Two Stutterers and a Speech Therapist Walk into a Dairy Queen...

Time slides by quickly
Letting it pass is easy
Seizing it is hard

This month the stuttering group was lightly attended. There were three of us there: Barry* the speech therapist, Mick* the life-long stutterer, and me. We talked for awhile and then watched a short video with information and interviews about the Monster Study. After that, Barry wanted me to try something. He wanted me to try to speak more carelessly so that instead of the tension, words would come out with the normal type of repetitions that everyone makes in their speech. I’m certain that he wasn’t expecting fabulous results, but it could help to show me some examples of speaking without trying so hard. As I’ve experienced in therapy, when I start speaking with the idea of replacing tension with repetitions, no tension or repetitions come out, only normal sounding speech. I explained this to Barry, saying that when I get told to just let the repetitions happen, I usually speak just fine. Barry disagreed. He asked me if I was trying hard at times like that. I only needed a moment of thought before I said that yes, I was trying hard, very hard. He said that what I was doing was producing normal sounding speech while still struggling inside and backing myself up against a wall. We talked about that a little more and then, since there were only three of us, we headed to Dairy Queen. While there we talked some more and Mick and I tried to keep Barry from making a scene, which he probably does a lot when he’s not properly supervised (Anyone who knows Barry, knows exactly what I mean.).

It wasn’t until the next morning that I made some connections with what Barry had said the evening before. His mention of “backing myself up against a wall” was something that I had done over twenty years prior. After I had been in speech therapy as a child for awhile for non-stuttering issues, my mom had reported to my speech therapist that I was stuttering at home. The therapist blew her off and said that she was not seeing anything in the therapy so not to worry about it. What I undoubtedly was doing was trying really hard in therapy to speak without any errors. Sometime during that period I became aware of my imperfect speech and afraid of making errors, even errors that are completely normal for a six-year old and errors that no one would even really notice. Now, jump back ahead to my current (s)peachy predicament - anytime I’ve been asked to purposefully have normal repetitions it feels very uncomfortable and just plain wrong. If I’m asked to just let repetitions happen as they naturally would, I unconsciously try very hard not to have them, and back myself into that wall - the wall being the tension and secondary behaviors that I have today. I might be able to speak error-free for awhile if I try really hard, but at some point, simply trying hard won’t be good enough, which leads to trying harder with limited results, which leads to trying harder still with even worse results, etc. After awhile I’m left with facial tension, closed eyes, and the rest of the craptacularly abnormal things I do while trying to force my speech.

In summation, it is my subconscious and irrational belief that normal speech repetitions are the root of all evil. I should really get over that.

*The names have been changed to protect the innocent, or in Barry’s case, the not-so-innocent.