and feel.
To me, this is authenticity. It comes from recognizing something already experienced firsthand. When PWS speak naturally while alone—or in any context in which their IASN is freely accessible—that speech is authentically theirs. It is not an accident or “lucky fluency.” It is theirs to own.
If the capacity to speak naturally already exists, we have an obligation to affirm it—helping our clients recognize, trust and claim it as their own, and understand and resolve what interferes with accessing it.
This year’s theme reminds us there is no single shade of stuttering. I would add one more to the palette:
The person who speaks naturally might also be the person who stutters!
What might we learn if we became just as curious about that person?
References
Constantino, C. D., Eichorn, N., Buder, E. H., Beck, J. G., & Manning, W. H. (2020). The speaker’s experience of stuttering: Measuring spontaneity. Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research, 63(4), 983–1001. https://doi.org/10.1044/2019_JSLHR-19-00068
Harrison, J. C. (2011). Redefining stuttering: What the struggle to speak is really all about (12th ed.). National Stuttering Association.
Jackson, E. S., Miller, L. R., Warner, H. J., & Yaruss, J. S. (2021). Adults who stutter do not stutter during private speech. Journal of Fluency Disorders, 70, 105878. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jfludis.2021.105878
Schwartz, R. C., & Sweezy, M. (2019). Internal Family Systems therapy (2nd ed.). Guilford Press.
Hello and thank you for reading my paper, I look forward to your questions and comments 🙂
October 5, 2026
The author of this “Comment” writes the following as an email response to Marjorie Foer’s recent ASAD post titled “A Person Who Speaks Naturally—and Sometimes Stutters.” My comments are in parentheses under the following six powerful quotes I’ve pulled from your paper:
1. “They already know how to speak. So why teach them how?”
(Extremely well stated. You couldn’t have asked an SLP a more probing question. Indeed, every SLP who reads your paper will be strongly challenged to get real about the extreme importance of cognition in stuttering. I remember a famous quote from years back: “If it ain’t broke, don’t try to fix it.” Absolutely, stuttering treatment should focus on the fact that, in some contexts, the person who stutters (PWS) is most often fluent. I believe that these PWS have learned two speaking strategies – fluency and stuttering. The question that makes the difference is “how does the PWS know when to trigger their stuttering strategy and when to trigger their fluency strategy?” This is a matter of cognition, not genetics or physiology. IT IS A LEARNED BEHAVIOR, AND IT CAN BE UNLEARNED.)
2. “I call this capacity the Innate Ability to Speak Naturally (IASN)—an ability PWS recognize firsthand when their speech emerges naturally, spontaneously and without deliberate management. In those moments, they simply speak, much as a person who does not stutter speaks.”
(Yes, yes, absolutely. Way to go, borrowing from the acronym “IASN.” That is a stroke of brilliance! I just learned from Marjorie that she wasn’t aware of their similarity. That is how the unconscious works. It does things for us that we aren’t aware of, both good and bad.)
3. “Recognizing (their) that the IASN invites PWS to notice, become familiar with, and increasingly identify with who they are when speaking feels natural, comfortable and authentic—because it is all of these!”
(I love how you challenge the IASN to consider the natural conclusion of their own belief system about stuttering. Well done, Marjorie, well done.)
4. “Why teach greater attention to speech when PWS tell us their natural speech emerges when they aren’t paying attention to it?”
(If it weren’t so sad, your 4th statement would be almost laughable. After my many years of working with PWS, my sadness deepens for the thousands, and yes, millions, of PWS who will not learn what triggers (causes) them to stutter. So many spend their lives in anxiety, shame, guilt, low self-esteem, depression, etc.
(So many build their careers around work where their stuttering doesn’t cause them personal grief. This truth affects not only the PWS but also the family immensely. The family suffers financially because their stuttering parents don’t reach their full potential in their desired career.
(Wake up, SLP community! Are you well-meaningly trapping your stuttering clients into continuing to live such defeated lives? Please, please read closely the powerful paper Marjorie has given you and begin researching the cognitive view of stuttering.)
(Your statement captures my beliefs about this: “Natural speech is not something we make happen. It is what can emerge when we feel free to be ourselves and to express our thoughts, ideas and emotions.”)
5. “After many years of listening closely to PWS describe their experiences, I have come to believe that each person develops an intricate and highly individualized Stuttering System of interconnected protective Parts and responses. I refer to these protective Parts as Stuttering System Parts (SSPs).”
(I found much truth in your informative section, which you metaphorically call “Look Under the Hood.” Marjorie, have you ever shone in this section? SLP’s, pay close attention to this section. In this section, Marjorie addresses the most effective metaphor for healing your triggers of blocking and stuttering, “Parts.” These unconscious “parts” must be uncovered and healed so the PWS can reduce their strength and, yes, even eliminate them forever through reframing. Marjorie cites John Harrison’s book, “Redefining Stuttering: What the Struggle to Speak Is Really All About” (12th ed.). Read it! You will be glad you did.
(Marjorie stated, “Every Part has a history, a good intention, and a desire to be understood.” Yes, these unconscious parts all have a positive intent for the PWS. PWS, which unconscious part is the main driver of your stuttering? Is it the fear of stuttering? Is it feeling threatened when you have to speak to an authority? Is it feeling less-than? Is it the fear of rejection? What belief, idea, thought, feeling, etc. is behind your trigger for choosing your stuttering speaking strategy?
(What emotional part is the main driver (trigger) of your stuttering? What is its higher purpose for you? What does it really want for you? Acceptance? Appreciation? Understanding? Keep asking yourself, “What does this part (name it) want for me?” When you get an answer, keep asking that question for each answer you get. “And what does that part (name the previous answer) want?” Keep asking each answer until you reach the part’s highest purpose. It is the key to healing the part. Apply your highest purpose to that old negative part that lies at the root of your triggering painful part. This methodology comes from Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP) and Neuro-Semantics, which I co-developed with L. Michael Hall, PhD.)
6. “The work is to bring more of this protective system into conscious awareness—not to control speech, but to understand what is happening underneath it. As clients become familiar with their SSPs, they can discover the beliefs, fears and protective intentions driving these automatic responses. As clients understand and resolve the fears of their SSPs, they gain greater access to their Authentic/True Self Energy and can increasingly recognize, trust and identify with their natural-speaking experience as their own.”
(Way to go, Marjorie. You have written a paper that needs to be circulated throughout the SLP community. I encourage you to send it to every SLP and PWS organization that publishes newsletters, both print and digital. Your extraordinary paper needs to be read by every SLP and PWS you can reach.)
Thank you for all the effort that you have put into this paper. It is absolutely awesome.
Dr. Bob Bodenhamer
Retired Christian Minister and Neuro-Linguistic Psychology (NLP) Therapist
Author of the book: “I Have a Voice: How to Stop Stuttering,” plus co-author of 10 other books.
Check out http://www.masteringstuttering.com for much, much more information.
Email: bobbodenhamer@gmail.com
Hi Bob,
Thank you so much for taking the time to comment on my paper. I appreciate you responding to what you called “the six powerful quotes.” I believe that you’ve mined the most vital nuggets that I want our beloved community to consider. I’m reposting them below as a summary of key points for SLPs, PWS, parents and researchers. I’m encouraged to have your support, Bob. I know we see stuttering in the same way – as a complex learned behavior that can be unlearned. The evidence is there, baked into the six key points.
I understand that for many, it can be difficult to embrace an inverted perspective on stuttering, one that sees that (probably most if not all) PWS have the Innate Ability to Speak Naturally and can learn to trust this ability as real and not “lucky.” This perspective encourages clients to identify with their IASN, not their stuttering. It empowers them to discover for themselves what is driving their Stuttering System and, disempower it. We know that people have learned how to dismantle their Stuttering Systems and this deserves to be included as a valid course for treatment and for researchers to study.
1) “They already know how to speak. So why teach them how?”
2) “I call this capacity the Innate Ability to Speak Naturally (IASN)—an ability PWS recognize firsthand when their speech emerges naturally, spontaneously and without deliberate management. In those moments, they simply speak, much as a person who does not stutter speaks.”
3) “Recognizing that the IASN invites PWS to notice, become familiar with, and increasingly identify with who they are when speaking feels natural, comfortable and authentic—because it is all of these!”
4) “Why teach greater attention to speech when PWS tell us their natural speech emerges when they aren’t paying attention to it?”
5) “After many years of listening closely to PWS describe their experiences, I have come to believe that each person develops an intricate and highly individualized Stuttering System of interconnected protective Parts and I refer to these protective Parts as Stuttering System Parts (SSPs).”
6) “The work is to bring more of this protective system into conscious awareness—not to control speech, but to understand what is happening underneath it. As clients become familiar with their SSPs, they can discover the beliefs, fears and protective intentions driving these automatic responses. As clients understand and resolve the fears of their SSPs, they gain greater access to their Authentic/True Self Energy and can increasingly recognize, trust and identify with their natural-speaking experience as their own.”
All the best,
Jorie (Marjorie)
Reading this made me think of something from around 2020, when I was still working out my own approach. I met a lot of adults who stutter who described the same thing: the start and the end of a conversation are hard, but somewhere in the middle it feels easy and the words come out fine. Most of them wanted to train that middle part until it covered the whole conversation.
Over the years since, I have met many more people who stutter, and an enormous range of ideas and methods about it. Gradually I came to think that this is not really a question of theory. Most of the theories are correct, and the phenomena they describe do objectively happen. The problem is that it cannot be executed — and it cannot be reproduced.
Telling someone not to pay attention to how they speak is like telling them not to think about an elephant. And the middle of a conversation isn’t something you can build or stretch; it’s just the part between the two ends.
So what I’m curious about now is: when it does happen, what actually changes inside? And what would have to change for it to stay?
One last thought, offered as a reminder rather than as criticism: noticing the problem and drawing a conclusion are only the first two steps. You have the conclusion — but you cannot reproduce it reliably yet. There is still one step beyond that, triggering it fully, and only there does it become something that can actually be executed.
Hi Liu Hua,
Thank you so much for reading my paper and sharing your experiences and thoughts regarding my approach. I would love to know what your approach is, if you would care to share it here.
I will do my best to respond to your comments and questions, but I am not certain that I fully understand each one, so I would appreciate you clarifying your thoughts if I misunderstood you, and I will happily try again to respond to your question.
When you ask “when does it happen, what actually changes inside? And what would have to change for it to stay”, I am assuming that you want to know when does the person who stutters (PWS) start accessing their Innate Ability to Speak Naturally (IASN) and when does it stay?
The answer is that after we meet a Stuttering System Part (SSP) and the PWS is able to see how hard this SSP has been working to protect/prevent them from stuttering, or the repercussions of stuttering, the client gradually develops understanding and compassion for this Part. Let’s go with a common SSP, Doubt. Pretty much everyone I’ve worked with expresses doubt that they will be able to say their name in certain situations without stuttering.
It seems that when a client is able to consistently turn toward Doubt with compassion and forgiveness, this part gradually loosens its control and backs off, allowing the PWS to say their name with ease/access their IASN.
If there is a related SSP that holds the belief that the client will stutter on their name in specific situations, such as time pressure, with strangers, authority, lots of listeners, or whatever the circumstance, then we need to understand and feel compassion and forgiveness for that particular “circumstance part”. This is a simplified explanation of Internal Family Systems (IFS or Parts Work). You can watch some videos that introduce you to IFS. Even though the speaker is not talking about SSPs, you may be able to see how this works with SSPs. Here is someone who has a wonderful series of videos that explains IFS:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tNA5qTTxFFA.
I’m not totally sure what you are asking in your final paragraph, but I’ll see if I come close to answering your concern. My clients learn to identify and feel more comfortable accessing their True Self Energy. It is from this True Self Energy that they learn to develop a relationship with their SSPs. Once the SSP feels seen, heard, appreciated, understood, validated and forgiven, they begin to relax and the client is no longer blocked from using their IASN.
I never teach them to not think about stuttering and I don’t teach them how to speak, it’s not necessary, they already know how to speak. I teach them to understand that SSPs have the best of intentions – to protect them from harm – but they are misguided and “frozen in time” from when they were “born” (came to the rescue).
To summarize, my clients become comfortable identifying with their True Self Energy/Authentic Self which puts the SSPs at ease and allows them easy access to their Innate Ability to Speak Naturally.
Please let me know if I answered your questions and concerns.
All the best,
Jorie
Thanks for the reply — it cleared up a few things for me. It also reminded me of groups of people who stutter that I met years ago. One group had a belief: when they weren’t thinking about it — when they forgot they stutter — their speech was fine. So they wanted to train themselves into that state.
Looking through other work on stuttering, I noticed something missing. Any kind of intervention comes with side effects — medicine treats an illness, but medicine has side effects. Work with people who stutter, especially anything at the level of changing how someone thinks, doesn’t only affect speech; it affects other parts of life too. Like the film Inception: put an idea into someone’s memory and it changes what they think and do in real life — but if you put it in the wrong place, you get the wrong result.
But nobody seems to pay much attention to that, or to ask whether it’s worth it — whether what you get in speech is worth what it costs elsewhere.
I watched the video you sent. It mentioned not worrying about the other person’s reaction, good or bad. That made me think of something: feedback is a protection. It’s like pain — nobody wants pain, but without it you can’t tell when something is harming you, and that gets dangerous.
About my last question — what I meant is that once you think you’ve found the answer, you have to check it again and again before you can call it one. Not luck, not “it happens sometimes”, not something that depends on a process you can’t reproduce. If it only turns up by chance, or only with a particular person in a particular situation, then the root of the problem hasn’t really been solved — it’s just something that happens to show up.
My own work on this goes in a different direction from yours. I went back to the starting point: if the problem is in how the words come out, then fix that, and leave the rest alone. Or I’d put it better this way — pull stuttering out from everything else.
Here’s an example. Two people giving a speech. The first one stutters — prolongations, repetitions — but their tone and their bearing are easy and composed. The second one goes pale, their body shakes, they’re sweating — but their speech itself is normal.
Which of them is “the one who stutters”? I would say the first one stutters, and the second one speaks normally.
That’s what my work does — it separates them. Stuttering is stuttering. The other problems are other problems.
Thank you for filling me in more about your thinking and your approach. The “side effects” of IFS are access to one’s Innate Ability to Speak Naturally – the Stuttering System is de-activated. It allows the person to speak with ease, naturally. Here’s a side effect that a client told me last week, “I no longer have good days and bad days. I’m having a good life.”
I agree that the first person in your example exhibits stuttering and the second one doesn’t, but seems to have an extreme fear response to giving a speech. I have plenty of clients who exhibit both kinds of behaviors, extreme or even minor physiological reactions along with stuttering. It seems to go hand in hand with the people who seek therapy. It’s not just the stuttering that they express as a problem but the rest of the Stuttering Hexagon: Emotions, Physiological Responses, Beliefs, Perceptions, Intentions and the Behavior of stuttering. So I treat the entire Stuttering System.
The current paradigm has people focused on neurological differences as the cause of stuttering. I see those differences as the effect of stuttering. In other words, practicing a stuttering pattern shows up in the brain and makes it feel real, because it is. But if the client experiences times when they don’t stutter, that is also real and we focus on developing this innate ability to speak with ease.
This is a holistic, inward-looking therapy, instead of outward looking therapy. We come to understand what makes the client’s unique Stuttering System work the way it does. The client is no longer bothered by the perceptions of others because they find peace in understanding who they are, and if there’s a moment of stuttering, they have the calm and presence of mind to let it go. That moment doesn’t define them or make their Stuttering System kick into gear because the triggers are no longer activated.
Are you finding that your clients feel confident, calm, present and connected with their listeners? Are they able to speak naturally and not focus on their speech while speaking? Are they no longer fearing certain speaking situations?
One thing I do agree with you about: seeing the neurological differences as the result of stuttering rather than the cause — something that practice puts there.
We’re looking at different things — but for me the real problem is execution. It has to emerge right away, not after ten minutes of getting ready, but be there in a conversation whenever you need it. Because that’s what ordinary talking is like — it doesn’t give you time to prepare.
If by execution, you mean speaking spontaneously, when the urge strikes, that’s what happens for my clients over time. It’s not something that emerges right away in therapy. It takes time for the protective parts to trust one’s True Self Energy – that this calm, confident, present person who feels the urge to speak will remain in that state. Sometimes other parts jump in and take over when one part starts relaxing. Stuttering is a complex system, and in my experience, at least for the people that come to see me, the impact of stuttering includes a trauma response. Therefore I use a trauma treatment modality, IFS, to heal the entire person, not just their speech.
Thank you for your warm replies. I think this conversation can come to an end here. Before it does, I would like to leave you two things from my own experience.
1. What changes is not the outer situation. What changes is what that situation means, relative to what a person can do.
When the outer situation changes, the inner state re-matches to it — and it re-matches very fast. As a rule of thumb from experience, the figure I use is 50% in a day.
Take the nervousness a person who stutters feels when speaking. Once their speech is back to normal, all it takes is three or four conversations a day, two or three sentences each: the nervousness is down 50% on day one, 75% on day two, and 87.5% by day three.
By “the outer situation” I mean things like a person’s position, the outcome, and the purpose.
For example, someone who cannot swim is afraid of the water. Teach them to swim and the fear goes away — nobody has to work on their psychology; you only have to teach them to swim. Or: a cyclist hates it when drivers honk. Give them a car, and they stop hating it.
Rather than spending effort changing the mind, change the situation and the mind follows by itself. So if the purpose is to actually solve a problem, I don’t think over-attending to the psychology matters much.
2. We are still looking at the core of the problem differently.
A method can be good, elegant and effective — but if the process is too long, the cost too high, or the margin of error too wide, then for solving stuttering it has no value.
Here is an example. Someone wants to build muscle and needs more protein. The usual way is a protein powder, but it is expensive and many people cannot afford it. What then? Boiled eggs do the same job.
Your method is not wrong. It has a precondition that is not written down: that the person has money and time.
Maybe the environments we work in are different. There is a phrase here — “prevent poverty caused by illness.” That is probably where the difference in how we see this comes from.
Hi Jorie,
Thanks for a great paper, one that left me nodding my head in parts.
As a person who stutters who spent more than half of my life trying to hide it, and was fairly successful at that, I appreciate deeply your main premise of curiosity.
Sometimes PWS wind up in therapy not knowing what they want. After a devastating experience of being fired from a 22+ years held job, (because of stuttering) I decided to explore therapy when I discovered there was a program near me that I’d never knew existed until I typed the word stuttering into the internet for the first time.
I was curious to see what therapy was about, since my father had refused to allow me to participate as a kid when it had been recommended in third grade.
The clinicians I worked with didn’t seem overly curious about me and the “why” behind my 35 year experience with covert stuttering. They were almost exclusively focused on teaching me fluency shaping techniques. I quickly realized that’s not what I needed. I just needed someone to tell me it was OK to stutter and be ME, in all my true shades, stuttery, fluent, and everything in between.
I didn’t last nine months in that program and comfortably walked away.
How would you encourage anyone working with a pws to foster curiosity and demonstrate that curiosity is valid within a therapeutic alliance?
Pam
Hi Pam,
Thank you for sharing your previous experiences with stuttering affecting you in the workplace and with the therapeutic environment and approach you encountered. You shared that you were curious to see what therapy was about. You lead with the Self Energy of Curiosity, and continued to wonder “how is fluency shaping helping me?”, came to the conclusion that it wasn’t and promptly left that world behind.
That’s the power of curiosity in a nutshell. It’s generated from within, it’s a state of mind that we can sense and feel, it’s an openness and willingness to learn with genuine interest.
To foster it with clinicians, I think one needs to believe that the client holds all the answers about their Stuttering System (SS) and it’s up to us, the clinicians, to ask the kinds of questions that help the client uncover the answers. We’re not the experts on their SS, they are, and by modeling curiosity, it becomes safe for the client to begin to explore what creates and maintains their SS. Curiosity holds no judgment, it is purely the state that involves us in the process of discovery.
I can’t imagine engaging with a client and not being curious about how they felt prior to, during and after blocking on their name. What were their thoughts, what beliefs do they hold around being able to say their name in different situations and circumstances.
For example, using the IFS approach in therapy, I would start by asking:
“Where to you feel this “Block on my name” Part (SSP) most in your body?
Answer: In my chest and throat.
Question: What does it feel like?
A: It feels tight, and there’s some pain, even like burning”
Q: Can you see this part? If so, what does it look like?
A: It looks like a chain, a heavy chain.
Q: Is this heavy chain willing to give you just a little space and step outside your body? Silence.
I wait, curious to find out about the answer.
A: Yes, it’s a few inches away.
This is a glimpse into the beginning of Parts work with clients. Curiosity is the foundational vehicle for creating relationships with the Parts and the client. Even if a clinician isn’t using Parts Work, it’s important to be curious about how the client feels in different situations, what their beliefs and perceptions are, what their physiological and behavioral responses are and what their intention is in a given situation. You need curiosity to find the answers to those questions.
To lead with curiosity it starts by noticing if I’m curious about what is going on for my client right now. That of course requires Presence – presence of mind to ask oneself “How am I relating to my client right now? Am I telling the person how they should be thinking, believing and behaving? Or am I wondering about what their immediate needs or beliefs are? How can I find out their immediate needs? I can ask “What would you like to focus on today?” “What do you notice happening just before, during and after the moment of stuttering?”
Thanks for giving me the opportunity to explain a little more about using Internal Family Systems (IFS) and how curiosity, one of the Self Energies, is a vital force for discovering how a particular client’s Stuttering System operates.
All the best,
Jorie