How Do You Help Someone Navigate Shades That Might Change A Lot?
I’m sure you all have experience helping people navigate a bunch of things that can feel challenging and/or overwhelming, especially if they’re at the same time. How about when the shades of one’s stuttering changes a lot? People can stutter more when tired, under stress or just facing life changes. Or maybe people find they’re particularly fluent under certain circumstances. Have you helped people through that “maze?” How? Please share!
Dear Pamela,
Thanks so much for your interesting question! This feeling truly can be challenging and overwhelming. There are many thing to discuss what would be helpful to manage this. The 2 main things that come to mind are:
1. Learning, exploring and discussing that stuttering differs per situation. The realisation that that is ‘what stuttering is’, helps a lot. It is not your ‘fault’ or whatever that that happens. That most of the time give a lot of peace,
2. Exploring what excusably happens. Is the e.g. more fighting or avoiding? Why is that? By taking small (very small) steps you might be able to do something there. There still might be more stuttering then in another situation, but when there is less fighting etc, the overwhelming feeling might become less. There is not 1 one, we have to explore it and try things out
Thank you Joeri,
I live the idea of helping to explore the different facets happening with stuttering. I’m glad you “get it.” Thanks!
Pam
I love this question! One of the most rewarding things about my role as an SLP is using my training together with my client’s experience to help them break an overwhelming goal and/or situation into more “handle-able” pieces. By building up evidence that they can handle each smaller piece, the larger challenge becomes more approachable little by little. An essential part of this also is building up resilience and knowledge of how certain situations are likely to feel. Knowing that something is going to feel hard and trying it anyway can be experienced much differently than expecting it to (or hoping it will) feel easy and then being discouraged when it’s harder than expected. Supporting a speaker to build up the specific knowledge of their resources to face a certain situation helps them to make an informed prediction and therefore choice about how they’d like to handle it. For example, for a teenager knowing she is likely to feel nervous and stutter frequently during a class presentation, we might set an intention for navigating those moments of stuttering and prepare some self-talk that she has found helpful in the past.
Thanks for this Carrie. It’s so helpful to see that SLPs can recognize the different shades of stuttering by offering different appropriate shades of therapy.
I wish I’d had that in my brief foray in therapy.
Pam
Your question is fantastic because it constantly challenges us as speech-language pathologists.
I believe that another useful tool—in addition to those suggested by colleagues—is CURIOSITY. Approaching stuttering as something we need to understand better, without judgment and by experiencing it in various settings, is essential. It allows the person who stutters to view it without fear and, likely, with fewer negative emotions attached to it.
Allowing oneself to feel whatever arises in those moments with curiosity facilitates an understanding of the cognitive and emotional processes accompanying the entire experience. This makes it possible to distinguish between the stuttering itself and reactions of avoidance or rejection toward those feelings. In this way, experiencing changes in the stutter or in one’s own behavior empowers the person to take action toward what they truly desire—guided by their values rather than by a pursuit of fluency.
Thank you for your response Ana! I love that you conclude with the notion of guiding someone towards what they want – as opposed to fluency automatically being the intended goal.
That is why I only stayed in therapy for less than a year – as an adult after never be allowed to engage in therapy as a young person. When my adult therapy focused solely on fluency shaping after I’d been covert for 35 years, I knew that was not healthy for me.
I just needed someone to tell me it was OK to stutter.
Someone finally did!
Pam