Strategies/Advice
Is there a strategy, or advice you’ve been given, that has either lessened the severity of your stutter or made you more confident as a PWS? If so, what was it?
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Strategies/Advice — 3 Comments
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Hey pb1999, I’m sorry I don’t have any good advice to give as nothing ever affected the severity of my stuttering and it actually grew more severe throughout the years. However, what made me more confident as a PWS was my own process with myself to value myself, acknowledge my worth and just embrace the “whatever” approach, meaning- learning/deciding to care less abiut what others might think. That really helps. Hopefully my fellow panel members will have additional advice 🙂
I, too, cannot give advice regarding fluency. But I think the best advice I’ve ever been given is to disclose my stutter. Since I started doing that, my anxiety and stress levels have decreased radically.
There are definitely tricks and techniques that will improve fluency. The problem is you have to keep using them to try and maintain fluency and if you’re older – like I was – the work involved can sometimes be more trouble / time consuming / tiring than the reward. And yes, we all want to be fluent but truth be told many of us are already semi fluent with our kids, husband / wife, long time friends etc.
The City Lit course taught us some very helpful techniques to attain and retain a degree of fluency. They also pointed out that fluent speaks (non stutterers) are never fully fluent themselves and often stumble over words, repeat words, and hesitate / block every now and again.
One of the best techniques was to run one sentence into another ie gently flow through your sentence and into the next. They also taught us to use soft lips for plosive words – like the words ball or cat – and by doing so and pushing gently into and through the word you could avoid the dreaded block. There were a number of other simple to learn techniques – some I’ve forgotten because it was 1988 – but I’m sure I’ve a stuttering book somewhere which follows my stutter from the mid fifties until the early nineties. I may have recorded the other techniques taught in there.