At Least I Didn't Wait a Full Three Months

My motivation for finally getting something posted here was several people actually telling me that they've been looking every once in awhile and there hasn't been any updates. Thanks for the little shove.

This post won't make total sense unless you've read my previous couple of posts (and even then, I won't guarantee that it does...).

I came to a conclusion. Before I get to said conclusion, I'll recap how I reached it. During the end of the summer in therapy, while I was working on the repetitions (see previous posts), my clinician called me out on something. She told me that she could guess, quite accurately, which words I was going to use a voluntary repetition on. This struck as not-so-good because it looked like I was falling into a pattern rather than just randomly choosing words.

That pattern was me subconsciously avoiding words that I could not stre-ehhhhhhhh-tch out the sound, but that, because of the nature of their sound, could only repeat them. Here, you folks at home, give this a shot: Choose a letter and make that letter's sound for several seconds. Try it with any of the following: w, r, l, n, m, y. You can keep your mouth in one position and keep making the same sound until you run out of breath (or until someone slaps you on the back of your head). Now try the same thing with some of these letters: b, d, g, t. As soon as you make the initial sound, it's done. Extending it is just some superfluous vowel sound and not the sound anymore that actually classifies it as that letter's sound. The wwwwwwater is d-d-d-down nnnnnext to the b-b-b-boat. I can do the w and n just fine but the d and b cause me to struggle.

So the conclusion that I came to through all of this is that I'm still avoiding the sounds that demand repetitions and focusing on what comes easier - prolongating the sounds instead. For Halloween, I think I'll dress up like a repetition, since there's apparently nothing more frightening.

Sometimes while reading aloud in therapy I'll try to use repetitions on all the b words just because for some reason the bah-bah-bah sound is much harder for me to do. It frequently doesn't work out as planned and I'll kind of freeze up on the sound, but sometimes it goes just fine. I have no idea why. Also, I must say, whoever thinks it's a good idea to put two b words in a row can go straight to hell, the barbaric bastards.