Beyond Fluency: Understanding the Everyday Impact of Stuttering
Hello! My name is Kinsley, and I am a graduate student pursuing speech-language pathology. As I learn more about fluency, I have become interested in how stuttering can affect a person’s everyday life beyond what we hear in their speech. My question for the panel is: How can speech-language pathologists recognize when stuttering is affecting a client’s confidence, relationships, or willingness to participate in everyday activities, even if the client does not openly talk about it? I would love to hear how you approach these situations in therapy and help clients feel comfortable discussing their experiences.
Hi Kinsley and thank you for your interesting question. Let me start by this: don’t learn about fluency. Learn about making PWS talk. Giving them tools to talk with less effort, and with more confidence. Stuttering treatment is so much more than fluency, while, when the focus is on attaining fluency, the risk is that the stuttering iceberg goes underneath the surface, and PWS will turn into covert, hiding.
I can only speak from myself, as we all come in different shapes. It became clear my stutter started to affect my life when I started hiding my stutter. I was a confident, social and outgoing child, but became more and more silent, as the people around me reacted negatively towards my stutter, and my fear and shame started to take over my love for speaking. I started avoiding people and speaking situations, stopped raising my hand at school, stopped with social activities, and kept myself to my room. The more I heard from my teachers it was no use for me to study as I wouldn’t get a job anyway, and kids laughing at me, I believed them, and didn’t see a future.
I wanted to end my life (I wrote about that in revious ISAD online conferences, which you can still read). But when meeting the right people, people who say me behind my stutter, and other people who stutter, I realised I wasn’t my stutter. I was so much more. And thanks to them I started to see my skills and my personality, I started to challenge myself, putting myself into tough situations, realizing that my stutter didn’t stop me, as long as I felt confident about myself and my skills, which projected onto my listener. The more I believed in myself, as a person, wife, mother, employee, etc, the more people saw all these parts of me, accepted and respected me. So when I decided to face my demons and go back to school, they asked me to become a teacher. Who wouldn’t have thought, me who hated school, was now a teacher, and even taught teachers!
So yes, stuttering is tough, but so are PWS. Help your client to focus on what they’re good at, both when it comes to skills, passion and personality. Help them expand their comfort zones. Help the people around them to understand what stuttering is and what it is not. Help them to find the stuttering community. Children camps, youth camps, adult events, as feeling you’re not alone and seeing people who stutter and still follow their dreams is so uplifting!
My husband says I’m not the woman he married (in a positive way). I’m the one making the phone calls, do the errands, join community and organisational boards, speak up at political meetings and make the complaints. 😉 I still stutter, but no longer with shame and fear, and through saying what, when and where I want to say it, my stutter has decreased. Win-win. 🙂
Keep them talking!
Anita