Friday, July 3, 2009

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