Finding Confidence in Stuttering
Hello! I hope that this comment finds you well. We are students studying to become Speech Language Pathologists and had a question for you. We have learned that a person goes through their own journey with their stutter and how they handle the feelings that come along with it. At what point in your journey were you able to look in the mirror, and say, “Yes, I stutter, and that is okay.” What exactly led you to this moment? Did any type of intervention in speech therapy attribute to this? Thank you so much!
Thank you for this interesting question. My reply is to be found in my paper for this conference. It’s meeting the right people. The moment when my boss told a person, who didn’t want to talk to me because of my stutter “I don’t have time, so you’ll just have to talk to her, as she knows just as much as me”. A guy coming to me when he saw my school mates (who he knew) being a few meters away from me, and he wanted to get to know me and saw behind my stutter. The moments my stepchildren took their friends home, not being ashamed of me. And most of all, meeting people who stutter at the age of 27, realizing stuttering was not my fault.
Stay safe and keep them talking
Anita Blom
For me I have never been able to look at myself in the mirror and say I am OK. Now you must be thinking “oh that must be because John has never been successfully treated and now lives his life as a severe stutterer” but that is not correct. I have been successfully treated and now pretty much live my life as a fluent person. So why can I say that I can’t look at myself and say I am OK. Well the reason is that my severe stutter will always be there under the surface and the reason that no one sees it much is that I am continually doing work to keep my fluency skills in place. I am one of the best proponents of “Smooth Speech” in the world but to make this claim I have to put in an exorbitant effort to achieve this. Like a professional golfer puts in an amazing amount of personal effort to stay at the top because swinging a golf club just right does not come naturally to him so to do I have to put in an equal amount of effort to maintain the high fluency level I am used to. So for me getting myself ready for totally fluent speech is like pulling on a mask. A mask that will eventually fall off. That is called relapse. I call it the “Cinderella Syndrome” because, like Cinderella I am never quiet sure when I will turn back into a stuttering pumpkin. I have never accepted stuttering (which is a problem in itself). So for me stuttering is still not OK.
Same answer as Anita
Here is the link of my paper
https://isad.live/isad-2020/papers-presented-by/stories-and-experiences-with-stuttering-by-pws/my-stutter-is-my-ally-mounah-bizri/