SLP Advice
Hello!
I am a speech pathology graduate student, and I recently had the opportunity through my fluency disorders course at my university to hear and learn from individuals who stutter. One person shared his story and said that it was not until he was 19 years old that a speech pathologist sat down with him and told him that they were interested in what he had to say regardless of his fluency. I hope to be a SLP similar to this person’s story who makes clients always feel seen and heard. With that being said, what has an important speech therapist in your life said or done that has made an impact on your life? I’m looking forward to reading your responses and learning from them for my future practice.
Best,
Sarah
Hi Sarah! It was so exciting for me to read what kind of SLP you want to be, this is really the kind we need.
For me, unfortunately I did not meet the right SLPs at the right time when I needed to. But something that did make an impact for me was 2 hours of CBT that made me question everything I believed about stuttering. That was 20 years ago and definitely changed my life, as I learned that concealment wasn’t the only option.
Best of luck!
Hi Sarah,
It makes me so happy that you want to be an SLP that supports their clients through making them always feel seen and heard.
This is so important to me as a person who stutters.
I think one of the biggest lessons that I learnt from an SLP I had when I was in my teens was that my stutter and I can work together. Meaning, I don’t need to control my stutter nor let my stutter control me. I don’t have to try and make myself fluent but I can also just start pushing myself out of my comfort zone which in turn means my stutter doesn’t need to control my life.
My stutter is not against me, it is simply just how I talk and that’s okay.
Hi, Sarah! Thank you for this most interesting question.
I have had about 35 different therapists for stuttering during my life, of whom seven were significantly helpful. For this question, I will choose one significant piece of advice from a speech pathologist when I was about 20 years old, that really changed my life. (I’ll use the older term “speech pathologist”, as it was before the term “speech-language pathologist” came into use.)
This took place nearly a half-century ago. My stuttering was very severe at that time, almost constantly, with long blocks on almost every word.
A speech pathologist who I was seeing at that time dragged out of me the reluctant admission that I had no friends to speak of. This speech pathologist stuttered himself.
He told me what I needed to do – and he offered some really profound advice. He told me that I MUST make a special effort to meet people, to try to make friends, to introduce myself to people, and talk to as many people as I possibly could – regardless of how my speech was in that situation, and regardless of how severe my stuttering happened to be.
It was a very tough assignment, and one that I was really afraid to take on. But I was desperate to make changes, and so I followed the speech pathologist’s advice as best I could. I met as many people I could socially, on the college campus where I was then a student.
I introduced myself to other students, sought out familiar faces and at the same time met unfamiliar faces, and really tried to be as social as I could. I was stuttering very severely in these situations, but still I did it.
And guess what? That was such fantastic advice. I quickly made many friends, and my social life became really satisfying, and my life in general became so much happier. Life became fun! I was still severely stuttering, but life became fun! And I made an incredible discovery – that nearly everyone I met DID NOT CARE in the least that I had severe stuttering. Almost everyone was patient and listened to what I had to say – long blocks and all.
I discovered something that I simply had not known – that the only person who really cared about my stuttering was myself. People were interested in me as a person, and were interested in what I had to say. I discovered that the friendlier I was to people, the friendlier the people were to me. The more that I cared about other people, the more they cared about me. And they didn’t care at all that my speech wasn’t fluent.
I soon had plenty of friends, really close friends, and before long I had a girlfriend too.
Some of the friends I met around that time have remained my friends for many decades.
No matter how severe one’s stuttering happens to be (and mine at that time was really very severe), one can make many friends and have a great social life. That’s what I discovered back then, a long time ago.