Putting it Together

 

 

Now that you have read all of these suggestions you probably have some mixed feelings of confusion, helplessness and even disappointment. Perhaps you were hoping that at least one of these stuttering experts would have found a quick, easy, magical cure for your distressing disorder. Instead, it is quite evident that no such panacea exists and that, if you want relief from your miseries, you’ve got to earn that relief by making some real changes in the way you react to your stuttering and to your listeners and to yourself. As Dr. Emerick says, “The first thing to do is to admit to yourself that you need to change, that you really want to do something about your stuttering.” Perhaps you are willing to make that admission but have some reservations about having to do what Dr. Boehmler calls the “dirty work of therapy.” Some of the suggested procedures may at the moment seem far beyond your courage or capacities. Is the pay-off worth the cost?

 

All these authors answer that question with a resounding yes. I know these writers. They talk well and live well. All of them were severe stutterers. All of them know from personal experience your self doubts and the difficulties of self therapy but universally they insist that you need not continue to suffer, that you can change yourself as they have changed themselves and can become fluent enough to make the rest of your life a very useful and rewarding one. Perhaps you have already had some speech therapy and have failed and so feel that nothing can be done. If so, reread what Dr. Freund has told you about the success of his own self therapy after the best authorities in Europe had treated him unsuccessfully. Or you may be feeling that you are too old to begin now. If so, read what Dr. Sheehan had to say about the 78 year old retired bandmaster. Or you may be saying that you cannot do it alone without help, yet many of the authors agree with Dr. Starbuck’s statement that essentially “The correction of stuttering is a do-it-yourself project. Stuttering is your problem. The expert can tell you what to do and how to do it, but you are the one who has to do it. You are the only person on earth who can correct your stuttering.” While most of these writers would prefer to have you get competent professional guidance, they do not at all feel that it is impossible for you to get real relief without it. “Get help if you can,” advises Professor Czuchna, “but if not, help yourself. You can!” They would not write so earnestly if they were not sure that you can do much to solve your difficulties. Moreover, you must remember that this is not the kind of false assurance or hope that you have received from others who never stuttered. This comes straight from persons who have known your despair and lack of confidence, from stutterers who have coped successfully with the same problems that trouble you.

 

At the same time, and as a measure of their honesty, they are realistic. They hold out little hope for what you have long dreamed of—the complete cure. Universally, they insist or imply that you can learn to live with your stuttering and to be pretty fluent anyway. This may be hard for you to accept—as it was hard for them too. The present writer has worked with a great many stutterers and has helped most of them to overcome their handicaps but only a few of the adult ones ever become completely free from the slightest trace of stuttering in all situations always. As Dr. Sheehan, the psychologist, advises, “Don’t waste your time and frustrate yourself by trying to speak with perfect fluency. If you’ve come into adult life as a stutterer, the chances are that you’ll always be a stutterer, in a sense. But you don’t have to be the kind of stutterer that you are now—you can be a mild one without much handicap.” We find this thought expressed by many of the authors. Dr. Neely says, “My own experience has been that nothing ‘cures’ an adult stutterer, but one can effectively manage stuttering so that it ceases to be a significant problem throughout life.” Dr. Murray writes, that he has known many adult stutterers who achieved a good recovery but not one who claimed to be completely free from disfluency. Throughout this book, you have read many suggestions for the modification of your stuttering, for learning to stutter in ways that permit you to be reasonably fluent and free from emotional upheaval or social penalty. If these authors have one common message to you, it is this—you can change your abnormal reactions to the threat or the experience of stuttering and when you do so, most of your troubles in communicating will vanish. Is this bad? Is this not enough? As Dr. Emerick says, we cannot promise you a rose garden, but we can offer you a much better communicative life than the fearful, frustrating one you now endure.

 

But you may protest that you don’t know where or how to begin. If you will read this book again, you will find author after author saying that the first thing to do is to study your stuttering and its associated feeling. In this, there is remarkable agreement. As Miss Rainey, the public school speech therapist, suggested to the young man she interviewed, you should get a mirror, and a tape recorder if possible, and start observing how you stutter, perhaps as you make a telephone call while alone, so that you can know how much of your avoidances and struggle is unnecessary and only complicates your difficulty. Dr. Dean Williams and Dr. Dave Williams offer important sets of very challenging questions that you can ask yourself as you do this observing.  Other authors provide other ways that you can use to study your stuttering and feelings but all of them feel that this is how you should begin.

 

All of us know that this process of confronting yourself will not be pleasant, but we also know you will find, as you observe and analyze what you do and feel when stuttering or expecting to stutter, that you will then know what you have to change. And will want to! Besides, isn’t it about time you stopped pretending that you are a fluent speaker? Isn’t it time, as Dr. Starbuck phrases it, for you “to become an honest stutterer,” to come to grips with your problem, at least to look at it objectively?

 

To do so, you will have to accept another suggestion that these authors make almost unanimously. You’ve got to talk more and avoid less. You’ve got to start giving up what Miss Rainey called your “camouflage.”  We know that this too will be hard to do but over and over again you will find these writers insisting that they had to overcome their panicky need to hide their stuttering before they began to improve. They tell you, as Dr. Moses advises, to bring your stuttering into the open, to let it be seen and heard rather than concealed as though it were a dirty shameful thing rather than a problem that you are trying to solve. How can you possibly know what you have to change if you refuse to look at it? Aren’t you tired to the bone of all this running away and hiding? Different authors outline different ways of decreasing this avoidance but you should be impressed by their basic agreement that you should admit, display and confront your stuttering openly and objectively.

 

There is another point on which almost all of them also agree. It is that you can learn to stutter much more easily than you now do and that when you master this, you will be able to speak very fluently even if you may continue to stutter occasionally. As Dr. Sheehan says, “You can stutter your way out of this problem.” The idea—that it is unnecessary to struggle when you feel blocked and that there are better ways of coping with the experience—may seem very strange at first, but if this book holds any secret for successful self therapy, it lies here. These writers say it in different ways. Dr. Emerick describes the process as getting rid of the excess baggage, the unnecessary gasps and contortions and recoils. In his account of his own self therapy, Dr. Gregory tells how he experimented with different ways of stuttering before he overcame his fear of it. Other authors tell you to learn to stutter slowly and easily. What they all seem to be saying is that it is possible to stutter in a fashion which will impair your fluency very little. Indeed, Dr. Murray suggests that if you study your stuttering, you will find that you already have some of these short, easy moments of stuttering in your speech and that if you will recognize them, they can serve as goals. If you read this article again, you will find him saying, “If you can learn to whittle the others down to similar proportions, most of your scoreable difficulty will have disappeared” and that “there are countless ways in which to stutter. You have a choice as to how you stutter even though you may not have a choice as to whether or not you’ll stutter.” Along with other authors, Dr. Agnello says that you should try different ways of stuttering, that you need not remain “bound” to your old patterns of stuttering. The present writer, now sixty-seven years old, agrees. For years he tried to keep from stuttering and only grew worse. Not until he found that it was possible to stutter easily and without struggling did he become fluent. He was born at the age of thirty years and has had a wonderful life ever since. How old are you?

 

So we suggest that you reread Advice to Those Who Stutter (click here to read a free version), this time to work out the design of your own self therapy. Your stuttering won’t go away. There are no magical cures. You will not wake up some morning speaking fluently. You know in your heart that there is work to be done and that you must do it. This book contains many suggestions, and many guidelines. Your job is to sort out and organize those that seem appropriate to your own situation, to devise a plan of self therapy that fits your needs, and then begin the changing that must take place. Why spend the rest of your life in misery?