Helping those with prior negative experiences
Hello! My name is Danielle and I am a second year SLP graduate student. One thing I’ve learned about PWS and stuttering therapy is that in the past, some therapy practices were emotionally harmful to PWS. What advice would you give to a therapist working with a PWS who is interested in therapy but has had prior negative experiences with speech therapy?
Danielle,
My name is Sulema Rodriguez, and I’m a bilingual speech-language pathologist who stutters/stutterer. I appreciate your incredible question. It’s important to check our biases when it comes to stuttering therapy. In some cases, clients will come to us in our role as “experts” and seek our “help”, while in others, the client knows what they want and only need us as a guide. In either situation, the most important question to ask yourself is: ‘Who is this strategy for? The listener or the communicator?’. Regardless of the strategy, we must ask who will the strategy be helping. Is it for the comfort of the listener or the stutterer/PWS? For example, engaging in covert behaviors has historically been stigmatized, but is it a “bad thing” if the stutterer/PWS is doing it to protect themselves?; they might not want to share their whole life story during a 5-minute conversation at the coffee shop via self-disclosure. That’s only one example, but you can start to see the nuances in stuttering therapy. When in doubt, follow the client’s needs and ensure that the goals and strategies are in the client’s best interest.
This is a great answer, Sulema. I couldn’t have said it in a better way.
Be open and talk about what did not work for the client but also what DID work.
Manon
Danielle, “negative experiences with speech therapy” can be due to so many different reasons, so it’s difficult to answer without knowing what has made the experience negative for that individual. However, negative experiences often stem from a mismatch between the client’s desires/needs/expectations and the clinician’s agenda, so we must be good listeners as we seek to understand their experience and the impacts of stuttering in their lives. Treatment that is meaningful for an individual will surely help improve that person’s self-perception, increase their confidence as a communicator, foster courage to face difficult speaking situations, etc., so we have to work together with mutually agreed upon goals and intervention activities as we explore how to move that individual toward their preferred future.