A Personal Testimony

By Anna Margolina
annamargolina@yahoo.com
Last updated 24th August, 2010

A far back as I can remember, stuttering was always present in my life, although according to my mother, it began when I was 4. Even when, after years and years of intensive therapy, I became passably fluent, or so it appeared to outsiders, I felt that that it was still there, lurking in the back of my mind, ready to pounce at every moment. It was my monster, a “thing” that had always been sitting on top of my life, marring everything. No matter how hard I fought it, deep inside I never believed that I would ever be able to get rid of it. I never thought that someday I would take interest in my monster, get to know it, befriend it and finally free myself from its detrimental influence.

MY EARLY EXPERIENCES WITH STUTTERING THERAPY

I grew up in the Soviet Union, during the reign of the Communists. What was it like to undergo stuttering therapy in those days? It was very intense, and because medicine was free for everyone, money and time simply didn’t matter. There were almost unlimited resources. Almost every year, I was taken from regular school and placed in some sort of live-in facilities that combined school and therapy. By the time I graduated from high school, I was sure I had tried everything that was available.

The main approach of course was speech therapy. The commonly accepted point of view was that stuttering cannot be cured, but it can be controlled by various fluency techniques, such as preceding every word with a gentle exhalation, linking words in a sentence with a barely audible humming sound and pronouncing consonants very lightly with minimum tension. The techniques were quite efficient in controlling blocking, but the downside was that they made my speech sound “different”, “not natural” (or at least I thought so). That was precisely what I was most afraid of. No wonder that after a while, I would inevitably resume my old “natural” speaking habit and with it would come my stuttering.

Another popular approach was assertiveness training, which included acting out different social situations and developing confidence and ability to stand your ground. In addition, I had hypnosis, acupuncture, and psychotherapy. At one occasion my father took me to see some wise village woman, who dripped melted wax on my head and muttered something under her breath for some length of time. I remember walking quietly beside him secretly hoping that when I would open my mouth, my speech would be fluent. But the first word that I said came out with a struggle, so no effect was produced.

Every time, after completing an intensive course of treatment, I would become almost fluent, but then resumed stuttering in the following months. Still, over time my speech gradually improved to the point that I was able to communicate my ideas with satisfactory low level of blocking. I still stuttered, when I entered adulthood, but I learned to live with it.

OLD STRUGGLE AND NEW HOPE

In 2001 my husband and I came to the U.S. And here, in a matter of a few months, my fluency deteriorated to the point that I was unable to say even a few words without heavy blocking. The reason was that, since my childhood, I firmly believed that clear and grammatically correct speech is an important sign of higher intelligence and education. This was an axiom. But now I spoke with a heavy Russian accent and was painfully aware of it. I knew my speech wasn’t clear or correct anymore, that people barely understood what I was saying. Above all, my speech was DIFFERENT, and, therefore, unacceptable. This led to increased blocking, and increased blocking made my speech even more difficult to understand, which added stress and perpetuated the problem. This process was so deleterious to my self-esteem that all my confidence went down the drain together with my fragile fluency.

I decided to find a cure. First, I took several sessions of hypnosis and second, spent some money on a highly touted therapy course at the Handle Institute in Seattle, where I was taught various exercises to improve communication between my two cerebral hemispheres. Both approaches produced only minor effect.

Finally, in 2009, I started speech therapy. My goal, however, was to reduce the accent, not stuttering. With accent I still had hope, but with stuttering I was completely disillusioned. However, it happened that my decision to take speech therapy had unexpectedly set me to a road to recovery.

Initially, it seemed that my feelings toward speech therapy were justified, because we started learning fluency techniques that were very similar to those that I had known since my childhood. It was apparent that in almost four decades stuttering therapy techniques haven't changed. But one day my speech therapist asked me if I could stutter on purpose. This was definitely something new, and of course, it sounded very bizarre to me. However, one day, when I found myself locked in the most severe and prolonged block, I decided to give it a try. To my surprise, immediately after I intentionally tensed my muscles, the block was released and the next stretch of speech came out almost fluently. This made me so curious that I decided to learn more about this technique and started gathering all available information concerning voluntary stuttering. In the course of this search, I stumbled across a very unusual book - Redefining Stuttering written by John Harrison. (Free download)

This was the book that turned my life around. According to it, all that I knew and believed about stuttering appeared to be wrong.
It also appeared that all along, I was trying to solve the wrong problem.

THE STUTTERING HEXAGON

All my life, I have been fighting “my stuttering” – a “thing” that burdened me from the childhood and belonged to me just as sure as the nose on my face. It was one of my characteristics, a part of my self-image, my scary monster. But according to John Harrison, stuttering can be eliminated, eradicated, or as he says “dissolved”. His own example was the best proof for this. To actually be free of stuttering? I buried this dream a long time ago. But his reasoning made so much sense that I started to wonder if my hopes should be resurrected.

The most important thing that Harrison argues in his book is that stuttering is not some solid, one-piece pathological phenomenon – it is a system and should be addressed as such.

First of all, he suggested avoiding using the word “stuttering”, because he believed it obscures the real problem. Instead, he advised to focus on a physical component of stuttering – blocking behavior, such as tightening of vocal cords or clenching the jaws.

According to Harrison this behavior appears because of intertwined influences of our beliefs (such as “stuttering is unacceptable and should be avoided at all cost”), perceptions (“people judge my speech”), emotions (shame, anger etc), divided intentions (to speak or not to speak) and physiological components (such as susceptibility to stress, nervous excitability etc). Those six components - Behavior, Beliefs, Perceptions, Intentions, Emotions and Physiological Reactions – can be represented as a Stuttering Hexagon, in which all parts maintain dynamic interaction and reinforce each other.

Figure 1

This was an entirely new approach. Instead of fighting stuttering as a single rock-solid phenomenon, Harrison suggested dismantling a stuttering system piece by piece. Another novel idea was that stuttering as such was only a part of the much broader problem with the experience of communication, with my relation to other people and the surrounding world.

In some sense, I was cured from stuttering right on the spot, even before I started to apply the principles outlined in the book. Because the problem that I had to “dissolve” wasn’t the same stuttering that I had dealt with before.

Although I still viewed it as “my monster”, now I could see that it was made up of diverse but quite manageable problems for which solutions already existed. Of course, in practice it wasn’t that easy. Since my stuttering started rather early in my childhood, the tangled mess of non-productive social habits (such as avoidance of speaking situations), fears (fear of authority figures, speaking on the phone, speaking in public), limiting beliefs (“everybody thinks I am stupid”, “my speech is so tedious to listen” etc.), and divided intentions (express or impress?) plus heightened emotional sensitivity became very difficult to untangle at my age of 40+.

Still, I was very willing to try and from that point on my battle with stuttering took an entirely new direction. I still attended speech therapy sessions, but the focus of my efforts had now shifted to activities outside of the speech therapy office. My therapist continued monitoring my progress with stuttering and we kept working on my English, but the fluency techniques were abandoned entirely.

TOASTMASTERS – A VALUABLE RESOURCE

Frankly, I don’t know how far I would have gotten on my own, but one day, following a mad impulse, I emailed John Harrison and expressed my deep admiration for his book. The conversation followed, and at some point he agreed to coach me over Skype. I didn’t expect him to “cure” me. In fact, I had no particular expectations and felt more like an explorer, who sails out in search of an unknown continent and is ready to take what comes to him.

After signing on with such an experienced guide, I started my explorations. And the first thing I did was to join a local Toastmasters Club and started applying the techniques of successful speaking that John presents at the beginning of his book.

I would highly recommend to anyone who sets out to dismantle the stuttering system to find a place like Toastmasters. However, to make this experience less stressful and more enjoyable, you have to develop an individual plan and set up a realistic goal for every speech. There is no point to go out and do your public speaking trying to measure up to the greatest orators. This approach will lead you to failure and frustration. Instead, you may focus on simple and realistic goals for each speech such as using your bigger voice, or maintaining good eye contact even during blocking episodes, or you can even explore voluntary stuttering. The key is to chose only one goal, praise yourself on accomplishing it, and not worry about some flaws that you as a speaker might still have.
It is also important to make sure that a Toastmasters club that you selected has warm and supportive atmosphere. To prevent yourself from accidental hurts, it is better to disclose your speech problem during your introductory speech and explain your goal as a Toastmaster member.

I used public speaking exercises from John Harrison’s book. For example, during my first speech I used elongated pauses and a slow pace. In my second speech I practiced using exaggerated gestures and maintaining eye contact, in the third, having a louder voice and varied pitch.

If I experienced a speech block during presentation, I tried to remember not to push through it (as was my habitual way of dealing with blocks). Instead, I would intentionally prolong it, as if saying to my stuttering “Come on, buddy, let’s see who gives up first”. This “voluntary stuttering” technique produced an amazing effect of releasing tension, and, most important, emotional liberation. After a lifetime of futile attempts to “blend in” and to be “accepted,” I gave myself a wholehearted permission to be different. It felt so good.

MAKING PROGRESS

These deadlock blocks were the first to go. This was a significant victory for me, because for me the episodes of silent struggle were the most painful, since I had no control over them, and also because they were accompanied by weird facial contortions. I think if I continued to have those blocks, I would have quit Toastmasters after just one or two oral presentations because I wouldn’t wish to subject myself to this humiliation anymore.

Voluntary stuttering and my general attitude of deep interest in the stuttering phenomenon allowed me to gain control over my speech and reduce the length and severity of blocking to the manageable level. In a course of almost a year, I gave ten speeches and took on several meeting roles. Not only I was able to stand up and talk before the club members, I actually won a number of awards including seven Best Speaker, two Best Table Topics Speaker, and two Best Evaluator.

None of this was anything I would have done before. With every speech and with every role, I felt myself more comfortable and increasingly fluent. I joined the National Stuttering Association and started attending support group meetings. Instead of emailing I made it a habit to always call people on the phone. I also used every opportunity to start a conversation on the street or in the stores.

The most important thing was that I stopped getting frustrated over my failures. I stopped being afraid. In fact, I became so fascinated with my monster that I decided to befriend it. Since then, all the actions I’ve undertaken to facilitate my recovery have been driven, not only by my desire to overcome stuttering, but also out of scientific interest and deep curiosity.

NLP – THE FINISHING TOUCH

Gradually, I increased the level of control and awareness during the conversation, learned how to get in touch with my emotions instead of blocking them, and developed an ability to identify when I had divided intentions. I also read most of the books on John Harrison’s reading list and adding to them a few of my own choice to deepen my understanding of the rules and mechanics of human conversation about which I had been so ignorant.

As my knowledge and experience grew, so did my fluency. I also began to feel myself more and more in control of my speech. And yet, I felt that there was something else lurking underneath my blocking. Something that I couldn’t quite identify, but which had the feeling of helplessness, fear and inferiority as if I were suddenly reduced to some lower level of competency. In those moments I felt small and powerless, and I didn’t know why. In those moments I didn’t want to express myself or to connect with other people. I wanted to withdraw and hide.

The answer came with the book by Bob Bodenhamer, Mastering Blocking and Stuttering. Thanks to this book I made a startling discovery. It appeared that my belief system, with which I evaluated myself and my relationship with other people, was built on logical speculations and assumptions made by a child - a much younger me, a girl between the age of four and eight.

This why I was feeling so small. This is why I felt so inferior compared to other “adult” people. And this is why I was so desperate to blend in, to be accepted and approved.
This was a revelation.

Lucky for me, there was a tool that I could use to fix this. The technique is called Neuro-Linguistic Programming or NLP, and it has been successfully used to treat a variety of conditions.

NLP is a form of cognitive therapy and it gives people the power to revisit their past and re-evaluate it from a different perspective. This shift in perspective (called reframing) is what helps a person to arrive at a different conclusion. It is especially useful when applied to childhood experience, because we can use our mature brain, our adult knowledge and our life experience to correct the flawed logic of a small child.

Since Bob Bodenhamer was the first practitioner who started using NLP for Stuttering and since I had read a fascinating story by Linda Rounds, who recovered from stuttering after only three sessions, I decided to contact him. To my delight he agreed to several therapy sessions. This was a finishing touch. In 5 or 6 sessions we revisited my childhood, reviewed the foundation of my belief system, and replaced the faulty structure with one that was more sound and appropriate.

It is interesting that all of the childhood episodes that we revisited and reframed during these sessions appeared so insignificant they couldn’t cause such severe condition as stuttering. But as I understand now, they created a certain landscape, an environment, in which the stuttering monster felt right at home. After my mental landscape was changed, my speech started to flow much easier and much of the tension that accompanied speaking situations was gone for good.

As I understand it now, changing my beliefs was the most difficult part in my “Hexagon therapy” and using NLP saved me many months or even years of effort, not mentioning a great deal of frustration that would inevitably accompany my attempts of battling my childhood fears on my own.

And finally – a clown school!

In the early summer of 2010 my teenage daughters enrolled in the Seattle School of Acrobatics and Circus Art. They did not intend to become professional acrobats, of course, but they did it just for the fun of it. They got me interested in the class. While browsing the circus school website, I came across a class that offered to reveal our “funny bones” by teaching us the secrets of clown art. Clowns! That is exactly what I need! And I immediately enrolled.

To some, this jump from NLP to clowning may seem sudden. But to me, this was perfectly logical. Since my childhood, clowns seemed to me a strange bunch, whose behavior contradicted all norms and rules. They could be loud, extravagantly dressed, obnoxious, even annoying and seemed to enjoy high level of freedom, while for me watching my behavior and checking what others thought of it became a lifelong habit. I wanted to learn how they did this.

Our first class started with a short lecture about three states that every clown should master – an animal, an athlete and an artist. An animal has the ability to act solely from its intentions and desires without bothering itself with inner struggles or self-doubt. An athlete has certain skills that he masters by long and hard work. And an artist has an ability to adapt to sudden changes of situation and to come up with a creative solution. He also has an ability to change. This was much related to my own journey. Isn’t this true that in order to speak well we have to be able to immerse ourselves in the realm of conversation, following our intentions and leaving aside our self-doubt and inner struggle? In order to achieve this, we need to put many hours into practice, such as going to Toastmasters, talking to strangers and challenging our comfort zone? And isn’t this true that we also have to be able to change and to creatively respond to the changes in our environment (how many PWS get thrown out of balance, when they encounter unexpected problems in their conversation such as when a wrong person answers the phone or a salesperson is rude and inattentive?)

We also played a ball game (I talk about it in more detail in my speech I posted on You Tube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AJbKDZK6RtM&feature=channel.) This game was simple, but involved some challenges such as watching whose turn was next or counting how many times you have caught the ball. It was fascinating to observe how such minor difficulties could make people nervous and how easy it was to slip into a performance mode. Those people didn't have stuttering, but under this performance pressure they displayed very familiar for me reactions and behaviors. Needless to say that to succeed in this game we had to stop thinking, worrying and evaluating ourselves - we had to get out of our heads and be fully engaged in the moment. This was also exactly what I needed in order to become fluent.