A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Secondary Behaviors

This is a follow up to the plan outlined in the previous post.

With the help of my clinician we created a video tape of us having a conversation. Upon watching it I felt two things: disappointment and embarrassment. The disappointment was because there wasn't a lot of physical struggling, the kind that I feel every time I speak for more than a few seconds. I was expecting to feel uncomfortable about watching myself talk, but something else was apparent immediately that I wasn't expecting: I was using a whole heap of interjections. Long strings of "ums" and more individual ones thrown in between words. What bothered me about it, even more than the struggling that I had been looking for, was that, at times, it took away from the coherence of what I was saying. I've always been afraid of that and hear it was, right before my eyes and ears.

So we talked about what to do next. Where do we go from here? One option was to make another recording. I told my clinician that since the ultimate goal of this summer project was to get me to be able to accurately practice my physical secondary behaviors, why not just have me give it a shot, instead of talking and worrying over the tape? I felt that, if allowed to, I would talk around it all day until July came to a close and then I would never have given it a real shot. The part of me that was scared of trying this really wanted that to happen. With my feelings out in the open, we decided that during our next session together, I would just try to voluntarily create some struggling and see where it went. I knew this wouldn't be easy and I wasn't sure if I would be able to make myself do it. Luckily, while walking back to my office after the session, I had an idea for a way to allow myself to get warmed up to the thought of going through with this. And since there was a stuttering group the next night, I had the perfect opportunity to try it out.

The group meeting was lightly attended. It was Jerry, an SLP named J, and a communicative disorders college student named E. I liked being the only person there with a speech problem because it meant I pretty much had a two-hour 3-on-1 therapy session. Selfish, but true. So I presented my idea, knowing that they really couldn't say no to the stutterer at a stuttering group. I had thought up a game that, if all went according to plan, would help to ease me into the practice of voluntarily fucking up my face to match how I uncontrollably fuck up my face all the time. The rules are simple: One person makes a goofy face and then the other people have to all make the same face. Then the next person gets to make a stupid face of their choice while the others get to mimic. The faces can involve some movement and sounds if desired. My plan was that after a few back-and-forths, that I would already be feeling pretty silly about making childish faces, so I wouldn't feel that much sillier jerking my jaw a little to try to simulate what I do while speaking. Aside from me needing to explain the rules several times to Jerry, it went quite well. I felt that there was just the right amount of easing in mixed with a dash of secondary behavior. It produced a number of laughs too.

So the next day at therapy, my clinician and I played the game too. It worked to the extent that it could. I was glad that I gave it a shot and took the initiative to come up with something that would help me try to voluntarily create those behaviors, but it was clear to me that I needed something visual to go off of.

Also, sometime after watching the recording, I had thought a lot about those nasty interjections that I saw and so utterly despised. I came to the conclusion that I've been using them to cover up the physical struggling I'm prone to do. I had undoubtedly used so many of them while having myself taped because I subconsciously didn't want to see myself struggling on the TV. After coming to this realization I noticed that I began to pay more attention to the interjections I was using in my everyday speech and there were times when I really over used them, again, to the point of where I was afraid of causing incoherence. This all gets neatly tied together when we decided to try some casual conversations during my therapy. I immediately liked the results. I was really noticing all the interjections and able to remove a large number of them. And since I was using those "ums" as a way to get myself unstuck or to avoid getting stuck, the outcome of me removing so many of them was that I showed many more instances of physical secondary behaviors – the struggling that we tried and failed to capture during the first taping. So the plan was obvious: Make another recording while having me concentrate on banishing as many of the dastardly "ums" as possible.

We created another recording under the above stated specifications and I really liked results. While it wasn't comfortable watching myself, I didn't feel embarrassed by it either and it showed a significantly higher number of struggling instances than the first one. That's where we sit right now. The next step is to transfer the recording to a digital format so that I can watch it more on my own and see what I think of it and to get comfortable with seeing myself do those things.

And it's out of context in regards to how it's said in the song, but I relate these lines to making a decision to break old habits and to form new habits.

Drive until you lose the road
Or break with the ones you've followed

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TmFi2snLr7o

I want to be like Mike

I hope he doesn't mind me talking about him and I hope he corrects any incorrect characterizations I might have made.

Mike is a friend of mine. Mike is an SLP. Mike is a stutterer. Mike is a former stutterer. When Mike talks about speech, he does so like no one else I've heard before. This is true because he speaks from his own experience coping, struggling, overcoming, anguishing, surviving, helping, learning, teaching. I don't always understand the importance or the depth of what I'm hearing, but I listen and try to absorb as much as possible because as different as we are, we're the same in the ways that matter for the topic of stuttering. Mike is the one that affected me profoundly with a single sentence, as chronicled here. Mike used to stutter. And by that, I don't mean some nice, simple repetitions, I mean the whole facial tension, twisting of the head type of stuttering. I know this because he's not only talked about it, he shows people exactly what he used to do. He can demonstrate his struggling whenever he wants to. He is exerting control over his speech by making mistakes at the time of his choosing.

I'm at a point in my therapy where it's great because I'm aware of blah blah blah. I realize my irrational fears, my idiosyncrasies, blah blah blah. I've also realized that I'm at a point where I'm comfortable. Being comfortable isn't a bad thing, but if I stay in that cozy spot and never push myself beyond it, then this is as far as I'm going to get.

A month or so ago, I talked to Mike on the phone for awhile. He explained that one of biggest positive steps he took in his therapy was confronting his struggling. He did this by being able to mimic at will his worst secondary behaviors. He suggested I do the same thing. His idea was this: Get a recording of me that shows a range of my worst struggling. Watch that recording over and over so that I become desensitized to seeing myself doing those abnormal things that I do everyday. Take note of what I don't like the most about it and practice doing those things so that I can eventually do them whenever I want. The point of it would be for me to able to have total control over my speech, so that I know I can act out those struggles when I want to. It's a way of confronting a fear and coming to a better understanding of my speech.

Right now I'm actually more nervous about properly producing the recording of my struggling than I am of trying to bring myself to voluntarily repeat those struggles. I'm afraid that there will be technical problems (we'll be recording to tape and since I don't own a VCR, we're going to try to transfer it to a digital format). I'm afraid that I (or my clinician) won't feel that what we recorded is a very good show of the worst of my worst. My fears are being a little magnified because I only have about seven weeks left to work with my current clinician and I want to get this recording right the first time so that we can spend as much time as a possible on the real meat of the task. I decided to write about this right now because we're going to be going at this for the first time on Thursday. Talking about it beforehand ensures that it's out there, i.e. I can't back out as easily if it really sucks.

But really, how bad can it be? All I'm trying to do is force myself to do something voluntarily that I do all the time anyway.

Hypothetically Hypocritical

Slow down! Take a deep breath! Calm down!

These three things are often said to someone, in particular a child, who is starting to repeat their words. The person offering the ill-advised advice is often a well-meaning parent or teacher. The advice is so profoundly wrong because the child is probably doing something, developmentally, completely normal, but that child is now slowly coming to the conclusion that they are doing something terribly wrong and that it needs to be corrected. Overcompensation, internalizing, and fear lead to real problems, like stuttering or the worst outcome – silence. My speech problem, while not due to being told those three exclamatory utterances, is a product of internalizing fear and keeping that fear tightly tangled together with my speech.

Someone talking too fast doesn't cause stuttering. Someone not breathing enough during their speech doesn't cause stuttering. Someone being overly excited about the topic they're talking about doesn't cause stuttering. Others may not know this, but I do.

Now, to the point! I enjoy the fact that I'm now much more conscious of many more aspects of my speech while I'm speaking and it's opened my eyes to some interesting things. But despite my strong words in the preceding paragraphs, I find myself thinking I really need to just slow down, breath more during speech, and calm the hell down. And then I wonder how big of a hypocrite that makes me.

So in the context of therapy it's like this – Do I work those three things in somehow? Do I ignore them and just deal with things much more underlying? Talking fast, being over-excited while speaking, and talking until you're out of breath can certainly cause anyone to stumble on their words and I know those things sometimes help send me into struggling mode. But the difference between me and others is that even if all three of those factors are absent, I'll still struggle. So is improving in those three areas worth it because it could allow me to strip down my speech to something easier to work with or is it just a waste of time and setting myself up for disappointment?

In any case, it's a good thing that I'm acknowledging this. Go me!

And lastly, I've been listening to this lovely song a lot:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QotZ7TIaztw
(It doesn't have anything to do with faulty speech production.)