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.)