Positive impacts on your life when stuttering or cluttering?
Hello everyone! My name is Ashley, I am currently a student aspiring to become a Speech Language Pathologist. Not referencing speech therapy, I want to ask PWS/PWC if you have ever had any experience(s) in life that have had a positive impact on you when stuttering or cluttering?
Hello Ashley. When I stutter (and it is very noticeable in my case), I always feel so heartened when someone asks a respectful question which signifies that they are genuinely curious and want to learn about stuttering and how you live your life while doing so. The ignorant/mocking people are not worth my while but if someone is genuinely curious in a good way – that makes my day.
Hello Ashley
In my many lectures about stuttering to university students (especially student teachers), every open stutter, and especially the long blocks, have had a positive impact on me. Why? Allowing myself to stutter openly, to explain what’s going on, to express my pleasure when I have had a really good, long block – those are all positive experiences for me.
In my professional life (I am an engineering consultant), every time I introduce myself to a potential customer I introduce my stuttering, and each time it is a positive experience, irrespective of the reaction by the clients.
Wishing you success.
Hanan
Hi, Ashley, and thank you for this most interesting question!
In my case, two particular conversations come to mind – which I would consider in retrospect to be life-altering. These conversations occurred nearly 30 years apart, and they helped to transform my perspective about stuttering.
The first of these occurred when I was 17 years old. (This was 55 years ago!) I was a high school senior, and learned of a seminar at a local college that would be of interest to me. But I was worried about my severe stuttering, which at that time was much more severe than now. How could I possibly speak at this seminar with my stuttering so severe? And I would be participating with university students, who were older than I was. I would feel really intimidated, I thought, by having frequent long blocks, and being around students older than I was.
I told this to my mother, who was a very sweet and understanding woman. She told me that there was no reason to limit my life activities because I stuttered.
She told me, very wisely: “Stuttering is like having a pimple on your nose. People who have a pimple on their nose do everything they want to do in life. They go anywhere they want to go, and they meet with everyone they want to meet with. You just have a pimple on your nose, that’s all!”
This was simple but very profound advice, and it was a wonderful analogy.
I enrolled in the seminar and enjoyed it. I spoke up frequently, always with severe stutteing, but no one cared about that – neither the seminar instructor nor the other students. People were just interested in WHAT I had to say, and not HOW I was saying it.
This was a valuable life experience, and a life lesson – that there was no reason at all for me to hold back in my life activities because I happened to stutter.
Indeed, having a difference like stuttering is no different than having a pimple on your nose!
Another life-altering conversation occurred 26 years ago.
Through a now-defunct stuttering-related website (one of the earliest such sites on the Internet), I came into contact with a fluent woman who had a mysterious interest in the disorder of stuttering. I was then a 45-year-old bachelor.
We corresponded by E-mail for quite a few weeks, and finally I (and we) decided it was time for our first phone call.
Wow – was I nervous. She knew that I stuttered, but I still wanted to make a good impression with fluency. So I practiced fluency shaping techniques for over an hour.
And then for added insurance, I also used a Delayed Auditory Feedback (DAF) attachment with my phone.
I was very fluent for a few minutes. But I underestimated how much she knew about stuttering and fluency devices.
Suddenly she asked suspiciously: “Are you using DAF?”
Thinking she would be pleased, I answered yes.
Her response surprised me.
“Turn that damn thing off! I want to hear your OWN voice, not your DAF voice!”
And so I did. I soon was having disfluencies, but it was my natural voice, and not my somewhat robotic fluent DAF voice.
Three months later we got engaged, and five months after that we got married. We celebrated our 26th wedding anniversary a month ago.
That conversation with my future wife began for me a long journey of self-acceptance, as I started to give up the dream of transforming myself into another type of person, a fluent speaker. I started to realize that it was okay to be different, and to accept that I had a particular type of speech difference. I am who I am, and it is okay not to try to transform myself into somebody I am not.
The combination of these two conversations, nearly 30 years apart, has been a powerful influence on me. I could do everything I wanted to do, regardless of my stuttering; and it really didn’t matter if I was fluent or not in life’s situations.
I hope tbis account has been useful and interesting to you.
Best wishes for your future career!
– Paul