Do You Stutter Well?
I am always interested in how people who stutter perceive their stuttering. So many people consider their stuttering as something bad, that they are ashamed of, and as something that they have worked hard (or are still working on) at getting rid of.
How do you on the panel think of your stutter?
I ask mainly because at this stage in my own life, after stuttering for 50+ years, I feel I stutter very well and I don’t let it bother me as much as it once did. I stutter, I am good at it, it’s what I do, so I stutter well.
What do you all think?
Hi Pam! For a long time, my stutter was something I was ashamed of and did what I could to hide it. After years of speech therapy that was about fluency and “fixing” my stutter, I thought it was a part of me that was broken and needed to be fixed. This really hit hard after doing a fluency program in 2019 that didn’t work for me and left me in limbo with these negative feelings about stuttering.
I never talked about it much until I found an online community in 2022 that helped me to start going down a road of acceptance and realizing it wasn’t my fault that I stuttered. I never really realized how much the internalized emotions and feelings I had about stuttering was effecting me until I started opening up about it.
Present day, I would say that I am much more at peace with my stutter and have accepted myself as a Person Who Stutters. Along with a lot of practice talking to people and putting myself in uncomfortable situations, I am much less fearful of speaking to people and know how to manage it/feel it and speak anyway. I’m also more honest about myself and my stutter and feelings towards it as I have spent a lot of time reflecting. I’m more so focused on my own self-discovery and figuring out who I am and developing into the best possible version of myself. The only part of my stutter that I could see myself working on is the secondary motions that I have which developed around the age of 14 as I was fighting my speech after years of getting interrupted. I find that they can get exhausting to battle and would be a relief if I can work on the avoidance behaviours that I have.
Thanks for sharing your journey, Pam and Matt. I’ve had a similar journey. After my entire childhood being told stuttering is something bad, something wrong, something that should be hidden, I found my Stamily, my stuttering family. I learned that stuttering is simply something that I was born with, and that life isn’t over just because I stutter. So I changed my mindset from shame to pride. Not proud because I stutter, but proud of how deal with life with a stutter. And that pride I’m paying forward to young people who stutter.
We’re all good at so many things, so why not see all that, instead of that one thing we’re not so happy with? I believe that, if we strive for our passion and excelling at what we’re good at, that’s good enough. Sure, stuttering can be a nuisance, as it makes it hard for me to make a quick, funny reply, to introduce myself, or to relax my muscles. Which is why I’ve done speech training to get out of a block, public speaking training, qigong and theatre, and also Mindfulness and NLP have been great help when it comes to deaing with negative self-thoughts and negative listeners.
I’ve learned to accept myself just the way I am. Now society needs to accept that we don’t need their “good” advice to “stop or hide” our stuttering, and that they should simply be respectful, wait and listen. As we’re making an effort to speak, so speaking to you shows that both you and the words we speak are worth the effort. 🙂
Keep (them) talking.
Anita
I have been stuttering now for almost 70 years.
Until about a quarter-century ago, I was obsessed with the idea of transforming myself into a fluent-speaking person. From the mid-1970’s to the mid-1990’s I went through four different fluency shaping programs, and numerous fluency refreshers. In the late 1990’s (after finishing a graduate education in speech-language pathology), I ran my own fluency refreshers.
I had much success in fluent speaking following fluency programs and refreshers, the fluency lasting for weeks, or sometimes for months. But for me, the amount of effort required to maintain fluency – daily intensive practice time, deep constant commitment to fluency techniques, carefully monitoring nearly every conversation for technique use – was just too much. The efforts required for me to maintain fluency were just enormous.
Eventually, I decided to completely change my perspective. I came around to the idea of self-acceptance, of simply and calmly accepting myself as a person who happens to stutter, a person who happens to have a speech diffeence. And life became SO much happier, so much more satisfying, and so much less stressful.
I never felt shame as such. To me there is nothing shameful about having a speech disorder, and I’ve always felt that way. Even at around the age of 4, I was aware that I had much more difficulty speaking than most people around me. But I also knew one of my father’s first cousins, who also stutters – she was then a teenager. I realized at a very early age that some people have difficulty in speaking – I realized that I had difficulties like my cousin, and felt no shame regarding that.
I felt frustration with my stuttering, in the sense that it wasn’t easy for me to speak. And I wished that this difficulty did not exist, and that there would be a way to make speaking easier for me. So I embraced the idea of going to many speech therapists as a child, hoping that someone could provide help for me. But no therapist who I went to before the age of 17 was able to help in any way.
I estimate I have seen about 35 different therapists for stuttering over the years, between the ages of 4 and 40. About 7 of those were helpful to some degree or another.
But now I regard all that as entirely in the past. It feels so free to finally accept myself as a person who stutters.
I severely stutter, but to be honest, stuttering doesn’t bother me any more.
And Pam, like you, I feel I stutter well!