See several articles by John Harrison on the Minnesota State University Mankato Web Site
Understanding the Speech Block
John C. Harrison
At the heart of chronic stuttering — specifically, the kind of dysfluency that ties you up so you momentarily cannot utter a word — is something called a “speech block.” We have traditionally seen speech blocks as having a life of their own, mysterious and unexplainable. Speech blocks seem to “strike” us at odd moments, usually without our knowing why.
You’re standing in line at Macdonalds, about to say “hamburger,” when suddently, a speech block zooms out of the ether and (WHUMP!) hits you in the vocal cords and renders you speechless.
The blocks seem as if they are not connected to us, giving rise to such phrases as “I was hit by a speech block.”
In response, we search for explanations. You hear statements such as, “Speech blocks are genetic.” — a prime example of using one unknown to explain another.
But when you understand what a block is about, it begins to make sense. There is no need to resort to such esoterica as genetics. Sometimes, simple explanations are the most compelling.
Opposing forces
I’d like to invite you to undertake a little exercise. Hook your hands together with your elbows pointed outward in opposite directions. Now try and pull your hands apart while making sure that your hands stay locked.
This is an example of a block. You have two forces of equal strength pulling in opposite directions — the force you’re exerting to pull your hands apart opposes the force you’re exerting to keep your hands locked together. As long as the two forces are equally balanced, you remain blocked.
If you want to get past the block, what are your options? Well, you can.
- decide to stop trying to pull your hands apart;
- decide to stop clamping your hands together;
- decide that this silly demonstration is not worth wasting another moment of your time and go do something else.
Any of these alternatives will instantly resolve the block.
Let’s look at what these three options have in common. All of them involve your intentions — in this case, your conflicting intentions. The block is caused by attempting to do two things simultaneously that pull you in diametrically opposite directions — pull your hands apart and hold them together.
How does this relate to speech?
A speech block is created when you intend to do two things that are directly opposed to one another. As long as you keep trying to do them both, you will experience yourself as blocked.
Shooting the horse
To better understand the nature of a block, let us examine it within a totally different context. Let us say that one beautiful summer afternoon you’re riding your favorite horse in the back country. Your mount is a splendid Arabian that you’ve raised from a colt. Riding this gallant steed has become your most beloved pastime, and over 15 years the two of you have become fast friends. When you’re not riding, you’re in the stable, grooming the horse and caring for it.
Today, as you canter through the tall grass, you’re lost in a magical, timeless world. Then suddenly, disaster! Your world collapses! The horse steps into a hidden hole, crashes to the ground and hurls you over its head. You roll. You pick yourself up, knees and elbows raw. But you’re oblivious to the pain, because the unthinkable has happened. Your best friend, the Arabian that you’ve loved for 15 years, is lying on the ground with its leg broken. It is in pain. It is suffering. It cannot be saved. You know that the only humane thing is to put it out of its misery. Right here. Right now.
Because this is snake country, you have gotten in the habit of wearing a side arm. You have one with you now, a .38 colt. You draw the pistol, and walk slowly up to the horse. You can see its pain. This has to be done. You stretch your arm in front of you, hand gripping the .38. You aim the pistol at the horse’s forehead, and slowly squeeze the trigger.
But your finger freezes. The horse is looking straight into your eyes. You look back. This is your best friend. How can you possibly pull the trigger? You think of all the years you’ve spent together, all the happy hours in the back country. How can you just stand there and kill your best friend?
You try again, but again, you cannot get yourself to pull the trigger. Your index finger is rigid and won’t move. You’re aware of what’s holding you back. You are not willing to experience the grief you know will arise the second after you pull the trigger, the pistol lurches in your hand, and the horse’s eyes glaze over. You just cannot pull the trigger!
At this moment you are experiencing a block. Two forces of equal strength are pulling you in opposite directions. Pull the trigger and lose your best friend. Don’t pull the trigger, and cause your best friend to suffer needlessly. You find yourself frozen.
How can you get past the block?
You can choose not pull the trigger and allow the horse to suffer, or perhaps have someone come and do the job for you. Another option is to pull the trigger and accept the pain you’re sure to feel. Whichever route you take, to get past the block, something has to give.
Losing self-awareness
Were you in this position, there would be no mystery about what was going on. You’d know why you couldn’t pull the trigger. You loved the horse, and the pain of shooting it was something you could not bear.
Now let’s modify this story. Let us say that you were out of touch with the fact that you cared for the horse, because you traditionally hid your feelings from yourself. You were just not the type to admit that you cared.
Okay, same scenario. The horse falls and breaks its leg. You draw your pistol and point it at the horse. You start to squeeze the trigger, and again, your finger freezes. But now, the frozen finger is a mystery, because you are out of touch with your feelings. You do not allow yourself to know that you care for the horse, although you care terribly. You have pushed this caring out of your awareness. Nevertheless, the fear of having to confront those feelings is holding you captive. Some thing is stopping you from pulling that trigger. It seems beyond your control because you’re out of touch with your fears about shooting the horse. It’s a matter of will. What is stopping you is your own reluctance to act.
The speech block
This is analogous to what happens with a speech block. You have a divided intention — speak/don’t speak. But because you have learned to prevent yourself from experiencing painful emotions, you close up and hold back. You push the fear (embarrassment, discomfort, etc.) out of your conscious awareness.
Thus, the block seems outside of your control, because you’re only aware of half the conflict. You know you want to speak, but you are not aware of the simultaneous reluctance to speak because of the underlying fear and pain. You hold yourself back without being aware you’re doing so. That is why speech blocks seem to happen to you.
The antidote is to begin paying attention to what you’re feeling…or at least start noticing and questioning what’s going on when you block. The most compelling question I used to ask myself when I was afraid of blocking was, “Suppose I do speak right now in this situation. What might I experience? Usually, the first thing I thought of was, “I might stutter.” Perhaps. “But what else, might I experience?” Here’s where so many people go blank. They simply don’t know what else might be lurking down there.
Is it a fear of asserting yourself…of looking aggressive or coming on too strong…of being the real you? Usually, the problem lies in this area. There is something about yourself that you feel is unacceptable, so you hold back until it feels safe to talk. “Safe” means that you can now talk because the intensity of the feelings has dropped and you can now remain within your comfort zone.
A second scenario
Just to confuse things, there is another, completely different scenario that can also lead to a speech block. It, too, involves a divided intention, but it is driven by different forces. It has to do with one of the body’s natural responses — the valsalva reflex.
William Parry in his excellent book, Understanding and Controlling Stuttering (available from the National Stuttering Association or from Amazon) postulates that a speech block can result from the misapplication of a valsalva maneuver.
What is a valsalva maneuver? A valsalva maneuver is what your body does whenever you try to lift a heavy suitcase, open a stuck window, give birth, take a poop, or do anything that involves a concentrated physical effort. Your chest and shoulders become rigid. The muscles in your abdomen tighten. And your throat — in particular, your larynx — becomes completely locked. The locking of the larynx is the body’s way of closing the upper end of the windpipe in order to keep air in the lungs. It is called an effort closure.
Why does your body do this?
Blocking the upper airway at the same time as you tighten your chest and abdominal muscles puts pressure on your lungs and creates internal pressure. This, in turn, creates strength and rigidity. It allows you to push harder. It gives you strength. It’s why four inflated tires can hold the weight of a heavy automobile.
Initiating a valsalva maneuver makes sense if you’re lifting your new 32-inch TV onto its stand. You need the added strength. But it is a non-productive strategy if you’re asking someone where the post office is, and you expect to have difficult saying “post,” so you start preparing yourself to push the word out. The very muscles that are tight and rigid and clamped together to give you strength are muscles that should be soft and pliant and relaxed in order to create the resonant tones associated with speech. No wonder you can’t speak.
Then why do we tighten everything?
Professor Woody Starkweather in an e-mail on the Stutt-L listserv on March 29, 1995, offered an excellent description of how some children end up misapplying the valsalva maneuver as they first struggle to learn to speak. Here’s what Woody said:
Personally, I think that most “garden variety” people who stutter (PWS) when they are very young find themselves repeating whole words. At this point, they aren’t usually struggling (there are exceptions), but they are still being impeded in their ability to say what they want to by these sometimes long, whole word repetitions. Their first reaction to this is usually frustration. They want to talk and they can’t go forward as quickly as they want to. Typically, this happens between two and four years of age.
At this age, the most common strategy for a child to use who is hindered by something in a task he or she wants to perform is to push hard. If something is in your way, you push it out of the way. The idea that some things work better if you don’t try harder is an alien concept to the preschool child, by and large. So they start to push the words out, and it works a little and some of the time because eventually the word does come out, in spite of the pushing, and it feels as though the child has pushed it out.
So he or she learns to push (with subglottal air pressure) when they feel stuck, and a nonproductive, maladaptive strategy for coping with stuttering has been born. The effect on the stuttering behavior is that the repetitions get shorter, i.e., part-word instead of whole word, blockages may increase because at a certain threshold of pushing the vocal folds clamp tighter together (the valsalva reflex), and the tempo of the repetitions increases because pushing harder usually also involves trying to talk faster through the stuttering behavior, that is, trying to stutter faster to get it over with.
There are a variety of strategies — some kids focus on speeding up during stuttering, others just push hard, others learn very early to avoid by turning away, stopping talking, saying “never mind,” etc. And I believe quite strongly that the only way to recover from this problem is first to become very aware of what you are doing during the stuttering. For an adult, this will usually involve learning about even more strategies that have been layered ontop of those early ones, but eventually the PWS comes to know and understand those very early pushing, speeding up, and avoidance behaviors.
Building awareness
So there you have it. Not just one but two credible explanations for what causes a speech block, and not once did we have to mention genetics or faulty brain functions.
Losing awareness of your intentions is not specific to stuttering. People develop blocks around all sorts of things. I once knew a guy who was not able to urinate in a men’s room whenever someone else was in the room with him. Same problem. For whatever reason (usually such fears are deep-seated) he held himself back by tightening his sphincter, but he didn’t know he was doing this. He just knew he couldn’t urinate. When the person left the room, then his sphincter relaxed, and he could complete his business.
As with most problems like this, the recovery process begins by developing your awareness of what’s going on and bringing these unconscious behaviors back into consciousness. This calls for observing each blocking situation carefully, perhaps keeping a diary so you can keep track of what threads are showing up consistently from one blocking experience to another.
Do you block around authority figures. Do you block when you’re afraid you’ll be wrong. Or when you’re afraid of looking foolish? Or aggressive? Or embarrassed? Do anxious feelings come up when you have to assert yourself?
Do you notice that each time you block, you also seem to be holding your breath? What else do you notice you’re doing? What else can you begin to bring back to conscious awareness.
Either of the scenarios I described above can cause a speech block. And sometimes, both are operating at the same time. So you really need to pay attention. Nobody said that recovering from blocking is easy. It’s not. But making the effort — and keeping at it — will eventually pay off by helping you take conscious control of an unconscious reflex.
How I Recovered from Stuttering
A keynote speech by John C. Harrison to the Annual Meeting of the
British Stammering Association London, September 8, 2002
John C. Harrison
It is always a pleasure to come to my favorite city. Especially when I get to talk about my favorite topic. Stuttering had a big impact on my life, and I wrestled with it more or less for 30 years.
My stuttering was always very situational. Around my friends, I could generally talk okay. But if I had to speak in class, or talk to authority figures, or get on a bus and ask for a “transfer, or stop a stranger on the street, I’d block. And as far as standing up and speaking in front of a group…forget it.
And yet I recovered. When I say I recovered, I don’t mean that I’m a controlled stutterer. I mean that the impulse to block is no longer present. It’s gone.
Now, according to most people, that’s not supposed to happen. I’ve heard hundreds and hundreds of people say, “There’s no cure for stuttering. Once a stutterer, always a stutterer. Nobody knows what causes stuttering.” Many of those people have been in the professional community. Mostly, they talk about controlling one’s stuttering. But they don’t talk about disappearing it.
That at least some people can make their stuttering disappear — and I’ve met a number who have — is an important statement on the nature of stuttering. That’s what I’m here to talk to you about…the nature of stuttering.
The reason why we haven’t been more successful in addressing it over the last 80 years is that for all this time…in my opinion and in the opinion of a growing number of others…stuttering has been incorrectly characterized. We’ve been using the wrong paradigm. We’ve been solving the wrong problem.
If you’re trying to solve a problem, the way you define and frame the problem has everything to do with whether you’ll be able to come up with an answer.
Employing the right paradigm is important because a paradigm filters incoming information. Anything that doesn’t fall within the defined characteristics of the paradigm is deemed to be unimportant and irrelevant, although much of what remains unnoticed may be necessary to solve the problem.
Another reason why we’ve been stuck in our thinking about stuttering is that, by and large, most of us focus our attention in looking for answers in all the familiar places.
It’s like the man who’s walking home one night, and comes to a fellow on his knees under a street light, obviously looking for something.
“Hey, buddy, need some help?”
“Sure do,” says the man. “I lost my car keys.”
“Well, let me give you a hand,” says the passer-by. And for the next five minutes they both crawl around under the street light, looking for the keys.
Finally, the passer-by says, “Are you sure you lost the keys here?”
“Oh no,” says the man. “I lost them over there,” and points to a section of grass outside of the light.
“Well, for Pete’s sake,” says the passer-by in frustration. “Why are you looking here?”
“Light’s better,” says the man.
The reason why I’m standing here talking to you today, having disappeared my stuttering, is in part because I never looked for answers in the “well-lit” familiar places. Why? Well, for one thing, I had a simple block and never developed a lot of secondary behaviors. Therefore, I never worked with a speech therapist. Therefore, I never got into the traditional thinking about stuttering as something you had to control. Therefore, my search for answers was not colored by other people’s ideas. I was not told what was important and what was not. I never developed the familiar filters through which most people viewed stuttering. And that’s why I was able to see more clearly what was going on with my speech.
What I discovered over time was that my stuttering was not about my speech per se. It was about my comfort in communicating with others. It was a problem that involved all of me — how I thought, how I felt, how I spoke, how I was programmed to respond. And yes, there were also some things I did with the muscles that created speech that I needed to correct.
Before we go on, there’s something we need to do. We need to define what we mean by “stuttering.”
The easy disfluencies that many people experience in emotional situations are essentially different from the struggle behavior characteristic of a full-fledged stuttering block. One is a reflex triggered by emotions and probably influenced by genetic factors related to how one relates to stress, etc. The other is a learned strategy, a set of behaviors designed to break through or wait out a speech block. They are, in short, not simply points on a continuum but entirely different phenomena. By using a common name, we imply relationships and similarities that may not in fact exist, and it only creates endless confusion to call them by the same name—”stuttering”—even if we distinguish one as “primary” and the other as “secondary”.
For this reason, I propose that we give up the word “stuttering” (except in the broadest of discussions) and differentiate each of five different behaviors by assigning to it its own separate and unique terminology.
- The dysfluencies related to primary pathology such as cerebral insult or intellectual deficit we’ll call pathological dysfluency.
- The disfluencies that surface as the young child struggles to master the intricacies of speech we’ll call developmental disfluency. This has a developmental model all its own which is separate and distinct from the developmental model of adult blocking behavior. Developmental disfluency often disappears on its own as the child matures. It is also highly receptive to therapeutic intervention, so much so that when treated early enough, most children attain normal speech without any need to exercise controls.
- The easy and unselfconscious disfluency characteristic of those who are temporarily upset, embarrassed, confused, or discombobulated does not have a word, so we’ll need to create. We’ll call this kind of disfluency bobulating. Almost everyone bobulates under certain stressful conditions. However, this is usually not a chronic problem, and even if it were, the person is generally unaware of his behavior and is, therefore, unlikely to have negative feelings toward it.
- The struggled, choked speech block that comes about when someone obstructs his air flow and constricts his muscles we’ll call blocking because the person is blocking something from his awareness (such uncomfortable emotions or self-perceptions) or blocking something from happening that may have negative repercussions. This is the chronic disfluency that most people think of when they speak of “stuttering” behavior that extends into adulthood. Unlike developmental disfluency and bobulating, blocking is a strategy designed to protect the speaker from unpleasant consequences.
- Finally, there is a fifth kind of dysfluency related to blocking that occurs when the person continues to repeat a word or syllable because he has a fear that he will block on the following word or syllable. Since he is just buying time until he feels ready to say the feared word, we’ll call this kind of dysfluency stalling. Because stalling is an alternate strategy to the overt struggle behavior associated with speech blocks, the two must be considered in the same vein.
Today, we’re looking at the blocking form of stuttering, which can be more accurately understood as a system involving the entire person. This system can be visualized as a six-sided figure—in effect, a Stuttering Hexagon—an interactive system that’s comprised of at least six essential components: behaviors emotions, perceptions, beliefs, intentions and physiological responses.
Each point of the Hexagon is connected to all the other points. Like a spider’s web, a jiggle anywhere is felt throughout the entire network. Everything affects, and is affected by, everything else. It is the moment-by-moment dynamic interaction of these six components that maintains the system’s homeostatic balance.
It is precisely because of the self-perpetuating nature of the system that it is so difficult to bring about permanent change at only one point. What usually happens is that after therapy most people who stutter slide back. This is because many therapy programs simply adopt a strategy of control in which only speech issues are addressed. Little is done to transform the system that supports the dysfluent speech.
A strategy of disappearance, on the other hand, calls for breaking down the stuttering system into its separate components and making changes concurrently at other points around the Stuttering Hexagon—specifically addressing the individual’s emotions, perceptions, beliefs and programming. Pursuing this global strategy can lead to a self-sustaining fluency system because not only are the speech blocks addressed but also the supporting factors which lead the person to block. It can also lead to a different perception of what stuttering is all about.
I’ve had many people ask me through the years, “Can everybody make their stuttering disappear?” and “How did you do it?” Theoretically speaking, most everybody can make their stuttering disappear. Theoretically. Practically speaking, there are a lot of factors to deal with, and some people have more to deal with than others. Also, not everyone is interested in attaining a high level of fluency. So not everybody is going to be able or willing to completely get rid of their stuttering. But that’s not a requirement, if they can reach a level of fluency that they’re happy with.
After all, not everyone who studies English as a second language is interested in speaking it perfectly. I have a friend, Olga Peshkova, who comes from Russia. Olga has a great job in a large corporation and her English is almost totally fluent. That was her goal: to speak perfect English.
Then you have Mr. Galetski who runs a restaurant in San Francisco and emigrated here some years ago. He took English As a Second Language (ESL) classes, but left after he acquired a rudimentary ability to speak the tongue. Yet, he’s perfectly satisfied with his skill level. He can run his business. He can talk to his customers. They totally understand him. And that’s all that matters.
It’s all up to the individual — how much the person wants to work, how difficult the task is, whether the person has natural language abilities, what skill level the individual is satisfied with, and other contributing factors. There is no “right” way.
Although I’ve shared pieces of how I recovered, I’ve never really told the whole story. So that’s what I’m going to do today. In as much time as I have, I’m going to talk about the key factors that contributed to my recovery. I’ll also relate this to the Stuttering Hexagon so you can see how the changes in my speech were a reflection of the way I changed as a person.
My disfluent speech began when I was three years old. My mother and grandmother had gone to Europe for six weeks, and the day my mother returned, I took her into the garden and said, “Mommy, look look look at the flower.” I don’t remember that day. But I do know that by the age of four, my father was very concerned about my speech and started running me around to various experts. One of them told my father that I was a nervous child, and that I seemed to stutter more when my mother was around.
There are also indications that, although I started out with a very close and intimate relationship with my mom, that something happened to change this. I don’t know what it was. But by the age of 7 or 8, I no longer liked to have her hug me. I was prone to hold in my feelings. I also remember that I was an extremely sensitive child and that it didn’t take much to hurt my feelings.
Libby Oyler, who is both a person who stutters and a speech language pathologist, conducted some fascinating research on the relationship of sensitivity and stuttering for her Ph.D. thesis. The numbers she gave me were astounding.
Although 15% to 20% of the general population can be classified as “highly sensitive,” that number climbs to an amazing 83% for people who stutter.
What does “highly sensitive” mean? On the plus side, it means that you’re more intuitive. You pick up feelings and subtle aspects of communication, both verbal and non-verbal, that don’t register with less sensitive people. But it also means you’re more quickly aroused. Your senses are easily stimulated and sometimes, overwhelmed. You react more strongly when somebody yells at you. It’s easier to get you excited or upset. If somebody doesn’t like the way you act, they don’t have to yell at you or openly mock you to deliver their message. They just have to raise an eyebrow or give you a look, and the message comes through loud and clear.
Libby’s research also highlighted something else that was interesting. About 10-15% of the general population can be classified as behaviorally inhibited. What does that mean? Behaviorally inhibited people find it harder to be out in the world. They’re profoundly more vulnerable. It’s harder to calm them down. They’re more subject to over-arousal. Their brain doesn’t regulate sensory integration well and doesn’t filter out information efficiently so they can relax. For the stuttering population, the percentage of behaviorally inhibited people is not 10 or 15%…it’s 42%.
Did all that apply to me? I think so. If someone was cross with me, or raised their voice, just like that, I’d be upset. I was totally focused on pleasing others and on being nice. And because I was a sensitive kid, I was quick to pick up any signs of disapproval.
Is this hyper-sensitivity what caused my stuttering? No. But it was part of it.
How do I know I was worried about my speech? I recall that back when I used to say my prayers at night, they always began with, “Please, Oh Lord, help me to talk without stuttering, help me keep my back straight, and help prevent all wars.”
Help me keep my back straight? What kid in his right mind would pray for that? I’ll tell you what kind. A kid who didn’t feel he was okay the way he was and who was totally focused on pleasing his mom. And if I had that much of a charge on keeping my back straight, imagine the charge I had about stuttering which was number one on the list.
Here are more things about me. I never got angry. In fact, I was afraid of feelings, just like everyone else in my family. It wasn’t until the age of 30 in an encounter group that I ever got angry and blew up at another person. Imagine that. I went 30 years without ever getting angry. And I thought that was perfectly natural.
Then there was my compulsive need to do things right. In middle school, if I wrote a character too quickly and it filled in, I’d cross it out and write it correctly right above it….until the teacher finally commanded me to stop doing that.
Is this perfectionism what caused my stuttering? No, it’s not what caused it. But it was a contributing factor.
My earliest memory of being really scared about speaking was when our seventh grade class had to perform a scene from a play at a middle school assembly. The play was Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and I was playing the part of Puck. I only had a couple of lines which started out — “I came with Hermia hither.”
Well, did I worry about that for four weeks. I was afraid I couldn’t say the “h” words. I was panicked about being up in front of 100 kids and teachers and standing there with my mouth open, not being able to say a word…because I had this speech problem. That’s all I could see. I had this speech problem.
I did survive it, because I had a trick. I discovered that if I could evacuate most of the air in my lungs, I could talk on the residual air and get the word out. And that’s what I did. When the time came, I said, “I came with (long exhale) Hermia hither.” Oh, I got some funny looks. But I got the words out.
Nevertheless, that experience reinforced my belief that I had a speech problem. How wrong I was. I didn’t have a speech problem. I could speak just fine when I was alone. The problem lay in my relationship with the people I was speaking to. I had a problem with the experience of communicating to others. It was my EXPERIENCE of expressing who I was that I had fears about. And it manifested itself in my speech.
Let’s see what my hexagon looked like at the age of 12. I had a belief that it was dangerous to show my emotions. It was dangerous to be assertive. I believed that I had to do everything correctly. I believed that everyone was judging me…not just my speech…but me. I had very low self-esteem. I didn’t think that I was very important. I had a fear of not being good enough. And a fear of acting out of character with my passive self-image. Speaking forcefully in front of the middle school, on the other hand, required self-esteem. Consequently, I had a conflict, and I resolved it by holding myself back.
By the age of twelve I had so completely made myself over to fit the expectations of others that I didn’t know who I was. Looking back to that “Hermia hither” moment, it’s very clear what I was afraid of. I was afraid of experiencing the excitement of being me. I was holding back me. For some reason, there was something bad about showing up as myself.
How did this happen? How did I get divorced from my real self. How do any of us get so cut off from who we are that we feel compelled to hold back and create a false self?
One of the most elegant statements of how we lose ourselves was written back in 1962 by Abraham Maslow. Maslow was part of a group called the “third force psychologists.” These were psychologists whose main interest was not in pathology. They wanted to understand the self-realizing individual. The person who was super healthy, who consistently operated on a higher level than the rest of us. The person who frequently had what they called “peak experiences.”
What stops us all from being able to reach that same level of functioning?
As little children, we need the approval of others. We need it for safety. We need it for food. We need it for love and respect. The prospect of losing all that is terrifying. So if we have to choose between being loved and being ourselves, it’s no contest. We abandon ourselves and die a kind of secret psychic death.
Maslow wrote a seminal book called, Towards a Psychology of Being which looked at these issues. In that book was a beautiful description of how it is possible to lose yourself and isolate yourself from your deepest sources of power…and not even know that you’re doing it. Listen to Maslow’s description of a child who’s forced to make that choice:
He has not been accepted for himself, as he is. “Oh, they ‘love’ him, but they want him or force him or expect him to be different! Therefore he must be unacceptable. He himself learns to believe it and at last, even takes it for granted. No matter now whether he obeys them, whether he clings, rebels or withdraws — his behavior, his performance is all that matters. His center of gravity is in ‘them,’ not in himself. Yet, if he so much as noticed it, he’d think it natural enough. And the whole thing is entirely plausible; all invisible, automatic, and anonymous!
“This is the perfect paradox. Everything looks normal; no crime was intended; there is no corpse, no guilt. All we can see is the sun rising and setting as usual. But what’s happened? He’s been rejected, not only by them, but by himself. (He is actually without a self.)
But he’s not dead. ‘Life’ goes on, and so must he. From the moment he gives himself up, and to the extent that he does so, all unknowingly he sets about to create and maintain a pseudo‑self. But this is a ‘self’ without wishes. He’ll go through the motions, not for fun or joy, but for survival; because he has to obey. From now on he will be torn apart by unconscious, compulsive needs or ground by unconscious conflicts into paralysis, every motion and every instant canceling out his being and his integrity; and all the while he is disguised as a normal person and expected to behave like one!
So there I was, afraid to say, “I came with Hermia hither”…feeling that it was not okay to be myself in front of the middle school. But all I could see was that I had a stuttering problem.
Something that greatly contributes to the holding back process is the relationship you have with those around you. How many of you have noticed that it’s easy to speak to some people and impossible to speak to others without stuttering? I noticed that. When I was in middle school, I was shy and unassertive. I was not much of a presence in the class. But I had an experience around that time that caused me to wonder.
My parents had some friends who lived in New Jersey, and they had a daughter named Barbara Lee. We were invited out there one weekend, and I spent two days with Barbara Lee and her crowd. I hardly recognized myself. I was outspoken, I was funny, I didn’t hold back, and I didn’t stutter. People listened to me if I had something to say. Then I went back home and instantly turned back into this shy, quiet kid that nobody listened to. A shy, quiet kid who held himself back in his speech.
In retrospect, it became clear that over time, my friends expected me to show up as shy and unassertive, and they related to me accordingly. I, in turn, related to them the way they related to me, and presto! I was locked in a role I couldn’t get out of.
Over the last 26 years, I’ve seen many examples of how a person gets locked into a role and how it affects their speech. One of these moments took place at an NSA chapter meeting about 20 years ago. We had an older fellow in the group named Frank. He was a really nice, unassuming guy with a moderate stutter. One evening, it was my turn to run the meeting, and I came in with some silly poetry for people to read. What I gave to Frank was a stanza from Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland in which the Mock Turtle is singing this plaintive song in a voice choked with sobs Now keep in mind that Frank is a software engineer. It goes this way:
Beautiful Soup, so rich and green,
Waiting in a hot tureen!
Who for such dainties would not stoop?
Soup of the evening, beautiful Soup!
Soup of the evening, beautiful Soup!
Beau—ootiful Soo—oop!
Beau—ootiful Soo—oop!
Soo—oop of the e—e—evening,
Beautiful, beautiful Soup!
I told Frank to ham it up and be as silly and outrageous as he liked. And he did. He was totally silly. Instead of speaking in his usual flat voice, he was really passionate. And Frank was totally fluent. At the end of the meeting, I asked Frank how he managed to let go so much. You know what he said to me? He said, “You gave me permission.”
What was interesting was that Frank’s wife also came to the meeting. She was a severe, stern-faced women who had no interest in participating. She came to observe. And she spent the entire meeting knitting. I looked at her and thought, “I know why Frank doesn’t let go and be himself. He married his mom. He was still caught up with being a good boy.”
So the people around you and how you relate to them will have a big impact on your willingness to let go, that is, if you choose to hand over your power to them.
What I discovered through my own recovery process was that, at the heart of it, stuttering isn’t a problem with the production of speech. All of us can talk just fine when we’re alone. It’s a problem with the experience of speaking. It’s a problem with our discomfort when we communicate to particular individuals and in particular situations. And it’s about the strategies we adopt to manage this discomfort.
What really frustrated me in high school was that one moment I’d be talking, and the next moment I’d be locked up and unable to say a word. I could talk to my friends in the school yard and be perfectly fluent, but giving a book report in front of those same friends in the classroom, I’d only get a few words out before I’d block. Sometimes I wished that I’d stutter all the time. At least then I’d know who I was.
I spent hours in my room, trying to figure out what was happening with my speech when I locked up. I’d tighten my tongue or purse my lips, but it just wasn’t the same. When I actually blocked, it seemed like something was happening to me. In fact, it was not until I got to college that I made any kind of progress with my speech.
In my sophomore year of college I took a class in public speaking, and because I was anxious about my stuttering, I decided to confess to the professor that I had a problem. He was very interested in helping, and asked if I’d like to come by after class. One thing he did was to get out some books and pictures and explained to me how speech was created. It sounds like such an obvious thing, but nobody had ever done that before. For almost 20 years I had been totally in the dark about what was going inside my throat and chest when I spoke and when I blocked.
Now, for the first time, I could actually picture how speech was produced…what it looked like. How many people here know exactly how speech is produced?
The effect of that session with the speech professor was to take some of the mystery out of the speaking process. I could picture in my mind what I might be doing when I blocked. I don’t know about you, but when I understand something, I don’t fear it as much.
I also took a big leap by giving a talk in my speech class about stuttering — the first time I talked publicly about it. The reaction of the class was great. People were interested. I didn’t feel like a weirdo, and it made speaking much easier for the rest of the semester.
By the time I graduated college, I still blocked, though not as much. But more than anything, I had started to observe, not just my stuttering, but all the areas around my stuttering. And while I didn’t have any answers, I was starting to define the questions.
The ability to observe is absolutely critical if you want to change yourself in any way. Observing, in its highest form, is called mindfulness. It’s a meditation term. What it calls for is to clear your mind and simply notice what’s going on. Don’t just notice the familiar things. See if you can observe dispassionately, without an agenda. When you can do that…when you can observe without trying to fit what you see into any pre-existing paradigm, it’s amazing the kinds of things you start to pay attention to.
For example, back in the 60’s when you couldn’t pump your own petrol, I’d drive into the service station near our apartment and have to ask the attendant to “Fill it up.” Some days I could say it perfectly without a hitch. Other days, when the attendant came over, I knew I was going to block, and I’d have to resort to starter phrases like, “Eh, man ‘ow are ya can you fill it up please.”
Why was that?
If I was focusing only on my speech, I’d never been able to explain it. But by then I was routinely looking at all aspects of the speaking situation. You know what I finally realized? On the days when I was getting on with my wife, I had no trouble. But on days when I was feeling angry or resentful or hurt and was holding all my feelings in, those where the days I’d have trouble.
Then why was I having a problem with the attendant? I wasn’t hurt or angry at him? I discovered that if allowed myself to connect in a personal way with the attendant, what you might call “having an encounter,” those other feelings would want to come out. That was scary. I didn’t want to experience them. So I would get this danger signal from my body that there was something to fear, and I’d hold back and block.
What encouraged me to make observations like this? A big thing was that I never really had any formal speech therapy. Consequently, my mind was never shaped by the traditional beliefs about speech therapy, including the big one, which is having to control your speech. Consequently, I never focused on my speech. It was amazing all the things I discovered just by keeping a broad focus.
Most people are not very good observers. But they can learn to be. And this is critical if you want to get over this problem.
I never had any formal speech therapy, but I did undertake my own. Whether or not you work with a therapist, there are a lot of things that you can do by yourself. For example, just experimenting, I discovered that if I released a little air before I spoke, I was less likely block. I later found out that this was the air flow technique promoted by Dr. Martin Schwartz in New York.
If I did block, I discovered I could get a better handle on what I was doing if I repeated the block and then said the word the way I wanted to, without the block. Later I found out that this is was the “cancellation” process developed by Charles Van Riper.
I found that if I was really tense and took a deep breath, it helped to relax my body. This is somewhat similar to the costal breathing that’s an integral part of the McGuire program.
Now don’t get me wrong. I’m not against speech therapy. In a very real way, I did go through speech therapy. My own. And it really does help to know what you’re doing when you stutter, to know it so well that you can reproduce it on purpose. It’s like taking apart your tennis swing. The reason you hit too many balls into the net may be because you have a performance fear. But it may also be because you’re not swinging right.
Will changing your swing make you as good a player as Serena Williams? Probably not. But having a proper swing is one of the factors that makes a good tennis player. And speaking in a way that does not interfere with the production of speech is one factor you may need to address in the recovery process.
So again, proper speaking technique is not the whole story. But it’s a part of it.
Personality characteristics can also play a role in the recovery process. I just hate it when something doesn’t work right. As Doris can tell you, I’ve stayed up many nights until 3 a.m. troubleshooting a problem on my Macintosh computer. Sometimes, that compulsiveness drives me a little wacko. But as far as stuttering goes, it worked in my favor. Because whenever I couldn’t speak, I was compulsively drawn to figuring out why.
It also helps if you’re a counterphobic. When I’m afraid of something, I attempt to manage the fear by moving toward the threat and dealing with it directly, rather than running away from it. Every time I got on a bus, I’d ask for a transfer, whether I wanted it or not. Sometimes I could say transfer, but most of the time, I couldn’t. I had to keep pushing it, because I was afraid of what would happen to me if I didn’t. I was afraid to hide.
At the age of 25, I left New York and a safe job in my father’s ad agency and got on a plane and went to California. Smartest move I ever made. I needed 3,000 miles between me and my family, not because they controlled my life, but because I needed them to tell me who I was. In California, I didn’t have that crutch. For the first time in my life, I was really on my own.
I found a job as an advertising copywriter. I found an apartment. And I joined the junior advertising club. The very first meeting, there were 45 people seated around a very large conference table, and the president of the club said, “Let’s start out by having everyone introduce themselves.” I was next to last.
I couldn’t belong to this club if I had to fear introducing myself each meeting. I had to find a way to confront the fear directly, and that’s when I joined Toastmasters.
Toastmasters is one of the truly great organizations for those with speaking fears, because it gives you an opportunity to speak in front of others in a risk-free environment. Oops. Did I say “risk free?” Not quite! It’s true, there no consequences if you block or give a jumbled speech or even stand there with your mouth open and saying nothing. Nobody is going to fire you. And people in Toastmasters are always very supportive. But there is a risk. The risk is to your ego and your self-image. I don’t know how many times I left a Toastmasters meeting feeling like I came off poorly.
However, what those three years in Toastmasters did for me was to provide a place that offered both absolute safety and the experience of risk. It was safe in that, even if I blocked or went blank or totally screwed up, there were no consequences. Nobody would fire me from a job. Nobody would make fun of me. They were a very supportive group.
It felt risky because my ego was on the line. I would sometimes go home sometimes totally mortified about how stupid I must have looked in the meeting. Probably, I wasn’t stupid. It just felt that way. It was my old stuff coming up. But showing up week after week, I slowly became more comfortable in front of people.
Very slowly I was starting to change how I saw myself. And that accelerated in a big way when I became involved with the Synanon Foundation.
To give you a little background — Synanon was a unique 24-hour, residential, self-help rehabilitation program. The residents were all hookers, junkies, ex-felons and others you’d classify as people with acting out character disorders. I was drawn to the organization as a sponsor, as were many others in the community.
One of the unique contributions of Synanon was a form of group therapy called the Synanon Game. Drug addicts and other repeat offenders are hard to reach because they’re so manipulative. Being street-wise, they know all the right words to make a psychiatrist or counselor feel good. This makes it really tough to get them to change their behavior.
So the founder of Synanon, an ex-alcoholic named Chuck Dederich, created a group dynamic in which people could learn to manipulate each other into telling the truth. The only way to “win” in this game was to be candid and honest. If you weren’t, you’d get manipulated from Boston to Bombay, and end up looking very dumb and foolish. The focus of the group would drift from one person to another. At one moment, you’d be on the hot seat. An hour later you’d be running the riot act on someone else. The game was good, because not only did it force you into telling the truth, it also improved your ability to deal with others, and it gave you a chance to explore your feelings.
One evening in 1965 I and a group of others were playing a Synanon Game in a living room in Sausalito, right across the bay from San Francisco. In the group were a builder, a lawyer, a travel agent, a cartoonist and a dozen others like myself who you’d classify as ordinary people.
We also had one Synanon resident with us by the name of Jack Hurst. During the game he said to me, “John, if you stay around for a while, we’re going to make your stuttering disappear.”
After three years of having people see the most unflattering sides of me,
I realized one day that Jack’s prophesy had come true. I still blocked on occasion, but after interacting with hundreds and hundreds of people in a very intimate setting, I had a different perception of myself, my speech, and other people.
I realized that I didn’t block because I had something wrong with the way I talked. I blocked because I had difficulties with the experience of communicating to others, especially in particular situations. It was as if I finally looked under the hood to see what was really making the car run. And it wasn’t what I thought it was.
What did I find? Well, you name it. I had difficulties with self-assertion. I found it hard to express my feelings. I was a rampant perfectionist. I was overly sensitive. Most times, I didn’t know what I felt. I had very low self-esteem. I was obsessively focused on being nice and pleasing others. I was constantly beset by my conflicting intentions. Oh yes, I also had a tendency to hold back by tightening my throat and holding my breath when I moved too far out of my comfort zone.
If I wanted to survive in those Games, something had to give. I couldn’t survive by being nice and trying to please everyone, because every time I did, I’d find myself pushed into corners and looking totally stupid. You see, people wanted you to define who YOU were. What YOU wanted. What YOU stood for. Problem was, I didn’t start out having answers to any of these questions about myself.
In the Games, I also had my first exposure to strong emotions. In my family, people didn’t laugh hard and cry hard and argue hard. We were always restrained and guarded. But in the Games, quite the opposite was true. People laughed a lot. And cried a lot. And sometimes people got really angry and blew up.
Far from being intimidated, I found the energy exciting during those moments, like when a flight of jet fighters thunders in low overhead and every part of you vibrates with the noise. When I finally let go and blew up at somebody, was that ever a good feeling.
After many, many hours of interacting with others in these games, I stopped seeing what I was doing as something called “stuttering,” and I started seeing it as a system of behaviors and personal characteristics that were organized in a particular way to cause me to hold back and block.
One of the big surprises was how much I was like everyone else. In the beginning, I felt different, in part because I stuttered. But week after week of listening to other people’s stories, I began to see that we were all pretty much the same. People are people. Eventually, it got to where, after just 10 minutes into the game, I would find a point of connection with everyone in the room.
Another thing that changed was my relationship to authority. How many here find it more difficult to talk to authority figures like a boss or a parent or an expert of some sort?
I began to change in this area when I started taking graduate classes at San Francisco State College in the mid-60s. The most fascinating of those classes was taught by a nationally known general semanticist by the name of S. I. Hayakawa who had written a landmark book called Language in Thought and Action. Hayakawa was the most innovative and unorthodox teacher I’ve ever experienced.
In the first class, Hayakawa began by describing his grading system. “Everyone in the class is guaranteed a B,” he said. “No matter what you do, you’ll still get a B. At the end of the semester, if you deserve A work, all you have to do is come and ask me, and I’ll give you an A. No questions asked. I only reserve the right to give an A to someone who deserves it but is too modest to ask for it.”
Now, what did this have to do with stuttering? It was in Hayakawa’s class that I first realized how much I was intimidated by authority and how that undercut my own sense of self. Hayakawa asked us to write a paper a week on anything we wanted. Any length. Any subject. Any language. Because I didn’t have any requirements to fill, every word, right from the beginning, was mine. I wrote on the things that I wanted. What a wonderful (and bizarre) experience that was. Back in college, if the professor asked us to write a 1000 word paper, my paper would start with word 1001. But in Hayakawa’s class, with every word I wrote, I experienced what it felt like to be my own person, to write from the heart, and to be supported and recognized by the authority at hand.
You know how the classes unfolded? Twenty-five people would sit in a large circle. Then Hayakawa would walk in, sit down, look around, and say, “Well, what’ll we talk about tonight?
Some people were intimidated by the lack of structure. I LOVED IT!!! How liberating it was! I felt I could finally take a deep breath and be myself. I had never had that as a child. People were always telling me what to do, and how to do it. I never knew what it felt like to speak spontaneously freely and honestly in the presence of a non-judgmental authority figure, and be totally supported.
In General Semantics, which is what Hayakawa taught, I learned something about how my mind worked, and especially, how the way I used language shaped my sense of reality. In particular, I learned how debilitating labels can be.
For example, you invite me to your home for dinner, and a few days before someone says to you, “I’m not sure how to tell you this, but John Harrison is a thief.”
Would you put out the good silver? Or would you put out the stainless? Probably the stainless.
Suppose your informant had said instead, “You know, John stole something once.” What then? Since I didn’t have the label of being a thief, you probably wouldn’t be overly concerned. But you still might be alert.
On the other hand, if you asked your informant, “Well, what did John steal?” and she said, “Oh, John stole 15 pennies from his cousin’s piggy bank when he was 9 years old” (true story!), the issue of the silverware probably wouldn’t even come up.
In the general semantics class, I got to see how the way I used language forced me to see things as either-or propositions. I’m a success. I’m a failure. I’m a stutterer. I’m not a stutterer. I got to understand how language led me to see myself in a particular way.
I was encouraged to constantly challenge my own perceptions. If I blocked, and somebody smiled, I automatically assumed they were laughing at me. General Semantics taught me to question how I saw things. It taught me that my perception of reality was not reality at all. It was only my perception. The person could be smiling for any number of reasons. Maybe I just said something that reminded them of a funny experience. Maybe their drawers were too tight, and that smile was a grimace of pain.
I began to see that if someone became upset, I automatically thought it was because of something I’d done wrong. That created a lot of stress. It also put me in a one-down position. Once I got in the habit of challenging my perceptions, I started to see very interesting things.
So changing how I thought played a very big part in my recovery from stuttering.
There were many, many things like those I just described that contributed to the broadening picture of myself and of the world at large. But I’m hoping that touching on some of the highlights will give you the flavor of the recovery process…and that stuttering is a problem that involves all of you.
Do all perfectionists stutter? No. Does everyone who holds back his feelings, stutter? No. Are all highly sensitive people subject to stuttering? No. Do all people who grow up with a higher level of childhood disfluency stutter? No. Does everyone who gives up their real self and creates a false self stutter? No. Do all people who use the language in a non-self supportive way stutter? No.
But what happens when you take all these factors and put them together? If you put them together in the right way, you create a self-reinforcing system that’s greater than the sum of the parts. It’s not the parts, but how they go together that creates the blocking behaviors that most people call stuttering.
Remember, unless you put the parts together correctly, you don’t end up with chronic blocking.
By the age of 35, stuttering had pretty much disappeared from my life. To understand why, it might be useful to compare my hexagons as an early teenager, and as someone in his mid-30s.
John, age 15 | John, age 35 |
Beliefs | beliefs |
I have no worth (low self-esteem) | I am worthy (good self-esteem) |
I must be nice at all costs. | I must be genuinely me. |
What I have to say is unimportant. | What I have to say is important. |
I have to please everybody. | I have to please myself. |
People are focused on me. | People are focused on themselves. |
The world wants me to be good. | The world wants me to be me. |
Expressing feelings is bad. | Expressing feelings is desirable. |
The world has to meet my mother’s standard. | The world is perfect the way it is. |
My needs always come second. | I can decide when my needs have priority. |
PERCEPTIONS | PERCEPTIONS |
People are judging me. | I’m the one who’s judging me. |
I’m not measuring up. | I’m doing the best I can. |
I’m being aggressive. | I’m being assertive. |
The other person is speaking the “truth.” | The other person may be speaking the truth (and maybe not.) |
intentions | INTENTIONS |
My intentions to speak and not speak are fighting each other. | My intentions are in alignment. I’m clear when I want to speak, and it’s okay to speak. |
physiological responses | physiological responses |
I am sensitive and quick to react. | I am sensitive and quick to react. |
physical behaviors | physical behaviors |
I tighten my lips and vocal chords and hold my breath when I’m worried about speaking. | I keep everything lose and supple. |
I hold back. | I let go. |
Where are we going with stuttering? Are we finally starting to make some progress? I think so.
My guess is that within the next five years, there will be definitive answers to what chronic stuttering is all about and how to approach it. In fact, I believe we have a lot of the answers right now, if we only recognize what we already know. The reason why I think this will happen is similar to what is happening with the SETI project.
SETI, as you may know, stands for the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence and is the program that is organizing the effort to find life in outer space. Among other things, SETI is collecting voluminous amounts of radio broadcasts from deep space. These data need to be processed and analyzed for instances of intelligent transmission. This takes enormous processing power, more supercomputer power than will ever be available to the organization. How could they take on such a Herculean job.
Then several years back, someone came up with a brilliant solution. Break the data down into small chunks and send them to hundreds of thousands of home computers. Instead of running screen savers, the computer owners would allow their machines to process the data when their computers are not being used. The data would then be sent back to SETI to be assembled and further processed.
A similar process is already started to happen around stuttering. With hundreds of thousands of consumers working to solve the problem, and with the Internet as the means to share their experiences, we now have the firepower to solve what so many people have thought was an unsolvable problem. That’s because everyone is empowered to be part of the solution. Coming up with answers is no longer the exclusive domain of the professionals. It’s an effort that involves all of us.
For example, how many people are on Stuttering Chat? How many people are on some other Internet forum relating to stuttering? Check out the various Internet resources on stuttering if you’re not already familiar with them.
Because of this huge dialogue that’s been taking place on stuttering, ordinary people are doing extraordinary things. They’re writing books. They’re coming up with suggestions for therapy. And they’re helping researchers and speech pathologists to be better informed.
At this year’s annual conference of the National Stuttering Association, we held the First Joint Symposium for Researchers and Consumers. This meeting, which was two years in the making, is, as far as I know, the first such gathering in the history of stuttering research. It was designed to facilitate interactions between and among researchers and consumers on the subject of fluency disorders. For a day and a half, fifty scientists and clinicians, along with fifteen consumer advocates, discussed the current and future state of stuttering research and drafted ideas for future studies. This is the kind of cooperation I’m talking about.
There have also been a number of speech professionals who have been intimately involved with the stuttering community through the Internet over the last 10 years, and through attending NSA chapter meetings and conferences. It’s been interesting to see how much they’ve grown and how their points of view have been transformed as a result.
I’m sure that people here are saying, “Well, what can I do?” How can I start dismantling my stuttering hexagon. How can I start getting past my speech blocks? How can I get to where speaking is fun?
Here are some things you can do.
Start reading. Not just about stuttering. Start reading in all those areas that have to do with who you are as a human being.
Start being a good observer, not just about yourself as a stutterer, but about you as a person. Notice the subtle ways in which the way you function as a person affects your speech. Start asking questions like — “Suppose I didn’t block in this situation, what might happen?” Don’t stop with the obvious answers like, “Well, if I didn’t block, I might stutter.” Go further. What else might happen if you really showed up as the full version of who you are? Keep a journal.
Get out of your comfort zone. Experiment. Try new things. Remember, there’s a good chance that the answers may not be under the street light, but in the dark where you have to feel your way around.
Get to know your stuttering behavior in intimate detail, so you can duplicate it on purpose, down to the finest degree. Know what you’re doing when you block. Don’t allow yourself to go unconscious. Work with a speech professional, if you need to, in order to get a handle on this.
And for Pete’s sake, get on the Internet if you’re not there already, and start dialoging with people who have an enormous amount of wisdom and insight to share.
I’d like to conclude by reading a couple of emails posted on the neuro-semantics website by several list members who have been participating over the last six months. These are people who have been deeply affected by their participation on the net.
The first is from Robert who says…
I would like to share a little of my realizations that would have been somewhat foreign to me 6 months ago. I, too, and probably most of you out there, wanted to consciously be rid of stuttering. I now realise that just letting go of my stutter would have left the same old me, just without a stutter. If I had “fixed” my stutter, life may have been easier, but I would have been in the same model of my world. It is myself that I have needed to heal. Healing myself enables me to change my life for the better… I have started a new journey that I didn’t realise was even there for me. And…. here’s the EPIC part about it… the stutter leaves me as a consequence. Yes… it just leaves of it’s own free will. Wow! I don’t know about you guys and gals, but that bloooows me away.
And finally, this is from Prasun, who is in the audience and who wrote this not very long ago…
This group is really making a difference to people’s lives. It’s amazing how technology facilitates this. I have progressed quite a distance, and have reached the point where I realize that effective speaking is so much more than just NOT stuttering! Since the last month or so, I have just not been caring whether I stutter or not, it is not that big a bother as it was some time ago. John’s ‘free fall’ concept is so useful, and when I free fell in the situations I earlier consistently avoided, things turn out real cool. In general there is so much less tension, feverishness, worry…maybe the real me is coming out. The most important thing of course is my own relationship with myself, which has improved vastly. What would we do without this group!
Ladies and gentlemen, big changes are now taking place in the way we view stuttering. It’s happening now. There are thousands participating in the process.
Won’t you join in the fun?
Why Are Speech Blocks So Unpredictable
John C. Harrison
For years, I used to bite through pencils in frustration, trying to come up with some logical explanation for the seemingly capricious nature of speech blocks.
— Why do I have good days and bad days?
— Why do I sometimes block on words I usually can say without effort?
— Why does the feeling that I’m going to block seem to come out of the blue and for no apparent reason?
— Why can I go along for three minutes without a block, and then suddenly have everything fall apart?
I used to think I’d be better off if I stuttered on every word, rather than only in special situations. At least then, my life would be more predictable. Non-stutterers have no idea of the uncertainties that are created when something as basic as your speech stops and starts and lurches like a car with carburetor problems. It casts an uncertain shadow on every aspect of your life.
I once tried to explain this mindset to a non-stuttering friend. Imagine, I said to him, that you’re walking merrily along the street after an uneventful shopping trip to Macy’s when all of a sudden this gloved hand comes out of nowhere and — WHUMP! — it bops you on the nose. Not hard. Not so it draws blood. But sudden enough to startle you.
“Hmph!” you say. “Now where did that come from?”
A bit ruffled, you continue on down the street. You walk into the bank to make a deposit. Just when you step up to teller window and open your mouth to speak, a gloved hand comes out of nowhere and — WHUMP! — it bops you on the nose. Not hard, but hard enough to disconcert you.
You make your deposit and leave the bank. Walking by a newsstand, you feel a bit rattled and decide to buy a magazine to take your mind off of your anxieties. You fish around for the right change, hand it to the man behind the counter, open your mouth to ask for the magazine…and suddenly this gloved hand comes out of nowhere and — WHUMP! — it bops you on the nose.
How is the world feeling right now?
Unpredictable.
It’s lunchtime, so you walk into a local eatery. As you walk through the door, you notice you’re doing something you didn’t do before. You’re scanning the room ahead of you, looking for that damned gloved hand. Your schnozz is tired of getting bopped. Except nothing happens. Reassured, you find an empty table, sit down, and open up the menu. Ah, the roast beef sandwich looks great. The waiter comes over to take your order.
“What would you like,” he says.
“The roast beef on whole wheat,” you answer.
“Anything on the side?”
“Yeah, an order of fries.”
“And to drink?”
“A Miller Lite.”
“What was that again”
“A….” You go to repeat Miller Lite, but you never make it, because suddenly a gloved hand comes out of nowhere and — WHUMP! — it bops you on the nose.
Oh stop it!!! Why is this happening? None of it makes any sense. Why could you buy a shirt in Macy’s without incident, and then walk into the restaurant and get bopped. This constant surprise is driving you crazy.
My friend said he now understood why I found the world so unpredictable.
Speech blocks have many triggers
Traditional thinking says that stuttering is all about what we do when we’re afraid we’re going to stutter. Speech pathologists and most PWS have professed this for almost 80 years. But like many explanations of stuttering, this is only a partial truth. A fear of stuttering can definitely cause more stuttering, and it also explains the self-reinforcing nature of the problem. But it certainly doesn’t explain what triggers all stuttering blocks. And it does nothing to explain the fact that stuttering can come and go at odd moments and often seems to have a mind of its own.
During my own recovery process, I identified many situations that had nothing to do with stuttering fears per se and yet were fully capable of triggering a speech block.
In this article, we’re going to set aside the familiar and obvious reasons why people block, most of which have to do with a fear of stuttering. Instead, we’re going to look for the less obvious causes that often play a key role in initiating a stuttering block.
But before we do that, there are several things we need to get clear about. First, I need to explain what I mean when I say “stuttering.” I’m not referring to bobulating, which is a coined word that describes the effortless, disfluent speech you hear when someone is uncertain, upset, confused, embarrassed, or discombobulated. I’m talking about speech that is blocked. The individual feels locked up and helpless to continue.
Next I need to define my understanding of what blocking in speech is all about. I have come to understand blocking/stuttering, not simply as a speech problem, but a system involving the entire person—an interactive system that’s comprised of at least six essential components: behaviors, emotions, perceptions, beliefs, intentions and physiological responses. This system can be visualized as a six-sided figure in which each point of the hexagon affects and is affected by all the other points.
Thus, it’s not any one thing that causes a speech block. It’s not just one’s beliefs…or emotions…or physiological make-up…or speech behaviors that lead the person to lock up and feel helpless and unable to speak. It is the dynamic interaction of all these six components that leads to struggled speech.
I also need to share my understanding of the way that emotions contribute to the speech block.
The emotion track
If you’ve ever seen a piece of 35mm movie film — the kind they use in a movie theater — you’ll notice one or several wiggly lines to the left out of the picture frame that are constantly varying in width, like a line on a drum on a seismograph that measures the intensity of earthquakes. This is the optical track that contains the sound for the movie. No matter what is going on, that optical track is always there. If there is no sound, the optical track is simply a straight line. But the track is always there.
Using this as a metaphor, imagine that every moment you’re awake, there is a similar “emotion track” running alongside that contains the underlying emotions associated with what is transpiring. Your brain is constantly processing data, experiences, meanings, etc. If you could somehow record the “emotion track,” you’d see it constantly expand and contract, depending on the feelings associated with the particular environment, what you were saying, who you were saying it to, what words you were using, what thoughts you were having, and how you were feeling at the time.
Having difficulty with a particular word like “for” may not be about that word in particular. It may have to do with what has come before that word, or what you anticipate might come after and the emotions that this moment are engendering.
If you’re resistant to experiencing those emotions, you’ll be inclined to hold them back (block) until the feelings drop to a manageable level.
Optical sound tracks
How does the emotion track function? Let us say George, a person who stutters, is in a meeting with Mr. Peters, his boss. George suddenly realizes he has another meeting coming up that he’d forgotten about, and he has to interrupt his boss to find out the time as he may have to cut this meeting short. (He also feels a bit incompetent because he absentmindedly left his watch home that day.)
Notice that George has little emotional charge on the words “excuse me.” But when he goes to say the word “Peters,” he has a short block, because his boss’ name has an emotional charge for him. That charge pushes his feelings beyond his comfort zone, prompting him to hold back for a moment until the intensity of those feelings drops. The block is indicated by the spike in the emotion track that indicates that George’s emotions have suddenly shot outside his comfort zone.
Now George has to deal with the hard consonant “c” in “can.” Not only has he had trouble with “c” in the past, but he has a fear that Mr. Peters will not like that he has to interrupt the meeting. This makes it even more difficult to let go. George’s feelings spike again on the “t” in “tell,” but they really spike on the “t” in “time.”
Why is that?
The word “time” not only begins with a feared constant, it also completes the thought. Once he says “time,” Mr. Peters will know that George has a time issue and wants to leave the meeting. In anticipation of Mr. Peters’ annoyance and how small and unloved that will make him feel, George blocks on the “t” and has to try three times before he can push the word out.
What’s amazing is that all this is going on, and George isn’t aware of any of it. But then, George isn’t aware of a lot of things. He isn’t aware of his feelings about authority figures, and how they intimidate him. He isn’t aware of his compulsion to please others and to make sure they always like him.
But most significant, George isn’t aware that his mind is programmed to constantly processes his experience, evaluating each moment to look for what may further his health and survival, and what might threaten it. In fact, neuro-linguistic programming (NLP) claims that we process over two million bits of information via our senses every second and that we delete, distort and generalize this information to “suit” ourselves. As motivational speaker Anthony Robbins says, “Everything you and I do, we do either out of our need to avoid pain or our desire to gain pleasure.” This probably sounds too simple, but virtually all life functions this way. It’s just that the complexity of the human mind tends to mask this basic drive.
There is never a time when you are without an emotion track. Sometimes, that track is quiescent, such as in moments of deep relaxation. But that track is always there to guide you away from those things that may cause you pain, and toward those things that are likely to give you pleasure.
This is what I have come to observe about the relation between emotions and speech blocks. Now let’s look at another key part of the puzzle: the way our experiences are stored.
The holistic nature of engrams
As I better understood the dynamics of the speech block and the strategies I employed to break through or avoid it, the behaviors I used to find so bizarre were no longer strange. But it was not until I stumbled across the concept of the engram that I found a credible explanation for the unpredictable nature of those damnable speech blocks.
The engram can be defined as a complete recording, down to the last accurate detail, of every perception present in an experienced moment — a kind of organic hologram that contains all the information derived from the five senses—sight, sound, smell, taste, and touch—as well as whatever thoughts arose at the moment. This cluster of related stimuli is imprinted on the tissue at the cellular level. Permanently fused into the body’s circuits, it behaves like a single entity.
Here’s an example of an engram. You’re in a shopping mall buying a pair of jeans when you suddenly hear a scream. You quickly look up and notice that a scruffy guy with long hair and a skull tatooed on the back of his left bicep and wearing a jeans jacket is holding a gun on the poor clerk at the checkout counter, and he’s demanding that she give him the contents of the cash register. Instantly, your heart starts racing The man grabs the cash from the girl and starts walking briskly toward you. In a panic, you wonder what to do. Should you run? Should you look away. Should you stand still? The man is now looking at you full in the face, as if daring you to challenge him. You instantly look away and hold your breath. He continues on and in a moment, he’s lost in the crowd. You give a big exhale. Behind you, the sales girl is hysterical.
Ten minutes later, you are providing an eyewitness account of the incident to the mall’s security police. You recall his estimated height and weight. You describe, as best you can, his tattoo and the kind of jeans jacket he was wearing. Perhaps you even had the presence of mind to notice his shoes and the color of his hair. But there were many other perceptions that you didn’t report, partly because they did not seem important and partly because you did not consciously notice them. These experiences were woven together into a single engram.
For example, there was a Mariah Carey song playing on the store’s audio system. If someone were to ask, you probably couldn’t recall this detail, but your subconscious mind recorded the song as part of the engram. When the robber walked past you, your olfactory senses picked up a whiff of motor oil from the spill on his pants. Your subconscious mind saw his rough complexion and the fact that he had a small scar at the very bottom of his chin. That was part of the engram, too. Your eyes recorded the harsh store lighting that radiated from transparent globes. Also part of the engram were the crowd noises from the mall, the emotional overtones of the clerk’s screams, the feel of the carpet under your feet, the tension in your legs and body, how thirsty you were. And of course, there were all your emotional reactions—the fear, panic, shallow breathing, tightness in your neck, the cramp in your stomach. All these perceptions and more were recorded and organized into an engram.
Why is all this important? It’s important because the engram plays an important role in your body/mind’s survival strategy, especially in its relation to a little almond-shaped node within your brain that represents the seat of your emotional memory.
The amygdala
This node is called the amygdala and is located within the limbic system, the most primitive part of the brain that has elements dating back several hundred million years. It’s function is reactive—designed to quickly trigger a fight-or-flight reaction whenever the organism (you) feels threatened.
The amygdala has connections, not just to the autonomic nervous system, which controls physiological reflexes such as your heart and breathing rates, but also to other brain regions that process sensory input. It has a special high-speed pathway to the eyes and ears that give it access to raw and unprocessed sensory information. It’s like a neural hub with a trip wire that’s primed to fire whenever danger arises. In short, the amygdala is designed to by-pass the higher, conscious brain that controls cognitive processing so we can act first and think later.
Thus, when we perceive a threat, our body initiates a rapid fire sequence of events, comprising both a fear response and an instant reflex to pull back from whatever we’re doing that triggers that fear.
The problem is, the amygdala is not very smart or discerning and doesn’t differentiate between physical threats (tigers, robbers, fires) and social threats. When any kind of a threat is perceived, the amygdala interprets it as an issue of physical survival. It triggers the sympathetic nervous system, and all at once your breathing becomes shallow, your blood pressure rises, blood rushes to your limbs, heartbeat increases, adrenaline rushes into your blood — a reaction that is designed to give you the physical resources to challenge the threat or run from it.
How does your amygdala know when to trigger a reaction?
It triggers it when there is some element within the moment that suggests the situation is threatening.
Thus, a month later you’re in a bookstore and suddenly find yourself feeling uneasy. What you’re not aware of is that Mariah Carey has just started singing the same tune over the audio system. This one sensory experience recalls the entire jeans shop event. Yet, you’re not consciously aware of this. You just know that your heart is beginning to race.
Later that week you’re on a bus and you suddenly become uneasy. What you don’t realize is that the guy seated next to you works in a garage, and you’re picking up the same scent of motor oil that you experienced in the jeans shop.
In the fast-food restaurant the guy behind you has a tattoo on his shoulder. You feel yourself holding back.
Several days later you walk into a clothing store that has the same harsh lighting as the jeans shop, and suddenly you find yourself edgy without knowing why.
A person you’re talking to at work asks you a question. His voice has the same timber and quality as the robber’s, and as you respond, you find yourself wanting to hold back.
Notice that your circumstances are vastly different from the day you witnessed the robbery. You’re in a McDonalds, not a jeans shop. The guy with the tattoo is there to eat a hamburger, not rob the store. And yet, your emotions are doing a number on you. The reason has to do with how your reactive mind operates. In short, anything that looks like or feels like or even vaguely reminds you of the original experience has the ability to recall and recreate the original experience.
The scruffy guy is the hold-up. The scent of motor oil is the hold-up. The Mariah Carey record is the hold-up. The harsh lighting is the hold-up. The co-workers voice is the hold-up. Each sensory cue functions as if it were a minute piece of a hologram. Shine a strong beam of light on that one little piece of a hologram, and you can see the entire event. Similarly, the most “inconsequential” sensory experiences have the power to recall the entire engram and the emotional responses attached to it.
In the case of speech blocks, a fear of blocking is the most obvious trigger that can cause a person to lock up and be unable to speak. But there are many more ways to trigger this same response. Let’s look at some of the non-stuttering-related circumstances that can trigger a stuttering block.
Reacting to a tone of voice
One trigger is an individual’s tone of voice. Delancey Street Foundation in San Francisco is in the business of rehabilitating drug addicts, prostitutes, convicted felons, and others with acting out character disorders, and they are more successful at it than any other organization in the world. Over a 30-year span, I’ve periodically donated my services to Delancey as an advertising copywriter and have supported them in other ways.
In 1993, I volunteered to teach a public speaking class at Delancey. One day after the class was concluded, I was on my way to my car when I decided to drop by the Delancey Street restaurant located in the same building to say hi to Abe, the maitre d’, whom I had known for 20 years. I didn’t see Abe when I walked in, so I asked the acting maitre d’ to tell Abe that John Harrison had stopped by and asked for him.
I turned to leave when suddenly the fellow I’d just spoken to abruptly called out, “What’d ya say ya name was?”
I turned back to give him my name again, and suddenly I found myself blocked. More specifically, I was in a panic state, frozen and unable to say a word.
Totally flustered, my head swirling, I was catapulted back 30 years to when I used to regularly block in situations like this. Feeling totally self-conscious, I stopped, took a deep breath, and finally was able to bring myself back to “consciousness” so that I could say “John Harrison.”
I left the restaurant upset and puzzled by the sudden appearance of an old reaction. Why did it happen? I’d had a wonderful class. I love Delancey Street—both the people and the organization. This was our favorite restaurant in San Francisco. I wasn’t thinking about my speech; that had stopped being an issue over two decades ago.
The more I thought about it, the more I felt there was something in the fellow’s tone of voice that had triggered my response.
This is precisely how an engram works. It’s not necessarily the situation that triggers you, but some part of the situation that recalls an older event that was threatening in some way. Perhaps it had been a similar situation in which I’d blocked. Or perhaps there was something about the fellow himself. After all, almost all of the residents in Delancey had been in prison. Almost any of the guys could sound tough. Maybe I was intimidated by his tone of voice. He may have barked the question because he saw me leaving and realized that he hadn’t properly heard my name. Maybe that caused him to panic, and maybe I interpreted that panic as something else. A threat? A command? His tone did catch me off guard. Or perhaps there was something about my mindset that day that simply made me more susceptible to his tone of voice. I’ll never know. But I do know that for an instant, I was reliving an incident from an earlier time and place.
Single incidents like this only happened every few years. But when they did, they provided a quasi-laboratory setting to study the circumstances leading to a stuttering block.
The big difference between my response that night and how I would have responded 25 years ago is that, once the event was over, it was over. Though I was curious about it, I didn’t brood about it. Nor did I see it as a problem with my speech, so it did not reawaken any speech fears. It was just one of those things that occasionally comes out of the blue.
This story is just one example of how a situation not involving a stuttering fear per se can suddenly cause a shift in one’s “hexagon” and trigger a speech block.
Reliving a familiar scenario
Now let’s go back even further. By the late 1970’s I had been free of speech blocks for more than a decade, although every several years I would be surprised by an isolated incident. Like the Delancey Street encounter, these moments happened so infrequently that they gave me a laboratory-like opportunity to examine under a mental microscope the inner workings of the block.
This particular episode took place at Litronix, a manufacturer of light emitting diodes in Cupertino, California. I was the advertising writer on the account, and I and Bob Schweitzer, the account executive from the advertising agency, were at the company to present text and layout for a new ad.
Our appointment was for 10 a.m., but since we were a few minutes early, we found ourselves hanging out in the doorway to the office of Litronix president, Bruce Blakken, while he completed a phone call. As I stood chatting with Bob, I suddenly found myself feeling uneasy about introducing myself to Blakken, whom I had not previously met. I had the old familiar feeling that I would block on my name.
That was crazy. I hadn’t dealt with speech blocks in a dozen years. I never thought about stuttering in these situations. Why was this feeling making an unexpected reprise? The closer Blakken seemed to be to completing his phone conversation, the more I found myself worrying about my introduction. Eventually Blakken finished his call and motioned us in. Bob shook hands and immediately introduced me, avoiding the need for my having to say my name. Could I have said it without locking up? I would like to think so, but at the moment, I wasn’t sure. I only knew that I was off the hook.
Later that evening I sat down at home and mulled over the experience. What was going on at Litronix? Where did those feelings come from, and why did they show up at that particular moment?
I kept turning over the incident in my mind, looking at various parts of the tableau in an effort to find a clue that would explain my reaction. Eventually, something began to jell.
Two decades previously I had worked for my father in New York City. Our ad agency was housed in a small four story building on 50th Street where I worked downstairs. My father’s office was on the third floor, and sometimes I would go up to his office when he was on the phone. Unlike visitors from the outside who had to follow a formal protocol (receptionist, waiting room, secretary, and then be ushered in), I’d just hang out in his doorway until he finished his call. After all, I worked there, and besides, I was his son. I could take liberties.
The incident that day at Litronix felt remarkably similar. Because the company was informal, there were no official protocols to follow. We had waited in the reception area before being escorted to Blakken’s office, but after the young woman escorted us down the hallway, she simply said, “Oh, he’ll be done in a minute, and left us standing in the doorway.”
I had been here before. My emotional memory did not acknowledge the differences; rather, it responded to the similarities—head of company, standing in doorway, need for approval, attitudes about authority. These were pieces of a familiar engram that recalled the times when I waited for my dad to get off the phone. Not only did it recall the earlier experience, it became the earlier experience. He was my dad. I was his son, worrying that he wouldn’t approve of what I had done. And consequently, all the old feelings came back. These, in turn, brought back attitudes and feelings I had as a young man, including those about being judged and having to perform.
My amygdala, charged with protecting me from bodily harm, had made another mistake. Once again, it had inappropriately set off my general arousal syndrome to get me ready to fight or flee the saber-tooth tiger.
Fear of having your ideas rejected
A third type of fear-of-blocking scenario involves speaking to teachers, employers, or anyone who we cast in a higher position because of what they know, what they do, or what they can do for or to us. I used to think it was always because I might stutter in front of them. Now I know better. Fear of stuttering can be a valid fear. But fear of having my ideas rejected, something I took very personally in those days, can be equally intimidating, even if you no longer deal with stuttering.
In the mid-90s I was in a workshop sponsored by the Northern California Chapter of the National Speakers Association. Mariana Nunes, who taught the class, was a wonderful, supportive person and an accomplished professional speaker.
Among the subjects she addressed in the workshop was the need for an effective speech title. I had a talk that I’d given to local community organizations, and at the time, it was entitled, “Is It Fun, or Is It Work?” The talk was about how we tend to separate work and fun and how to build a relationship with work in which work and fun can become synonymous. Mariana felt my title would leave people unclear about the nature of my speech. I liked the title and was resistant to changing it. She said that during the workshop we’d have a chance to try out our speech titles on the other members of the group.
She was half way through the workshop when she asked if anyone had a speech title they’d like to test. At first, I did NOT raise my hand. Other people tried out their speech titles, but I held back. I should also mention that virtually all the people in the workshop were either professional speakers or wannabe speakers, so the caliber of those attending was high. I felt intimidated. Offering my speech title to this group meant that I would be judged by those whose opinion I held in high esteem. I had a fear of having my title rejected. But I didn’t want to feel rejected, so I kept holding back.
Eventually, I did raise my hand, but when I did, an old familiar feeling enveloped me. I felt like I was going to block. Now, at that time I hadn’t dealt with chronic speech blocks for over 25 years, although every once in a while, a situation would arise that brought up the old feelings. Though I felt as if I would block, I was also aware that it had nothing to do with my speech. It had to do with my divided intention. I sort of wanted to offer my speech title, but at the same time, I didn’t want to make myself vulnerable to the judgments of others. So I really DIDN’T want to speak. This pull in two different directions was creating a familiar sensation that I would lock up and not be able to talk.
I’d like to say that I ignored my feelings and spoke up, but I am embarrassed to admit that I finally put my hand down, and never did share my speech title. I felt bad about it afterward. However, once again, I was aware that the issue wasn’t about stuttering. It was about making myself vulnerable.
Fortunately, I had a second chance two months later when Mariana held another workshop. Once again, there was an opportunity to share speech titles. This time, my intention was clear, and mine was the second hand that shot up. When I did share the title, the words just flowed. I even felt surprised that it was so easy. As you can see, my mindset was totally different because my intentions were clear, aligned, and focused.
Had I only focused on my fear of stuttering the first time around, I would never have broadened my purview to include all the other issues that were involved. I would have reinforced the belief that I had a speech problem, and that it was a fear of stuttering that was keeping me back. I would have overlooked the real issues.
By the way, Mariana was right. They didn’t like the title. It wasn’t communicating. (I survived that revelation.) My presentation is now entitled, “Why Can’t Work Be More Fun?” and organizations are much clearer about the nature of the speech.
Talking to an unresponsive listener
A fourth situation in which a fear of blocking may have nothing to do with fear of speaking occurs when we speak to a totally unresponsive listener. The person just sits there, stone faced. Brrrrrr. Even now, that’s a tough one for me. I’m getting absolutely no clues to how I’m being received.
The need to be heard is one of the most powerful motivating forces in human nature. It has enormous bearing upon our development throughout childhood. Being listened to is the means through which we discover ourselves as understandable and acceptable…or not. It spells the difference between being accepted or isolated.
This also makes not being understood one of the most painful human experiences. When we’re not appreciated and responded to, our vitality is depleted, and we feel less alive. We are also likely to shut down.
Talking to an unresponsive listener is a lot like looking into a pitch black room. We project our own boogiemen into the darkness. In the absence of a response, our insecurities are awakened, and questions start undermining our self-esteem. Are we making sense? Are we well-regarded? Or are we being seen as the total fool, acting stupid and prattling on and on.
These questions wouldn’t be so important if we didn’t give the listener such power over us—the power to validate us, to tell us we’re okay.
Why don’t we just validate ourselves? Why do we need them? Because we create our own feelings of low self-esteem, and then turn to the other person to make us feel okay.
They have power over us because we want something from them—approval, love, acceptance. Sometimes, they’re in a position to dole it out because of their position. But often, it’s simply that we make them important and then look to them to validate us.
Our fear, of course, is that they’ll do just the opposite. They won’t like us or want us. So we desperately try to become presentable. We hold back our unworthy self. We second guess what they want, so we can provide it, or be it. We hide our dysfluent speech…our assertiveness…our spontaneity…our real self. Careful! Something may come up that the other person will find offensive. Because of their sphinx-like, expressionless manner, we tread lightly around them, as carefully as if we were walking on broken glass. We do everything we can to make ourselves liked. And when they don’t react, we hold back even more.
Our ultimate fear? It’s that they will abandon us. I call it the ultimate fear, because in our child-like state, if we’re helpless and abandoned, it means that we may die.
No wonder I grew up obsessed with always having to know whether I was coming across and whether people were receptive to what I had to say. I constantly looked for non-verbal clues to tell me whether or not I was connecting—a smile, a look of interest, an attentiveness.
But some people are just not expressive. It’s not that they don’t like you or don’t appreciate what you’re saying. It’s just not in their nature to be responsive.
I’d like to tell you I’ve outgrown all this, but the fact is that unresponsive people still make me uncomfortable. It has nothing to with a fear of stuttering. It has to do with a fear of not being validated, and 30 years ago in these situations, I would be highly likely to block.
The Alarm Clock Effect
A participant on the Internet’s neuro-semantics discussion group raised an interesting question. He asked, “If a person blocks to hold back and to avoid experiencing an emotion, etc., how does that relate to neutral, meaningless words such as ‘the’ and ‘and,’ as opposed to words with real content.”
One explanation for why we sometimes block on “meaningless” words is something I call “The Alarm Clock Effect.” This has nothing to do with a fear of stuttering per se, but about feeling that we’ve been speaking too long. We’ve been acting too assertively, and now it’s time for us to pull back.
When I first came to San Francisco years ago and joined the Junior Advertising Club, I periodically had to get up and speak in front of the group. On these occasions, I noticed an interesting phenomenon. In the beginning, I could speak for about 10 seconds before my “alarm clock” went off, and my anxiety level climbed to an uncomfortable level that would cause me to block. This had to do with my level of comfort in the situation and how long I could tolerate being in the power position (i.e.: in front of the group) before my feelings zoomed outside my comfort zone. Thus, I might block on the word “for,” not because that word was threatening, but simply because I had been letting go in front of the group for too long, and now I felt compelled to rein myself in. (A related fear is when someone speaks “too long” in a performance situation without blocking and the self-imposed pressure to keep up this perfect performance becomes overwhelming.)
However, the more opportunities I had to be up in front of the group, the more ordinary it began to feel, the more comfortable I became in the situation, and the longer I’d be able to speak—30 seconds, 45 seconds, one minute—before my alarm clock “rang.” This was an indication of my gradually expanding comfort zone as well as my growing willingness to assert myself.
As your self-esteem grows, as you build confidence in your ability to express yourself and become increasingly comfortable with projecting your power, you’ll find yourself able to speak for longer and longer periods without constantly hitting the brake. Speaking will cease to be an activity that wears you down; rather, speaking will energize you as you release more and more energy, because you are no longer working against yourself. Your “alarm clock” will allow you to go for longer periods without “ringing,” and eventually, may stop ringing altogether.
In analyzing a speaking situation, get in the habit of noticing what your emotions are doing and whether, just before you blocked, your feelings moved outside your comfort zone, causing you to pull back. Then ask yourself what the threat was. You can speed up the learning process by keeping a diary or writing down the incidents you remember on file cards. If you do this over time, you’ll begin to see definite trends and patterns. And those, in turn, will identify problem areas that need to be addressed.
How about people who seem to block in all situations?
After more than 26 years with the National Stuttering Association, I’ve seen every kind of stuttering you can imagine. I’ve met people who only block occasionally, and I’ve met those who struggle with every word.
What accounts for the people who seem to stutter all the time?
To help explain this, I devised something I call, “The Principle of the Upside Down Triangle.” This metaphor refers to the time in the child’s life at which particular sensitizing events take place. The earlier they occur, the broader the impact they will have on the person’s life later on.
Let’s say an 18-year old speaks up in class and is severely criticized and humiliated by a male teacher. There is the likelihood that the student will develop a fear of that teacher, or similar male teachers, and be discouraged from contributing further in that class.
If the event takes place at age 12, the student may not be as discerning and may project that fear onto all teachers.
If it happens at age eight, he may end up being afraid of all adults.
If it happens at age three, his fear may become generalized, not only to adults, but to any situation in which he’s called upon to be assertive.
At age three, he is not so much relating to the shoulds and should-nots of specific situations as he is to whether certain emotions are safe to express at any time.
For example, assertive feelings are an integral part of sex, creativity, and the expression of anger, hate, tenderness, and love. They’re part of one’s ego. If early in the child’s formative years he is put down for expressing his wants or needs in any of these activities, his fear of expressing strong feelings can easily become generalized.
He may come to the conclusion that his true self should never be revealed under any circumstances. Self-assertion per se may become a no-no. Then, almost all speaking situations will be threatening, and he’ll find it difficult to speak anytime, anywhere, without blocking.
Similarly, if not being listened to commences during early childhood, this would also have a broader impact on the individual’s life.
Compare this to the individual who’s sensitizing experiences occurred later, and whose fears are generally limited to specific situations.
As you can see in the above diagrams, the earlier the sensitizing events take place, the broader the impact they will have on an individual’s life, and the more widespread will be the incidence of speech blocks.
Imprinting the brain
Changes are also more difficult to implement when the unwanted behaviors are acquired early in life. An article in Time magazine in February 1997 explains why. The article starts out by describing how neural circuits are established:
- An embryo’s brain produces many more neurons, or nerve cells, than it needs, then eliminates the excess.
- The surviving neurons spin out axons, the long-distance transmission lines of the nervous system. At their ends, the axons spin out multiple branches that temporarily connect with many targets.
- Spontaneous bursts of electrical activity strengthen some of these connections, while others (the connections that are not reinforced by activity) atrophy.
- After birth, the brain experiences a second growth spurt, as the axons (which send signals) and dendrites (which receive them) explode with new connections. Electrical activity, triggered by a flood of sensory experiences, fine-tunes the brain’s circuitry—determining which connections will be retained and which will be pruned. [My emphasis]
The article observes that “by the age of three, a child who is neglected or abused bears marks that, if not indelible, are exceedingly difficult to erase.”
That would also be true of children who are subjected to anxieties about self-expression and who develop strategies and patterned behaviors designed to help them cope.
Then, from later in the article: “What wires a child’s brain, say neuroscientists…is repeated experience. Each time a baby tries to touch a tantalizing object or gazes intently at a face or listens to a lullaby, tiny bursts of electricity shoot through the brain, knitting neurons into circuits as well defined as those etched onto silicon chips.”
This process continues until about the age of 10 “when the balance between synapse creation and atrophy abruptly shifts. Over the next several years, the brain will ruthlessly destroy its weakest synapses, preserving only those that have been magically transformed by experience.”
No wonder some people have such overpowering difficulties with speech. Through repetition, their early fears of self-expression, with all the attendant perceptions, beliefs, and response strategies, have become deeply etched in mind and body and incorporated as part of the individual’s personality. In a similar manner, the blocking strategies they adopt also become habituated.
Can early programming be defeated?
The good news is that you can reformat these early experiences by reframing them so that the old reactions are not called up. You can also provide yourself with a choice of responses by developing new behavior patterns and repeating them over and over again until you automatically default to them. You will have to work much harder at creating those new response patterns, because your mind is no longer a blank slate and a certain amount of unlearning is now required. You will also have to address much more than your speech. You’ll have to address the perceptions, beliefs, emotional responses, and conflicting intentions that help to create the reactive patterns leading to a block.
Can it be done?
Yes, says author Daniel Goleman. In his book, Emotional Intelligence, Goleman talks about a problem that, like chronic stuttering, usually starts in one’s early years: obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). He reports that those being treated for OCD, which is another hard-to-break and deep-seated disorder, have been able to change their feelings and responses. They do it by confronting their fears, examining their beliefs and generating repeated experiences of a positive nature.
For example, one of the more common compulsions of the OCD sufferer is repeated hand washing. People are known to wash their hands hundreds and hundreds of times a day, driven by a fear that if they failed to do this, they would attract a disease and die. During therapy, patients in this study were systemically placed at a sink but not allowed to wash. At the same time, they were encouraged to question their fears and challenge their deep-seated beliefs. Gradually, after months of similar sessions, the compulsions faded.
Repeated positive experiences did not eradicate the old memories. They still existed. But it gave the individuals different ways of interpreting them and alternative ways to respond. They weren’t stuck playing out “the same old tune.” True, it took more effort to counteract the old responses whose roots reached back to early childhood. But motivated individuals were able to disrupt the old reaction patterns and relieve their symptoms, as effectively as if they had been treated with heavy-duty drugs like Prozac.
Says Goleman, “The brain remains plastic throughout life, though not to the spectacular extent seen in childhood. All learning implies a change in the brain, a strengthening of synaptic connection. The brain changes in the patients with obsessive-compulsive disorder show that emotional habits are malleable throughout life, with some sustained effort, even at the neural level. What happens with the brain…is an analog of the effects all repeated or intense emotional experiences bring, for better or for worse.”
The same principle applies to chronic speech blocks.
By venturing outside your comfort zone, being willing to experience your way through the negative emotions, and by reframing the old learnings using Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP), Neuro-Semantics® and other tools from cognitive psychology—you can build alternative responses, even though the old memories will always exist in your emotional archives. The adage, “What doesn’t kill you will make you stronger” really applies.
But to effect these changes, you have to put yourself at risk (at least, in your own mind) by such things as disclosing to people that you stutter, deliberately looking for speaking opportunities, and finding regular opportunities to speak, especially in those situations that feel risky but are actually safe, such as Toastmasters.
Such repeated risk-taking activities affect, not just your speech, but your total self. They reprogram your emotional memory. They help you create a broader, more honest and grounded sense of who you are by building positive beliefs, perceptions, and emotions. In effect, you’re changing, not just your blocking behaviors, but the whole ground of being that supports those behaviors. By giving your Stuttering Hexagon a more positive spin, you are assuring that the old ways of holding back and blocking will no longer be appropriate for the newer, expanded, more resourceful you.
Keep looking at the big picture
I have to confess I’m really frustrated when, year in and year out, people maintain their tunnel vision about stuttering. For years and years, people were mystified by their speech blocks. Nobody knew what they were about. Then along came the speech clinicians and researchers who offered a simple and logical explanation: “Stuttering is what you do to keep yourself from stuttering.”
The world hungrily claimed this as The Explanation. “Hurray!” said everyone. “We now have an answer that makes sense.”
That’s when the blinders went on. People stopped looking. We assumed that this explanation was the entire answer. We limited our perspective. We stopped questioning whether there were other parts of the problem that had to be factored in.
Fortunately, not everyone has fallen into that trap. I’ve met many individuals who have substantially, or fully, recovered from stuttering, and all of them looked beyond the obvious. They developed a keen awareness of themselves as people. They made an effort to notice how they thought and felt, and they correlated those actions and experiences with their ability to speak.
Ultimately, they came to understand that underlying their speech blocks was a need to hold back, and that the reasons for holding back were linked to many facets of their life, not just to a fear of stuttering. The self-knowledge they developed became an integral part of their recovery.
If you’re one of those individuals for whom constant practice of speech controls is not working…or if the effort to remain fluent has become too difficult…perhaps it’s not because you haven’t been practicing hard enough. Maybe it’s because you haven’t established a Fluency Hexagon to support the fluency goals you’re working toward. Your hexagon is still organized around holding back, rather than letting go.
If that’s the case, it’s time to broaden your field of vision. It’s time to look beyond your fear of stuttering and start discovering the ways your speech blocks are intimately connected to all the various aspects of who you are.
REFERENCES
Nash, J. Madeleine. (1997) Fertile minds from birth, a baby’s brain cells proliferate wildly, making connects that may shape a lifetime of experience. The first three years are critical. Time, 00:55, 47-56.
Robbins, Anthony. (1991) Awaken the Giant Within. New York: Simon & Schuster, 53.
Goleman, Daniel. (1995) Emotional Intelligence. New York: Bantam Books, 225-227.
The Feelings of Fluency
John C. Harrison
What is it like to be fluent? What does it actually feel like? When those who stutter think about fluency, their focus is almost always on their speech, rather than on their feelings. They see fluency as simply an absence of blocking. They believe that once fluent, they will be exactly the same person they are now; only their speech will change.
But fluency goes far beyond that. Fluency is a state of being. This state of being is called for whenever a person is called upon to perform any spontaneous act.
Real fluency is not about controlling speech…or about controlling anything for that matter. It’s about letting go, so that blocks become irrelevant.
Real fluency is about speaking without self-consciousness. You have an intention to express a thought or an idea, and suddenly, you realize you’ve done so. It just seems to happen.
This mindset will be found, not just in speech, but also in other forms of expression where the person operates fluently and intuitively without any awareness of self.
What follows is a short collection of personal stories that illustrate the components required to create the experience of true fluency.
Why have I used stories?
I discovered years ago that the best way to communicate an idea is by framing it in real life experience. You may think that some of the details are unnecessary. However, I’ve found that when I want to understand what someone else has experienced, it helps for me to be there with them, in their skin, to understand what they’re thinking and feeling. I want to feel what they felt. So let me take you along on some personal journeys that helped to clarify my difficulty with the feeling of fluency.
The need to surrender
This first story is an account of how I learned to read at 3,000 words a minute and then lost the skill because I could not tolerate the feeling of fluency.
“Whoa!” you’re probably thinking. “People can’t read that fast and actually understand what they’re reading.”
Not true. A certain percentage of the population is comprised of naturally fast readers. President John F. Kennedy was one of those people. So was my sister Joan. Back in grammar school, Joan routinely read two to three books every weekend. And she comprehended everything she read.
Most people crawl along at 200 to 300 words per minute. They’re constantly going back to reread sentences and paragraphs. By contrast, Joan could read an entire novel standing in a bookstore and be able to tell you what she read. I’ve met people who could read at 10,000 words a minute. And I’ve heard of one woman who could read at 50,000 words a minute by running her eyes down one page and up the facing page.
I know this sounds unbelievable. It did to me, too. And if I hadn’t learned to read at 3,000 words per minute, I never would have believed it.
There are some interesting parallels between verbal fluency and reading “fluency.” They involve a similar mindset. I’m going to tell you about how I learned to read at super fast speeds, how I lost that ability, and what I learned from that experience that related directly to my stuttering.
Reading Dynamics
One day back in the mid-1960s I happened to notice a newspaper ad for a speed reading program. It was called Evelyn Wood Reading Dynamics, and I was totally stunned by their claims. The typical ad for remedial reading classes talked about doubling or tripling one’s reading speed. That by itself would have been compelling. But the ad for Reading Dynamics was promising much more.
“Imagine,” said the ad, “that you were able to read at speeds as high as 4,000 or 5,000 words a minute.
“Impossible,” I thought. “Must be a misprint.” I read it again. No, that’s what it said; in fact, those same high reading speeds were alluded to several times in the ad.
In those days I was reading around 200-300 words a minute, so the idea of increasing my reading speed 15 times was an outrageous thought. Yet, the ad quoted people who said they were reading at astronomical speeds. Of course, I couldn’t resist, and the next week I signed up.
In the first class I attended at a downtown hotel, Doreen, the instructor, explained that this would be a different reading experience than we had ever had before.
“You mean we’ll really be skimming the material,” someone volunteered.
“No,” she answered. “You’ll actually be seeing all the words, but you’ll be using your eye and mind in a different way.” Doreen explained that the typical person scans left to right, line by line. We, on the other hand, were going to read in a zig-zag pattern, using our hand as a pacer to keep our eye moving down the page.
“But how can you understand what you’re reading?” someone asked
“That’s not a problem,” she said. “Let me demonstrate.”
Doreen explained that our eye was capable of picking up chunks of text at a glance, and if we concentrated, not on the words, but on using a broad focus and following the thought expressed in the text, our brain would automatically gather in the words and put it all together. We would totally understand what we were reading. But it would take a great deal of practice until we could do this. She then pulled out a soft cover book that someone had bought in the shop downstairs just minutes before class began.
“Find me several pages to read,” she said to one of the students as she handed him the book. The student opened the book at random.
“Here,” he said, “read the next three pages.”
As we sat transfixed, Doreen ran her hand down the first page in a zig-zag fashion, then the next page and the one after that. She read the three pages in about 12 seconds. Then she handed the book back to the student.”
“Okay, let me tell you what I read.”
Doreen took three minutes to summarize in detail what she had just read while the student corroborated her remarks. She had indeed read and understood what was on all three pages.
Wow!
Seeing someone read this fast was impressive. But my reading this fast was another matter.
Extreme frustration
In the first class of this 10-week program, we were asked to give up our old way of reading and start practicing the new way. That was unbearably frustrating. Week after week, none of us could even get close to understanding what we were reading using this new technique. True, some general impressions were getting through, but to say I was understanding what my eye was “reading” was an overstatement. The only thing I accomplished was to chew up a lot of pencils.
“Don’t worry,” said Doreen. “You’ll get it. Just keep working.”
During class in the eighth week, something happened that spurred me on. I was involved in yet another frustrating practice exercise when a woman student suddenly shouted out excitedly, “I’m doing it! Wow! This is wild!”
Sonofabitch! Someone broke through. Instantly, my competitive spirit was engaged. Dammit, if that woman could do it, why couldn’t I? I applied myself with additional fervor. All I could think of was being left behind by someone who did what I couldn’t do. It was maddening.
The ninth week found me still deep in frustration. It just wasn’t working. What kind of an experience was I looking for? It wasn’t clear. I simply couldn’t imagine running my eye in a criss-cross pattern down the page and understanding what I was reading. How could you read anything that way? True, I could get an impression of the material, similar to what I routinely did when I scanned. But that wasn’t “reading.” However, I continued to conscientiously practice every night.
In the tenth and final class, I still hadn’t had a breakthrough experience, but I did notice that there was something different. I had this feeling that something was going to happen. I couldn’t put my finger on it. It was just a sense that I was close to something. While nothing dramatic happened in that last class, that expectant feeling continued to hang over me.
The course was officially over. But I decided to attend the practice session that was held on Saturday to give it one last try.
I showed up on Saturday feeling both resolute and desperate. This was it. If I didn’t make it now, my investment was for naught. Besides, there was the matter of that woman who broke through and perhaps others as well. I just hated being left behind.
Breakthrough
Half way through the class I was reading a short novel by John Steinbeck called The Pearl. The writing was visual and graphic, and the text was easy to comprehend. I found myself racing faster and faster to see how the story unfolded.
Then it happened.
Suddenly, I was no longer reading. I was thinking the book. The story was taking place inside my head. It was like watching a movie. As my hand criss-crossed down the page, it felt as if I was scooping up the text and funneling it directly into my brain. It required no effort. I was racing along, and all I had to do was to surrender my mind to the page. The meaning seemed to float over the text as the story with all its visuals played itself out on my internal movie screen.
I was reading, but it was unlike any previous reading experience I had ever had.
As I practiced reading this new way, I felt oddly different. It was a reckless, powerful, fluent feeling, like being able to predict the future or move pencils with my mind. I was giddy with success.
I took the bus back to my apartment, and on the ride back, I made another interesting discovery. I could run my eyes across the advertising cards inside the bus and know instantly what they said. I didn’t have to read them in the normal way. One quick impression, and I could tell you what was on a particular card. My eye and brain were now functioning differently.
New problems
I had learned the skill. But I suddenly found myself with a new set of problems.
This new skill made me very uncomfortable. True, I could read a novel at 3,000 words a minute. That felt good. But I was not comfortable with the feeling that I had to surrender my mind to the page. I found it difficult to trust the process.
All my life, I had strived to keep myself under control. I never trusted my intuitions. I never gave in to my instincts. I constantly worried about being wrong. I always had a tight grip on my emotions. However, reading this way called for doing just the opposite. I had to let go and give up control. I had to give in and simply follow along with my mind. I had to surrender, and that made me feel vulnerable. I just didn’t want to give in to the experience.
So instead of practicing at two to three times the speed I could comfortably read at, as they had recommended, I went the other way. I began to slow down my speed to make sure I didn’t miss anything. I began to grab for meaning. What I was doing was trying to gain “control” over my reading experience, like years before, I had tried to gain control over my speech. Gradually, my reading speed dropped lower and lower as I worked to get every last detail. 2,000 words a minute…1,500 words a minute…1,000 a minute…each day I read a little slower, until one day, I was reading so slow that the eye/brain connection could no longer work, and I found to my despair that I had lost the skill.
Try as I could, I wasn’t able to get it back.
An unwillingness to change
Why couldn’t I hold onto the skill? It is clear that at that time, I was not ready to handle the trust and surrender required to read “dynamically.” What was called for was just too uncomfortable for me and not compatible with my need to be in control.
I subsequently did research for an M.A. thesis on Reading Dynamics at San Francisco State College. In preparation, I interviewed several instructors from the course. I was curious to find out which professions had the easiest time with dynamic reading, and which had the most difficulty.
“Musicians have the easiest time,” said Doreen, the instructor who had taken me through the program. “They’re used to working intuitively.” Musicians know what it’s like to give themselves to the music. They recognize the importance of surrendering to the experience, trusting their feelings, and not consciously controlling what they’re doing. I guess you’d say that in those performance moments, ‘the music is playing them.’”
One of the program’s best instructors was an accomplished organist. When she realized that certain complex pieces called for her to read music at thousands of notes a minute, she suddenly understood that she already had the proper mindset, and it was just a question of applying that same feeling to reading. In fact, she told me of musicians who were able to actually “hear” the music in their mind when they read sheet music using the same dynamic reading techniques.
“I’m curious,” I asked her. “Which profession has the most difficult time with this reading technique?”
“Lawyers,” said Doreen.
Of course. Lawyers do not automatically trust words. They’re constantly looking for shades of meaning. Wrong phrasing can make or break a case, so they feel compelled to scrutinize every word. Because of this habit of thought, attorneys were not, as a rule, successful in mastering dynamic reading.
One thing I concluded from my research was that most people were not able to master the dynamic reading technique. Apparently, the Reading Dynamics organization eventually came to the same conclusion. They ultimately changed their advertising claims, promising only to triple a student’s reading speed.
My speculation was that the experience of surrender was not something that most people were comfortable with. I certainly wasn’t. True, I was able to by-pass that problem for a short time when my competitiveness was awakened. I broke through because another person in the class had done it before me. But the feeling of competition was short-lived. And so was my reading skill. Without the crutch of competition, I could not sustain the ability to read dynamically.
Similarities
Some time later, I developed further insight into the ability of my mind to “see” meaning when my wife Doris and I took up conversational Spanish in preparation for an upcoming trip to Mexico. My teacher was Ralph, a Spanish translator at the company where we both worked.
We only had six weeks to get up to speed before we left for Mexico City. In our hour sessions with Ralph, he drilled us in familiar phrases, and to my delight, I noticed that eventually, if he talked slowly and clearly, I could understand exactly what he was saying provided I didn’t focus on the words. If I focused on the meaning, I could follow his train of thought. My brain made sense of it. But if I worried about missing something and shifted focus to the words themselves, everything he said turned instantly to gibberish. It was the Reading Dynamics experience all over again. To understand Spanish, I had to surrender. I had to simply allow my mind to follow the sense of what Ralph was saying and trust that I would understand without worrying about what I might be missing. I could not grasp at the meaning. I had to let it happen to me. As I became familiar with more and more words and phrases, I was able to understand more and more of what Ralph said to me. But if at any moment I was afraid of missing the meaning of a word and changed my focus to the words themselves, I instantly lost the train of thought.
In short, I could not directly control the experience in order to master it. Mastery only came through repetition, trust and surrender.
This parallels my early experiences with stuttering. Back in my school days, I did not automatically trust that I would be okay when speaking to another person. My comfort with the verbal transaction would constantly ebb and flow. Often I was afraid of doing it wrong. I did not trust.
But there was something else I was missing, something that at the time I could not put my finger on.
“The consciousness of self is the greatest hindrance to the proper execution of all physical action.” – Bruce Lee
With Reading Dynamics, you’re working with the brain’s higher centers. These higher centers routinely allow a person to do remarkable things. I have seen individuals perform feats that could only have been done by trusting their higher intelligence. You’ve surely seen some of these as well.
- The first time I watched a young Olympic gymnast work the balance beam, not only did she twirl on the beam, she even performed backward flips without using her hands. The next contestant astounded me even more. She mounted by leaping on a springboard and doing a forward somersault, landing securely on the beam. How could anybody trust themselves enough to do that? It was just stunning.
- I have seen even more astounding feats of trust. Some years ago the Russian circus came to San Francisco. Tight rope acts are de rigeur for any circus. But in this circus I saw a performer who walked up the slanted guy wire that supported the tight rope from the ground. Can you imagine how difficult that is? Then he did a truly “impossible” feat. While still on the guy wire, he did a backward flip! To this day, I don’t know how anyone could land on a slanted wire. And he did it six times a week!
- Have you ever watched the Blue Angels, the daredevil aerial acrobatics team that performs air shows around the world? In some acts two planes fly toward each other at over 350 mph. They clear each other by inches at a combined air speed of over 700 mph. That’s trust.
- How about the pianist who sits down with the symphony orchestra and plays Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue without ever looking at a page of sheet music. He has memorized the music, the fingering, everything. He simply trusts that his mind and body will perform it, and as he plays, the music unfolds automatically in his mind like the perforated roll that controls a player piano.
- Ditto the actor who loses himself in the role of Hamlet. Beautiful phrases in Elizabethan English roll off his tongue, and he or she simply trusts that they will come out the right way in the right order.
- Practitioners of aikido must retrain themselves to react differently when physically attacked. Instead of defensively challenging the attacker, they turn their body to flow with the assailant, then guide the person to the ground. In the beginning these reactions are counter-intuitive. A person naturally wants to adopt a defensive posture and put up an arm to block a punch or directly confront the attacker. The trainee needs to trust that the proven techniques of aikido will work more effectively, even though it takes a while to build confidence in them.
- Every pilot in training will tell you about the first time he or she did a solo landing. It’s all about self-trust.
- How about the championship tennis player who, one shot away from defeat and with everything on the line, puts his faith in a higher power and risks everything on one go-for-broke forehand. He surrenders to the moment, turns around his game, and eventually wins the tournament.
- Then there is the Zen archer who, seemly without aiming, shoots the arrow into the center of the bullseye…and then splits the first arrow with a second.
The rigorous training of the Zen archer is described in the seminal book Zen in the Art of Archery,” written in the early 1950s by Eugen Herrigel. What struck me as I read Herrigel’s autobiographic account was the degree to which the student has to surrender himself to the discipline. He has to practice in a way that was totally foreign to my own way of functioning:
- He had to shoot thousands of arrows that totally missed their mark and not be discouraged by his lack of success.
- He had to train his instincts without consciously trying.
- He had to forego any time limits on his quest for success but simply accept that it would take as long as it was going to take.
- He had to put his ego aside and fully surrender to the experience – i.e.: not personally identify with either his successes or his failures.
- He had to be guided and driven solely by his intention.
What is it that inspires some people to put themselves at risk in situations where, to succeed, they have to surrender themselves to a higher force that they cannot consciously control?
Why are some willing to take this chance, and others are afraid to act? And what does it take to be willing to put yourself at risk? What gives you the courage to act?
Part of it is trust. You have to let go and trust.
This is the first requirement of fluency. The second requirement is having conviction and a clear intention.
The next story will help shed light on this issue.
2,600 feet over Calistoga
My feet were sweaty and my stomach dropped as I looked straight down eighty-six floors to the street below. I was 10 years old, and I had gone with my parents to visit the Empire State building in New York. We were at the outside observation area eighty-six floors above the Manhattan streets.
Today, there’s a wire fence that stops you from looking straight over the side. It was put there in the early 50s to prevent suicides after several depressed souls hurled themselves over the side. But back when I visited the Empire State building you could lean over the side, look straight down 86 floors, and feel yourself go weak in the knees. I was fascinated by the experience. I also hated it. I was afraid of falling.
Yet 17 years later, I found myself standing on a metal bar outside the door of a small airplane over Calistoga, California. The wind was buffeting me at 80 miles per hour, forcing me to tighten my grip on a second bar that I was hanging onto for dear life.
I was about to experience my first parachute jump.
“So,” you’re thinking, “if John doesn’t like heights and has a fear of falling, what is he doing hanging outside a plane at 2,600 feet?
Let me explain. Back in New York in the late 1950s I was reading an issue of Esquire one day when I found a short article on a sport called skydiving. It seemed that a few hardy souls were free falling from planes over a little town called Orange, New Jersey. Imagine that. People were jumping out of planes on purpose. As uneasy as I was around heights, I began thinking that this was something I simply had to do.
I’ve always thought that behind my unease around heights was a secret urge to jump. Just impulsively throw myself over the edge. Why? I’m not really sure. I’ve heard that a fear of falling is analogous to a fear of failing. Perhaps that’s it. All I knew was that I didn’t trust heights, and that one day I would have to meet this fear by jumping out of an airplane.
A year after I arrived in California I met a young fellow, Jerry, at my army reserve meeting who was making regular jumps at an airport in Calistoga, about an hour north of San Francisco. He sensed my interest and invited me to drive up with him that weekend to observe. I did, and all it did was to whet my interest even more. The following week I enrolled in the Parachute Club of America and set a date for my ground training which I completed the week after.
The day of my first jump I wrote out a short will and placed it in the sock drawer of my dresser. I then picked up Doris whom I was just starting to date, crossed the Golden Gate Bridge, and headed north toward Calistoga.
Calistoga is a quiet little town in the wine country about 60 miles northeast of San Francisco. It’s noted for its mineral waters as well as for its hot springs where you can bake in a mud bath, then ease your way into a relaxing massage. There’s also a large, naturally heated pool where families splash and frolic in the summer months. In addition, they have a small airport where, today, glider pilots can get a tow up to 5,000 feet, then cut loose and ride the thermals for as long as their luck holds. But back in 1962 there were no gliders, there were only jumpers. Lots of them.
When I arrived at the airport, Jerry was already there.
“C’mon,” he said. “You’re late, and you still gotta pack your chute.”
Say what? “I thought I get a chute that’s already packed,” I replied. “I don’t know how to pack a friggin’ chute.”
“It’s easy. I’ll show you,” said Jerry. “We all pack our own.”
I had visions of pulling the rip cord, and having nothing but a tangle of lines and silk trailing above me like a Roman candle.
We walked into the hangar. Jerry went over to a corner and picked up a pile that resembled a large bundle of laundry. “Here’s the chute,” he said. “Let me show you how to do this.”
He stretched out the chute lengthwise, then began bunching and folding the canopy. Each time he folded a handful of canopy, he wrapped a rubber band around it to keep it in place.
“That’s how you do it. Here, you finish.”
I kneeled down and attempted to copy what Jerry did. Except where he bunched and tied a handful of chute every 15 seconds, I was taking a full minute. I was trying to get every bunch the same length.
“Oh for god’s sake,” said Jerry impatiently. “It’s not brain surgery. You can just stuff it in the pack, and it would probably work fine.”
I was not convinced.
I hurried as fast as I dared. When it was done, Jerry fitted me into the harness and clipped me together. We stood around for a few minutes until it was time to go and then walked over to the plane. It was a Piper Club with the door removed on the passenger side. Right outside the door were two metal bars welded to the body. One was a foot hold for when you stepped out of the door, the other was a hand hold.
We piled into the plane, and I was positioned as the second person out the door. The plane took off and slowly climbed in lazy circles. I have a brief mental snapshot of the altimeter as the plane reached 1,500 feet, and thinking “Oh my god, I’m really going to do this.”
Today, if you want to free fall, you can make a tandem jump from 12,000 feet or more, strapped to the harness of an instructor. But back in the early 60s there were no tandem jumps, and newcomers were not allowed to freefall until they first completed five static line jumps. These are controlled jumps where the rip cord is attached to the plane so the chute opens automatically as the jumper falls away. All of us were making static line jumps.
When we got to the jump altitude of 2,600 feet and were directly above the landing zone, the jumpmaster threw out a wind drift indicator. This is a weight with a small chute behind it that approximates the drift and rate of descent of a jumper with a fully inflated parachute. How far the indicator falls beyond the drop zone tells the jump master where the jumper needs to release on the other side of the target to give him the best chance of drifting onto the drop area.
In a few moments, the first jumper eased himself out the door and into the 80 mph wind. He was hanging there just an arm’s length from me…and suddenly he was gone!
Then I got the sign that it was my turn, and I pulled myself out of the door. I was surprised by how strong the wind was as I held tightly onto the metal bar, all the while keeping my eye on the jump master who was fixated on the ground below. Suddenly he said, “Go!” and I released and pushed away.
I’d like to tell you about those first two seconds before the chute opened, but in truth, my anxiety level was so high that I have absolutely no recollection of it. I just know that when the chute opened, the plane was going merrily on its way, leaving me stranded in the sky.
This was cool. I pulled on the toggles and turned first in one direction, then the other. Totally neat! Then I surveyed the scene. The light was clear and crisp, and downtown Calistoga lay below me with vineyards and houses stretching as far as the eye could see. It was all so novel and exciting that it didn’t occur me to think about the hazards: the water towers, the phone lines, the public swimming pool, the vineyard with its hundreds of wooden stakes pointing menacingly in my direction. The field also had a fence bisecting it, and it was smaller than regulation size, something I didn’t learn until later. None of that mattered. I felt totally on top of the world (which I was!)
As I drifted down, I concentrated on keeping myself facing into the wind. For a moment there, it looked like I might land on a large white horse grazing in the field. But at the last minute I drifted past the startled horse, hit the ground, and did a parachute landing fall – the standard forward roll that I had practiced in jump school. As Doris and Jerry ran toward me, I felt like I had just walked on the moon.
For the next week I basked in the glow of my derring-do. I was one heroic dude in my eyes. But perhaps I was not that daring after all. Other novice jumpers were in a hurry to get their five required static line jumps completed, and some made two jumps a day. This allowed them to complete their static line jumps by the third weekend, and a few even did their first free fall. By contrast, I managed to stretch my five static line jumps over a six week period.
Then we had a short spate of bad weather. I drove up to Calistoga several times, but the winds were too strong for novice jumpers, and I ended up sitting around the airport watching the more experienced guys make their free falls. That’s when I started to lose my nerve. Maybe I had too much time to think about it. Maybe I had satisfied my curiosity and the novelty was wearing off. Or maybe sitting around an airport chatting up the other jumpers was just not a scene I identified with.
Whatever the reasons, free falling started to lose its glow, my intention waned, and as it did, my mind began focusing on the dangers. As free falling slowly stopped holding interest for me, I was beset by images of landing in a vineyard or going off course and bouncing off a water tower, or even making news in the local papers by frying myself on a power line or injuring people when I landed in the swimming pool. Suppose the first chute didn’t open. Would I have the presence of mind to open the reserve?
The more I thought of the dangers, the more I realized I didn’t want to take the risk. If I got hurt for doing something I didn’t care that much about, I never could have forgiven myself. And so one day, feeling very incomplete, I gave up my dream of freefalling.
What I learned
Over time, I got past the disappointment, but it was only many years later that I understood the meaning of this experience with regard to stuttering. It had to do with the confidence I felt whenever I did something I truly wanted to do, and the confidence I didn’t feel when I lacked those desires. Without conviction, I worried about the dangers. With a strong intention, I only focused on my purpose.
In high school, because my own feelings were seldom clear to me, I was always myself holding back when presenting in class or going up to a stranger or an authority figure. Because I was never grounded in what I wanted, I was so caught up with what I thought the other person wanted to hear that I became afraid to speak my mind. I was afraid I couldn’t get it right for them. This, in turn, undercut my self-esteem.
Being in touch with what you like and want gives you the courage to act, and especially, to risk. In Calistoga, when I lost my passion to jump, I lost my nerve.
The same thing had happened with my speech.
Uncovering the secret
How do you change this in ability to trust? First, you have to figure out what’s going on. Personal change calls for self-observation, because without it, you’re flying in the dark.
One of the earliest observations I made about the relationship of courage, desire, and my willingness to put myself at risk took place around my thirteenth birthday. My folks belonged to a Reform Jewish temple. I had decided earlier that year that I wanted to be bar mitzvahed. To be frank, I wasn’t very religious, but others in my class were celebrating their bar mitzvah and I guess I wanted to be part of the crowd.
The services at our temple were fairly secular, compared to the nearby Conservative Jewish temple, and rather than having to study Hebrew and read from the Torah, as my friends did who belonged to the other synagogue, all I had to do on my bar mitzvah was to recite a single paragraph of transliterated Hebrew.
Oh yes, there was one other requirement. It was traditional that the bar mitzvah boy participate in the Friday night service the previous evening where, at the end of the service, he stepped up to the pulpit and read the announcements. So it came to pass that I found myself giving the announcements from a sheet that had been handed to me moments before.
“The men’s…………..club…….will be………meeting………at the
te…………temple…..next…………………………………………………………..
Tuesday night at……………ssssss……………..
sssssssseven……p.m.”
It went on like that, one painful minute after another, until I had gotten through all the announcements. The shame and mortification I felt as I walked red-faced from the pulpit are still seared in my memory, half a century later.
But the next day, my experience was surprisingly different. Though I was worried about how I’d do with my short speech in Hebrew, it went off without a hitch. I had no trouble at all.
I made note of something that day which was born out in later observations. I noticed that if I had something short to memorize, like a paragraph, and if I could go over it many, many times, if I could make it a part of me so that I felt it and “believed” it and wanted to deliver it, then the impulse to block was less likely to arise. At the time, that puzzled me. Later, I began to understand why this was so.
When I rehearsed something over and over until it was familiar, I made it a part of me, and I felt fully grounded. I knew and believed in what I had to say. I could feel my attachment to the words. There was no ambiguity, no ambivalence.
The question I posed to myself 20 years later was – “Why didn’t I feel that same groundedness and confidence when I spoke spontaneously?
Eventually, I got it. Speaking spontaneously involved doubt and uncertainty, and I found it difficult to speak with total conviction because I never knew what I believed and whether or not it was right. With rehearsed material, my feeling of conviction came through repetition. I could be spontaneous in my presentation, because I had already approved, sanitized, and vetted all the words. I became attached to those words. I claimed them as my own. I didn’t have to worry about being right. It was a sure thing. That’s one of the reasons why people don’t seem to stutter when they sing. Everything – the words, the purpose, the emotional expression – is all worked out beforehand.
I find this issue prevalent in the stuttering world. Those who stutter talk about the fear of being rejected. We grow up so much in need of personal validation that not getting it becomes a survival issue. To place that on the line is to risk rejection and psychic death.
Trusting myself to speak spontaneously and let go was akin to jumping out of the plane and not being certain that the chute would open. Without the conviction that I was doing my thing and doing it correctly, I just couldn’t risk it.
Top performers give up conscious control
This gets us to the central premise of this essay – the factor that weaves itself through everything we’ve been speaking about.
This is the issue of trust.
To do something fluently, you must give up conscious control and simply trust. You let go and trust.
The student of Zen archery has to shoot arrow after arrow at the target, trusting that if he follows the master’s instructions and practices the right technique and form, that eventually the arrows will start hitting their mark. He must do it without thinking and without making any effort whatsoever to consciously control what he’s doing. He must shoot thousands upon thousands of arrows at the target until the inner manager, the mysterious “it” takes over and directs his efforts.
Everybody who achieves a high level of fluency such as the
- high wire tight rope walker
- Olympic gymnast
- trapeze artist
- downhill skier
- concert pianist
- prima ballerina
- juggler
- actor
- calligrapher
- race car driver
- aikido master
- motivational speaker
- student of Reading Dynamics
must adopt an attitude of trust. They do everything they can to master their skill, then at some point they give up conscious control and simply trust. They must trust, because the complexity of what they’re trying to do, and the level at which they want to perform, falls outside their ability to control it consciously.
In fact, if the tight rope walker starts thinking about his feet, he may lose his balance.
The concert pianist who obsessively controls his fingers may end up stumbling over the notes.
The aikido master who thinks about what to do as his opponent strikes may lose his focus, and the match.
The professional actor who worries about remembering his lines will probably deliver a wooden performance. His focus will shift from “How do I want to” to “Can I do it?”
To perform all these tasks successfully, the practitioner gives over control to a higher power. He no longer controls what he’s doing. His intention controls what he’s doing. To perform all these skills fluently, he must trust that spontaneously being himself by losing himself will get the job done.
Learning about the remarkable capabilities of the mind
It was October of 1968. I was in the barber chair at the Ambassador Health Club on Sutter Street in San Francisco, thumbing through the latest issue of Sports Illustrated, when I came upon an article that caught my attention. The article was titled “Shooting by Instinct,” and it described one Lucky McDaniel, a young 33-year-old instructor from Upson County, Georgia, who could teach somebody to become a crack shot in a little more than an hour. Martin Kane, the author, started out by describing how someone typically approached the art of shooting.
Most skills allow you to attain a certain level of proficiency through conscious control. Target shooting is a good example. You take careful aim. You breathe according to plan. You watch the front sight drift back and forth across the target. You find it impossible to control the wavering sight, but you hope you can discover a rhythm that will permit you to let off the bullet at the correct instant. You try, therefore, to time the wavering of the sight, the beating of your heart, the extraordinary turbulence of your softest breathing. When you think you have all these things in rhythm, you do not pull the trigger. You squeeze it ever so gently, making sure you are holding your breath. You try to time the squeeze so that the bullet will let off between beats of your mounting pulse.
That sounded like the way I used to prepare myself to speak. But Lucky McDaniel had a different approach. He called it “instinct shooting” and it delivered virtually unbelievable results. In the article Kane recounted that…
…he taught me, in little more than an hour, to shoot with such marvelous accuracy that soon I was hitting crawling beetles and tossed pennies with a BB [pellet] gun, with scarcely ever a miss. The first time I ever wore a pistol I was able to draw it and hit a pine cone in the road, at a distance of some 20 feet, six times out of six, shooting from the hip.
For an over-controlled person like myself, this was akin to heresy. How could someone learn to do this? The article went on.
…a student of the Lucky McDaniel method (“The Lucky McDaniel System of Muscular Coordination and Synchronization Between Eyes and Hands”) does not trifle with the meticulous. A true McDaniel follower will go so far as to have the sights removed from his weapons because they are a hindrance to him. He will point rifle or pistol as naturally as he could point a finger, pretty much as good shotgunners do: Looking at what he wants to hit and quite disregarding the cant of his weapon or the state of his breathing, he pulls the trigger. He does not squeeze the trigger. He might even slap it, as shotgunners sometimes do. That is all. He hits the target, which may be a flying dime or an Alka-Seltzer tablet tossed into the air by Lucky.
By this time I was turning the pages in total disbelief. For someone who had found it hard to just let go and speak, the idea of shooting impulsively, with such results, was beyond my realm of experience. A bit later in the article, Kane described McDaniel’s teaching method.
Lucky’s method of instruction is a marvel of simplicity. There is, in fact, very little instruction because Lucky does not want to clutter the pupil’s mind with inhibitions.
The pupil is handed a BB gun and told to shoot it at nothing a couple of times. He is asked if he has seen the pellet leave the barrel. When he has satisfied Lucky that he really has seen it, the pupil is permitted to shoot at objects tossed into the air by Lucky, who stands at his right side and a half-step to the rear. Practically the only advice he gets is to cheek the gun [bring the gun to the cheek] slightly and to look at the object without sighting along the barrel.
“Cheek it and shoot it,” Lucky tells the pupil as he tosses up the first target, a rather large iron washer, a little bigger than a silver dollar.
The pupil generally misses.
“Where did the BB go?” Lucky asks.
The pupil says he saw the shot pass under the target.
“That’s right,” Lucky says, and tosses up the washer again. “Cheek it and shoot it.” The pupil misses again, is asked where the BB went and again he says it went under. Lucky agrees that it did. But on the fourth or fifth miss a pupil may say that he saw the BB pass over the target.
No,” Lucky says firmly. “It never goes over. You’ll never miss by shooting over it. Now try to shoot over it and you’ll hit it.”
The pupil tries to shoot over the washer. He hits it. In that instant he becomes a wing shot. Smaller and smaller washers are tossed into the air and the misses become very infrequent. Eventually the pupil is hitting penny-sized washers and is able to plink them on the top or bottom, as called for by Lucky.
This occurs in an incredibly few minutes, usually under a half hour. During that time the shooter has been kept very busy. Lucky gives him no time to think about what he is doing, no time to theorize, no time to tense up. Targets are tossed in fast succession while Lucky keeps up a patter of suggestion pretty much implying that this is just about the brightest pupil he ever has taught. The pupil is inclined to think so, too.
After establishing expertness with the BB gun, the shooter moves onto the .22 rifle. The routine is much the same except that targets may be anything from small clay pigeons to charcoal briquettes, either of which powders in a very satisfying way when hit by a bullet. There is almost never any difficulty in making the shift to the .22. The shooter now has ingrained ability to resist the temptation to aim. He just looks at the target, pulls the trigger when, somehow, he senses that he is pointing properly. This is a very definite feeling but hard to describe. It is a feeling of empathy with the target. Establishment of this “sense” is the big fundamental of Lucky’s teaching.”
What occurred to me is that this is how children learn to speak. If there’s no fear of stumbling or making mistakes, or if they don’t inadvertently slip into bad speech habits, they follow a mindless process of trying, failing, and trying again and again until some inner process takes over control. And lo and behold, they begin to produce words. Kane continues:
One reason for seeing the BB leave the gun, Lucky says, is that he wants the pupil to “learn to focus on a single object without looking at everything else around.”
“I tell him to hold the gun easy against the cheek, not force the cheek down to the gun in the regular way,” he explains. “As soon as he begins to shoot I know what he is doing wrong. There are a thousand things he can do wrong. But I don’t excite him. You’ve got to give him confidence or he’ll tighten up. I tell him he’s going to hit the target and most of the time I call ‘em right. When he’s shooting high I don’t just point to where he should be shooting. I throw the objects and point while I’m throwing it. I keep this up steadily so he’ll swing into it. Then I keep shifting the target, like from one match to another on the ground, so we won’t get wrapped up in one target.
“This is instinctive shooting and it’s got to come easy.”
Compare this method of shooting to the first method quoted in this section where the shooter painfully and deliberately tries to control every factor. To me the former smacks of a precision fluency shaping technique where the person is trying to consciously control every aspect of his or her speech. The difference between the two methods is that the second way of functioning is fluent. It simply flows. The first is not fluent, even though there may be an absence of speech blocks. Fluency isn’t about an absence of blocks. It’s about having flow.
To create flow, the one thing the spontaneous shooter and the spontaneous speaker have to have is trust.
You need to trust in something you can’t feel or touch or consciously control, precisely what we as people who stutter and block have trouble doing.
Whereas you can learn to shoot a rifle by exercising conscious control and get passable results, getting results with speech that are simply passable are usually not considered satisfying. Speaking fluently and expressively is a highly complex process that requires you to operate on an intuitive level. There are too many processes that need to be coordinated simultaneously to carry this out consciously. To have the words flow easily, they cannot be controlled by your conscious mind. They can only be controlled by your intention. Your subconscious, or what the Zen master would call your “it,” runs the show.
When you try to deliberately control your speech, you end up interfering with a spontaneous act and the fluency breaks down. You may be able to speak without stuttering, but many people I’ve met through the years, people who have tried to control their speech, end up forsaking the fluency technique they had recently learned. They all offer the same reason for giving it up.
“Sure, I can talk that way,” they say, “but when I do, I just don’t feel like I’m me.”
Well, that’s no surprise. Self-expression is a spontaneous act. It involves subtle changes in pacing, volume, tonality, and the like. You cannot consciously control this and feel free to fully express yourself.
If you don’t trust yourself to be spontaneous…if you cannot surrender to the moment…if you have a conflict in your intentions…if you cannot practice the skill and then forget about the practice and just perform the skill…the interference is likely to trigger your self-consciousness. And you’ll begin to pull back.
To be truly fluent, speaking must be performed intuitively, just like reading dynamically must be carried out intuitively. And gymnastics. And high wire walking. And Aikido. And playing a musical instrument. And all the other skills that require performance at the highest of levels just to do them properly.
That to me is what fluency is all about.
How does one gain real fluency?
In 1985, to prepare for a talk at the National Stuttering Association’s first national convention, I sat down one day to see if I could come up with a paradigm for stuttering that encompassed everything I had discovered about the problem and about how I was able to disappear it.
After years of personal growth programs, I understood stuttering, not simply as a speech problem, but as a system involving all of myself – an interactive system that was comprised of at least six essential components: behaviors, emotions, perceptions, beliefs, intentions and physiological responses.
This system could be visualized as a six-sided figure—in effect, a Stuttering Hexagon—in which each point of the Hexagon affected and was affected by all the other points. It was the dynamic moment-by-moment interaction of these six components that maintained the system’s homeostatic balance and that made it so difficult to change.
This model explained why you couldn’t just go to a therapist, work on your speech, and have those changes last. To make the changes permanent, you had to change the system that supported the way you spoke.
More to the point, in order to change your speech, you had to change you.
I found the Hexagon a useful concept because it resolved the question of whether a speech block was emotional or physical or genetic or environmental. As you can see by this paradigm, stuttering/blocking is not an either/or issue, but rather, a system that involves the constant interaction of all these factors. Blocking is emotional and physical and perceptual and genetic and environmental. Each point can exert either a negative or positive force on the other points.
Thus, in a system where most of the points are not supporting your ability to trust and assert yourself, there is little likelihood that gains in fluency or ease of self-expression will be lasting. On the other hand, if you have made gains all around the Hexagon, then this will support greater fluency, because you have not just changed your speech, you’ve changed the system that was leading you to hold back.
It is only by changing the system that you can create true, uninhibited, spontaneous, mindless fluency.
Unfortunately, many therapy programs adopt a strategy in which the focus is almost entirely on creating deliberate, physical fluency. This may lead to controlled fluency, but it actually creates a mindset that works against spontaneous fluency. It stops you from ever experiencing the feeling of fluency, which is mindless, spontaneous, and expressive.
So what did I do to become spontaneously fluent?
I couldn’t change my physiological make-up. That was a given. It was encoded in my genes. How I reacted to stress and how quickly I switched into a fight or flight reaction was hard wired.
What was not hard-wired was how I framed my experience.
If I didn’t frame a situation in crisis terms, I would not initiate crisis-managing strategies (blocks).
I changed my beliefs, not just about my speech, but about myself and about other people. That in turn would affect how I perceived my experiences moment by moment.
I resolved conflicts in my intentions – conflicts that fueled my desire to speak and hold back at the same time.
I learned to become more comfortable with my emotions.
I better understood what I did physically when I blocked and learned to relax the muscles that caused the block.
Over time, I made a lot of changes. I practiced speaking in front of others. I learned to become assertive. I became comfortable expressing what I felt. I changed how I framed my experiences. Eventually, I dissolved my stuttering system and stopped thinking about stuttering altogether.
Very gradually, I ended up building a system in which spontaneous fluency and self-expression were possible.
Summary
Though you may not realize it, you’ve been functioning in an intuitive mode all your life.
When you first learned to walk, you focused on placing one leg before the other. Then, one day, you did it instinctively.
When learning to drive a car you initially focused on the pedals, the steering wheel and your position on the road. You were conscious of pedestrians on the sidewalk. After a while, the driving process became automatic.
Similarly, when you first attempted to ride a bicycle, you experienced difficulty with your balance. You held back and applied the brake at every opportunity. Suddenly, one day it all came together. You gained the confidence to let go and pedal – enjoying a fluent ride.
Yet with speech, something ran amiss.
This essay looks at the parts of the fluency system – something that should operate in the same fashion – to see what has broken down
In both the Reading Dynamics and Lucky McDaniel stories, we saw that a complex skill is mastered through –
• having a clear intention
• mindless repetition without concern for consequences
• practicing trust.
In the skydiving and bar mitzvah stories, we saw that conviction and commitment have everything to do with a person’s willingness to let go, give up control, and just be.
With the Hexagon, we saw that troubleshooting a complex skill calls for addressing it as a whole system.
In part two of this journey into the Feeling of Fluency, I’m going to share with you some of the experiences from my life that were critical in transforming an underlying deficit in my life:
My inability to trust.
John Harrison can be reached at jcharr1234 @ aol.com.
My Tangled Tongue
– A Testimony by Walter Sturdivant Client of Tim Mackesey.
Walter Sturdivant
At around the age of four or five my mother told me to speak “low and slow.” I wasn’t at all sure why I should do this and simply ignored the request. It wasn’t until I was in the second grade that my normal routine of walking home from school with a friend was interrupted twice a week on those afternoons. My mother took me to a speech therapy clinic where I sat at a table with a few other children who stuttered and literally blew out candles. The words “when,” “why,” “where,” “who” were elongated so that if one of us extinguished four candles he or she was complimented and given a prize.
As these sessions progressed and as I continued to hear promptings from my parents to speak more slowly, no doubt my sub-conscious began to whisper to my conscious that I was not talking very well and that I must try harder to talk better. Quite possibly I was “learning” how to stutter, or I was one of the children Dr. Wendell Johnson referred to when he said, “Parents teach their children to stutter when they teach them to fear speech by being ashamed at their best attempts at speaking.”
For me the key word in this statement is fear. During my elementary school years I accepted stuttering as simply part of my personality, unaware that within some pocket of the left side of my brain fear was breeding. When I entered a New England preparatory school I was teased not only about my Southern accent but also for my stuttering. Some of my classmates believed southerners were poorly educated and that one who stuttered was, most probably, stupid. For the first time, I found myself substituting a synonym for a word that usually gave me trouble. In the vernacular of speech pathology I had “anticipatory anxiety” which is a result of stuttering and not the cause. I would have a decent thought composed, but within it lurked a feared word. Generally, I would not raise my hand in class to answer the question correctly, nor would I say exactly what I desired during social conversations. Ironically, because I was a mild stutterer (though with occasionally severe blocks), I was teased more often than those who stuttered severely. I never accepted this attitude. The most egregious example of this treatment occurred when a teacher imitated my stuttering in front of the class after I had answered a question.
At my school all graduating seniors were required to make a speech on a topic of their choice to the entire student body and faculty. As weeks shriveled to mere days before the dreaded event, I began to feel dissociated from sports and other usually pleasant activities. I felt adrift and believed that I would somehow be spared the ordeal. Yet a speech was required for graduation and I was definitely ready to leave New England.
When I began to speak behind the lectern I oddly felt that I was hearing someone else’s voice. The words came acceptably and continued fluently throughout the talk. Afterwards, the English teacher in charge of public speaking told me that I did all right but spoke in a monotone. Perhaps this slight alteration in my delivery enabled fluency as when the person who stutters sings, whispers or speaks loudly stuttering diminishes.
This victory soon dissipated when I became increasingly concerned about my freshman year at the University of North Carolina. There would be social events, visits to fraternities and most probably trips here and there with “the boys”. I asked my parents what could be done about my speech and my mother was told that the best clinic in the country at that time (1954) was at the University of Iowa, directed by Dr. Wendell Johnson.
There were about 10 of us sitting in a room not saying a word when Dr. Johnson, a jovial, portly fellow, entered. He introduced himself by gently repeating the initial syllable of every word. I was astounded and dismayed, sensing that this fellow had to be joking and was he even possibly mocking us? He asked everyone to say our name and hometown. When my turn came I spoke without hesitation and fluently. Dr. Johnson looked at me suspiciously as did a few others.
That afternoon, he asked my parents why was I here, since he did not experience me stuttering. Only years later did I conclude how unprofessional to initially judge someone who merely had a moment of fluency. At that time I was still having moderate to severe blocks.
My therapist and I visited public places such as grocery, hardware, drug stores and restaurants where I practiced the gentle repetition of initial sounds in asking for an item or ordering a meal. To my astonishment my listener did not look past me, smirk or say the word for me. I was treated as a normal, fluent person. As I progressed with this exercise my sub-conscious no doubt began to realize that my old stutter with tension was being replaced with a repetition lacking tension. I sensed an emerging control over my speech that had never been present before. Moreover, these speaking events in public places helped desensitize stuttering and lessen the anxiety of certain sounds.
While at Iowa, I came to know a medical student whose severe stutter had so depressed him that he was convinced he would never become a surgeon. To ask fluently for the proper instrument during an operation was overwhelming. While it is highly likely that Dr. Johnson’s methods enabled this aspiring doctor to gain more control over his speech, the stutter that remained most probably deterred him from pursuing a career in medicine. He is typical of many talented people who stutter, in that they tend to turn inward and settle for the mediocre.
Whatever happened to me in Iowa was, as I reflect upon it, a wondrous oddity in that not only was I completely fluent, I did not seem particularly impressed about such an achievement. Moreover, the only ‘A’ I received at the University of North Carolina was, ironically, in public speaking! During my senior year a friend told me that I had an “irregular” speech pattern. Apparently I paused between words, or spoke quickly, hesitated then resumed. As an officer in the Marine Corps I had to speak before troops, and, occasionally, before an audience in an assembly room. Was I a miracle in the making? Hardly.
During the early sixties in a north Georgia rural town I became the editor and reporter of a weekly newspaper. Whereas the position strengthen my ego, the unrelenting pressure of producing a 6 to 12 page journal with the assistance of only a secretary began to test my resolve. I shall always remember a significant moment that occurred one afternoon. While speaking over the telephone, my stutter so rudely returned that, initially, I discredited its substance, merely attributing the moment to an absurdity resulting from fatigue. Yet on following days when using the telephone, my foe returned with conviction and, as I would discover throughout the remainder of my professional career, it would remain permanent.
During the early seventies I attended a speech clinic on the Hollins College campus in Roanoke, Virginia. The method was based the theory that we speak the way we hear, and that if the inner ear senses disruption then stuttering would ensue. However, if the ear hears a soothing rhythm, fluency would result. The three-week program known as “fluency shaping” consisted of dramatically stretching words liiiiiiiike thiiiiiis. During the second week stretching was reduced, and in the final week normal fluency was attempted and nearly everyone succeeded. But for me, and I dare say for many of the others, the experience was merely a temporary fix not only because we never ventured into the city and spoke in public places, we were merely attempting to manage symptoms and not digging deeper into the psyche.
I abandoned therapy until the late eighties when a female therapist believed that my speech would improve if I practiced optimal voicing of vowels by keeping the shape of the oral cavity ready for the vowel only and to breathe through the abdomen. So I would drive around in the car saying, “pAy”, “kEy”, “pUt”, “tOp”, feeling, indeed, like there’s no fool like an old fool. Although some sounds became more manageable I was concluding that I would always stutter.
As the 21st Century dawned, and as I began to feel my seniority deepen, stuttering became more an annoyance rather than an embarrassment. Why was I fluent in most speaking situations except the telephone? Was there anything more I could do here in Atlanta, as the thought of traveling to yet another disappointing clinic was hardly appealing?
When telling my story to a group of speech pathology students at Georgia State University in July 2004 Tim Mackesey’s name was mentioned and his Neuro Linguistic Programming (NLP) was briefly discussed. What caught my attention were the cognitive or emotional issues that he confronted.
In August I had my initial interview with Tim, was sufficiently impressed with his approach and therapy began.
We initially revisited specific moments in my past when I had encountered severe blocks either on the telephone or in mixed company. We “edited movies” of these events so that they became insignificant and anxiety-free. Then I learned that stuttering followed a 1-2-3 pattern: 1) I would sense a “feared” word approaching that set off…2) anticipatory anxiety in my throat or chest that would pose the…3) fight/flight option, meaning that I would either inhale then stutter through the word or simply substitute words (flight).
To successfully reduce initial anxiety as the stuttering moment approached, I learned that the thought of experiencing a feared sound (plosive or fricative for me) precedes the anxious feeling and the anxious feeling precedes the actual stutter. I learned that the initial fear, the thought that I was going to stutter, could be significantly reduced by knowing I had a way to “re-frame” the moment—that being to welcome the feeling, exhale and let the word slide out. Also, pausing before initiating the sound often helped to deliver the word fluently. Since option 3) was no longer valid, I concentrated on 1) and 2) and began to realize that the plosives and fricatives that had for so long plagued me were actually harmless. Hence, the old panic began to wane and I became increasingly aware that I could control them by this new approach in “managing my state”. Most important, I realized the therapy taught at Iowa and at the Hollins campus treated only the symptom—the moment at which the stutter occurred.
State Management requires dedication but, at least for me, I am convinced that this therapy is the answer, and that I can reverse the “mind-to-muscle” idea that I stutter. That I can become fluent in all speaking situations all the time is now a distinct a reality. I have been having more victories on the telephone and those once troublesome sounds, now free of tension, are “anchored” in my subconscious.
What causes stuttering and why it persists into adulthood is still debatable. Yet I sincerely believe that, at last, permanent relief from this most embarrassing, and humiliating affliction is possible through NLP methodology.
Finally, for me, the winner’s circle where fluency is commonplace is no longer a mirage. Its clarity strengthens daily and during this year I shall return to that fluent person I once was – that child who never doubted the first sounds he made.
Note: I very much appreciate Walter’s telling us his story with NLP and Neuro-Semantics. The viability of any new model is that other people with similar knowledge can take the new model and duplicate its findings. With Walter’s story we see the results of speech pathologist Tim Mackesey, SLP of Stuttering Specialists in Atlanta Georgia. Indeed has utilized these tools in assisting several clients to much more fluency. There are others in the Neuro-Semantic Community obtaining the same results thus validating this model for PWS.
The Swish Pattern
by Tim Mackesey, SLP
Pour la traduction française, cliquez ici (PDF)
Purpose
To move from an unresourceful state to a resourceful state instantly. To “break state.”
If you are experiencing anticipatory anxiety before speaking, swish away the feeling quickly. If you have negative feelings after a stutter, prevent a new somatic memory on your time-line. The swish pattern is a powerful tool- when combined with reframing and the Drop-Down Through pattern- to help become “relapse-proof.”
Where there are many versions of the swish pattern in NLP, this is my favorite. Why? The fast, kinesthetic movements of the hands complement the visual and auditory experience. As you see and feel the toxic state on the back of your right hand, you bring it closer to your face and welcome the feelings intensifying. When you are fed up of this feeling and image, you do a quick motor movement of your hands while saying “swish.”
Hence, this version of the swish pattern incorporates V-A-K: Visual, Kinesthetic, and Auditory channels. Some people pick a word such as “fluent,” or “confident” in place of “swish.” Make sure you say a word when doing the arm movements.
Application
When anxious, angry, nervous, or any other toxic unresourceful state. Why stay in a bad mood when you can change instantly? Break state !!
Process
- Identify the mood/feeling and put in on the back of your right hand. Feel and see a memory of that toxic state. As you bring the hand closer it intensifies the negative feelings.
- Shake that off and break state. It is critical to clear your head before #3.
- What state do you want to be in? What is opposite of the toxic state? Recall a time when you were in that ideal state….imagine it intensely…..see, hear, and feel what that is like….breath the way you did, now. When you have it amplified to a 10/10, put it on the back of your left hand. This is your positive anchor. A ring band is a great visual target. As you bring the hand close you feel better- great.
- Shake it off and break state.
- Put your right hand out in front of you and as you bring it in the negative feeling will intensify. Just let your self experience it, as it is only a feeling. Get your left hand into position in front of you with arm fully extended; just left of center. So now you have the right hand “in your face” close and the left hand at full extension. Your are now loaded and ready for action! As you say the word “swish,” rapidly push your right arm out to full extension and bring the left/positive hand in real close. With the left hand close, recall the positive state intensely. The arm movement is to be done rapidly and with intense feelings.
- Shake it off and break state.
- Test: look at your right hand. Is there still some negative feeling left? If it is gone, great. If not, repeat exercise as many times as you need until the looking at the right hand is completely emotionally neutral. You should be able to say “It’s gone.” Congrats !! You used the swish pattern to run your brain and change your break state instantly.
When you realize that you now have a tool to immediately change your mood, how will that change your future? What will become easier? When and where do you imagine using it in the days and weeks to come?
In the future, use your left hand, and the positive anchor, to step into a resourceful mood when you desire. “Stacking the anchor” means to recall new, great experiences on that anchor point. As you bring the left hand up and you focus on the anchor point (i.e., ring band), it will “fire off the anchor” and put you into a resourceful state. So, after each positive, new experience you will want to re-associate into that great memory, amplify it to 10/10, and then open your eyes and see it on the left/hand positive anchor point. How bright will your future time-line be? Public speakers, athletes, actors, and others who seek peak performance use this technology.
Author
Tim Mackesey, PC, CCC-SLP
770-399-5455
1874 Independence Square
Suite B
Dunwoody, GA 30388
www.stuttering-specialist.com
There is Much More than Meets the Eye Contact
Tim Mackesey, SLP
Pour la traduction française, cliquez ici (PDF)
Eye aversion, or intentional breaking of eye contact during moments of stuttering, is more than meets the eye. It is far more than just a behavior. To fully understand eye aversion it is important to examine it from several angles. These include: 1) defining appropriate eye contact, 2) the positive intention behind eye aversion, 3) the cognitive and emotional aspects of eye aversion, 4) the listener’s perception of eye aversion.
First we must attempt to define appropriate eye contact. In language there is a system called pragmatics. Pragmatics is the language system that governs socially appropriate nonverbal and verbal language. This includes, but is not limited to, body posture, turn taking, ‘politeness,’ and eye contact. Appropriate eye contact does not mean staring like a deer in headlights into your listener’s eyes. In fact that is impossible because humans follow a distinct pattern of eye accessing cues as they retrieve and/or formulate information. For example, a right handed person will look up and left when accessing pictures, look up and to the right when creating pictures, look down when accessing emotions, and look left and right respectively when accessing or creating dialogue (words)*. So, there is natural and necessary eye movement when conversing. If you stutter, or provide services to those who do, you know how to recognize eye aversion.
There is a relatively consistent positive intention behind eye aversion. Stuttering therapy pioneer, Dean Williams, wrote about positive intentions behind many stuttering behaviors.** No one was born eye averting. Eye aversion is not a neurological tic (uncontrollable bodily movement). Eye aversion is a voluntary action programmed and conditioned subconsciously. Eye aversion is provoked by a combination of cognitions (limiting thoughts) and limiting beliefs about listener reaction.
People who stutter may be attempting to protect themselves from seeing a listener reaction. If so, they are mind reading, or presuming to know the reaction of the listener. It is often associated with guilt and shame over one’s stuttering. Stern correction by adults, teasing, bullying, and other negative experiences when young may help explain the foundation for the habit of eye aversion. The term “foundation” is used to imply these experiences are the references for the cognitions and emotions; the beliefs that stuttering is “bad,” “unacceptable,” “not tolerated,” and so on. It is when a child attaches a stigma to the behavior of stuttering that cognitions and limiting beliefs take root. I have seen eye aversion in children 3 years old to adults in their 70’s (older cases surely exist). Young children need help in modifying the behavior. Adolescents through adults have to take ownership over the behavior in order to integrate new patterns of communication and fluency.
There is a mind and body connection in stuttering. For instance a person may anticipate a stutter on the word “contact,” look away from his listener, tense his tongue against the roof of his mouth and utter “c-c-c-contact.” Often that just isn’t enough. He may then replay the moment of stuttering, feel guilty, mind read, and question his ability to say the word “contact” next time.
I recently interviewed a 41 year-old attorney who stutters. The dialogue was as follows:
TM: “…I notice that you look away each time you stutter. Is that something you have been doing for some time?
BB: “Yes, come to think of it I do it all the time.”
TM: “How do you know when to look away?”
BB: “I get embarrassed”
TM: “How do you manage to get embarrassed when you stutter?”
BB: “I wonder what they are thinking about me?” (mindreading)
TM: “Please fill in the blank for me. If people see or hear me stutter they think
(blank)?”
BB: “I am inadequate” (limiting belief)
TM: mirroring comment “You think you’re inadequate”
BB: shrug “Yes… I guess I have been thinking that.”
TM: “Has that served you well?”
BB: “Definitely not!”
It is here that I modeled two ways of stuttering on my name. I asked him to watch both examples and tell me which way made him feel more comfortable. First, I looked directly into his eyes and said: “My name is T-T-T-T-T-T-im” with visible tension in my mouth. Second, I kept eye contact for “My name is” and then averted eye contact for “T-T-T-Tim.” (The actual stutter in the mouth was made as identical as possible.) When asked which made him more comfortable he was adamant that the example with eye contact made him more comfortable. He went on the say it made him more comfortable when I stuttered with eye contact. When asked what he thought of me as I looked away, he answered “afraid.” Afraid, uncomfortable, and scared are the typical answers I hear in this exercise. That experiential exercise helps people who stutter decide that they want to keep eye contact. It is one thing to intellectually understand the importance of eye contact. It is entirely different to emotionally commit to it.
Eye aversion can have a profound impact on a relationship. For example, I recently facilitated a family counseling session involving an 18-year old male with a severe stutter and his parents. When asked the positive intention of looking away while stuttering, the 18-year old replied: “I think I’m bothering them when I block…it takes so long for me to get the word out….sometimes I just say ‘forget it’ and walk away.” His parents reported that they also always looked away. When asked their positive intention for looking away, they replied: “We thought it would be easier on him…less pressure…we just wanted to help.” Can you see the communicative wall that was built between child and parents? It happened that the young man had his most severe and chronic stuttering around his parents. They all committed to keeping eye contact during moments of stuttering modification. They noticed an improvement in fluency and a much more healthy relationship in a couple days. Eye aversion makes the listener less comfortable and makes the stuttering appear like more of an impediment. It is a lose-lose habit.
Eye aversion’s cognitive and affective phenomenon can be examined in another way. A pragmatically correct and comfortable conversation would involve appropriate eye contact. When a person uses eye aversion they are intermittently disassociated from the conversation. Specifically, as they look away they mind read, physically tense, and stutter- they intensify the stuttering state. Charles Van Riper once said: “Stuttering is everything you do trying not to stutter.” Eye aversion is an avoidance strategy– trying not to stutter and not be identified as a “stutterer.” Stuttering severity, anxiety, and physical tension all increase during eye aversion. People who stutter initially think it helps- that is until they experience the contrast of direct eye contact. Staying relaxed and confident is a prerequisite to utilizing any fluency shaping or fluency modification strategies. One must intentionally keep eye contact during the anticipation or realization of stuttering. That way the speaker is associated, present, and in the “here and now.” One must build his mental acuity to identify the urge to avert the eyes, and then make a commitment to make eye contact and go forward into the word. This commitment would, of course, disallow any use of interjections (i.e., “uh,” “um”) or any filler words before the feared word. If you want to swim, you must get into the water.
Telephoning is another situation where eye aversion can be evaluated. Using a mirror, people who stutter can face themselves during a phone call. If they avert eye contact with themselves during stuttering, similar cognitions and limiting beliefs exist. The positive intention of eye aversion is to protect oneself from confronting the reality that he is stuttering. Fear of stuttering and shame are at work in that moment. Purposeful eye contact in the mirror during stuttering modification can rapidly desensitize people who stutter to the behavior of stuttering. Voluntary stuttering while making eye contact, in face-to-face conversation or making phone calls, can be helpful in expediting desensitization.
Regardless of the variety of speech therapy strategies employed or favored by the individual who stutters, success is dependent on being associated with the listener. This requires a commitment to purposeful eye contact when stuttering is anticipated or experienced.
In summary, people who stutter (pws) are to recognize that it is vital to maintain eye contact at the moment of stuttering anticipation or realization. There was a positive intention behind eye aversion when the person who stutters was younger (to protect oneself from possible listener reaction), and that to move on one must have a new positive intention– to be associated, confront fear, and gain freedom speaking. One must experience that eye contact is a prerequisite to the ability to elicit a state of confidence and relaxation. Therefore, success with fluency strategies is positively contingent on keeping eye contact. Beliefs and cognitions to replace the old, limiting ones could include: self-acceptance, feeling safe and secure using purposeful eye contact, feeling worthy as a speaker, believing that listeners will approve of eye contact during stuttering and/or stuttering modification, and that disfluency of speech is tolerated by others. Realizing that eye aversion is a rapport breaker and that purposeful eye contact is a win-win habit- it makes speaker and listener more comfortable.
Tim Mackesey, CCC-SLP (Published in Perspectives on Fluency and Fluency Disorders, April, 2002)
* Brooks, Michael. Instant Rapport (Warner Books, 1989)
** Williams, D.E. (1957). A Point of View About Stuttering. JSHD, 22, 3, 390-397
Addendum to article for those applying the Drop-Down Through (DDT) process:
It is essential that a pws stop averting eye contact when anticipating stuttering. The frames that drive aversion are consistent with away-from motivation; trying to not stutter and not be noticed as a person who stutters. These are very toxic frames to overcoming stuttering. The meta-state during eye contact aversion is not consistent with the meta-state that accesses fluency freedom.
Having said that, there are moments in the DDT when looking in a quadrant to access the highest resource will require looking away. For example, one client looked up and left for a millisecond to access a visual image of his highest resource- which happened to be spiritual. When first using the DDT, some pws will close their eyes and “go inside” as they DDT. This is entirely different than looking away from the fear of possible listener reaction. The intention of the DDT is to release anticipatory anxiety and utter fluent speech. If a pws felt the urge to avert eye contact, I would encourage them to intentionally hold eye contact for a split second before utilizing the DDT.
In regards to accessing a highest resource or pausing to use the DDT, who will set the rules about pausing? The pws better set the frames.
Author
Tim Mackesey, PC, CCC-SLP
770-399-5455
1874 Independence Square
Suite B
Dunwoody, GA 30388
www.stuttering-specialist.com
Straight Talk on Portable DAF: SpeechEasy and FluencyMaster
Tim Mackesey, SLP
Background:
The makers of the SpeechEasy (SE) have enjoyed a recent splash of free publicity by appearing on Good Morning America, Oprah, and write-ups in some magazines. The SE’s most immediate predecessor, the FluencyMaster (FM), has been on the market since 1989. Good Morning America, featuring the SE, had the subtitle “An End to Stuttering.” Oprah had a subtitle across the screen stating “Stuttering Stopped by the SpeechEasy.” That would presuppose that users of the SE would stop stuttering in all situations, wouldn’t it? So, just put it in and become fluent — simple as that. A quick visit to your internet search engine will result in you seeing marketing claims for these devices with teasers such as “Stop Stuttering now.” Wow! I guess that is why speech clinics around the country have been bombarded by inquiries about these prosthetic devices. Family and friends of the afflicted are calling to share the news, and/or offering to buy one. The notion of a quick fix is mighty alluring. The FM has returned to the spotlight and been pulled onto the coat tails of the SE story.
The Skinny:
By attending to your own voice via an auditory feedback appliance in one ear, it may slow your rate. The SE attempts to simulate choral reading — when someone reads in unison — which has been known to induce enhanced fluency in the clinical environment. For example, PET scan studies of the brain use induced fluency by choral reading to get a “fluent” sample to compare to a stuttered sample.
There are people benefiting by these devices in some situations and I applaud that. Several people reported that the severity struggle of the stuttering blocks was reduced somewhat (Accurate measurement would, of course, require measuring severity in multiple speaking situations over 12 months or more.) I have had some clients do a trial with them. I am happy for anyone getting some relief with electronic devices.
After interviewing several people who own, or have returned, these above devices.
Anyone considering buying one will want to consider the following limitations:
- Ambient noise (i.e., restaurant, bar, cafeteria, shopping mall, etc.) may render it useless. The user must be able to listen to the signal (their voice) in one ear. Take it out of the clinic into a noisy environment and “test drive it.”
- Phone. Many people report that hearing their own voice delayed in one ear and listening to someone else on the phone is overwhelming. Make a call with it. Then make a call with it that you expect to stutter on. Does it serve you as desired on the phone?
- One complaint I have heard specific to the SE is that the speaker hears his own voice, and other voices, altered to sound either higher in pitch (reported to sound like a chipmunk), or lower (reported to sound like Darth Vader.) Many have reported that to be annoying on the phone and off the phone.
- Blocking. The devices require hearing oneself. If you produce silent blocks, you may want to explore this. Some soft sounds like /h/ can be a challenge.
- Anxiety. Test it under your feared speaking situations. Can you benefit from it when you need it the most? Does anxiety overwhelm the ability to attend to the signal? If phone calling has been a feared situation for you in the past, it may further increase the difficulty of attending to the auditory signal. Again, put the device to the test.Based on helping several hundred people who stutter in therapy, and recovering from it myself, I strongly believe that anticipatory anxiety will prove to be the pivotal factor for which the electronic devices will never compensate.
- Will you be comfortable seen with it? If you are self-conscious about stuttering and would be sensitive to inquiries about it, consider this. I only mention this because it has been cited by a number of people who stutter. One 33 year old had been telling people he was hearing impaired. Another said: “…It was like letting my ‘flaw’ hang out there for everyone to see.” Obviously, these people are not good candidates, are they?
I personally desire all people who stutter to get their break-through. Since these limitations were inadvertently left out of the reporting, I feel obliged to help people make an informed decision. I personally hope that the manufacturer of the SE asserts itself better in the stories about the devices- to include limitations. If you “stress test” one of these devices, and its performance is consistent with what you expected and find worthy of the price, go for it. I mean that.
The homepage of the Stuttering Foundation of America, a recognized authority, provides good insight about portable devices. The SFA’s 2004 survey, available on-line at www.stutteringhelp.org/research/survrslt.htm reported that less than half of the owners of these devices are happy six months after purchase. You might also want to get into a chat room for people who stutter and pose questions to others who have done a trial with portable devices.
I recommend careful consideration before fitting a young child with one of these prosthetic devices. The belief they inherit is that they must rely on an external aid for help. I recommend speech therapy with a specialist to help the child manage the disfluency and cope with emotions when they stutter in the situations where the device fails them. Some marketers have compared electronic devices to eyeglasses for the visually impaired. This is, at best, an awkward comparison. A good prescription works when you read at home, school, on a plane, on a bus, inside, outside, and everywhere there is adequate light. However, there are many situations in which electronic devices will not stop stuttering and not provide fluency.
Considering the significant price of these devices, will parents mandate use of them? I have already mediated family-child debates over mandatory use when the child refused to wear one. SLP’s have always advised parents to refrain from badgering and correcting a child who stutters. layering guilt and shame on a child for not wearing on could backfire bigtime. The whole process of nurturing and supporting a child who stutters must be considered before prescribing portable devices.
It is interesting to point out that the FM has had a recent surge in sales. A colleague of mine, who dispenses the FM, said this: “…people heard about the SE and started investigating DAF…when they begin comparison shopping they may choose the FM (about $3,500) over the SE ($3,600 – $5,000).” Both require an ear mold made by an audiologist. Both offer a 30-day trial. Returns forfeit the fitting fee. Check with the manufacturers for exact prices and return policies.
Wisely, both manufacturers report that they recommend speech therapy to support use of the device. Be advised: these devices are not a quick cure. Perhaps a famous quote will summarize truly overcoming stuttering: “He who would have the fruit must climb the tree.” Stuttering symptoms may be reduced in some contexts with the aid of these devices. However, the speaker will have to work very hard for a breakthrough.
© 2003 Tim Mackesey CCC-SLP, BRSFD/Mentor
Revised June 2004
Please request permission to quote or reproduce this article by sending an E-mail.
Author
Tim Mackesey, PC, CCC-SLP
770-399-5455
1874 Independence Square
Suite B
Dunwoody, GA 30388
www.stuttering-specialist.com
Freedom of Speech: How I Overcame Stuttering
Tim Mackesey, SLP
Boca
It’s the second week of my sophomore year in a college accounting class in Boca Raton, Florida, and I’m about to relive my worst nightmare. My professor has just announced that we will go down the rows of seats one after another taking turns reading the homework questions and giving our answer. I was in total panic. All my past memories of and embarrassment for reading aloud in class, from childhood to now, were all a cumulative horror.
The worst fear of my life was in front of me right now. I had to read. I could not leave the room. For many years I used to leave the room saying I had to go to the bathroom. As a result of fear, I would stutter while asking to flee. Here I was feeling like a naked, armorless knight cornered by a fire-breathing dragon.
I began to stutter on nearly every word. I was suffocating as my larynx tightened, and I created massive speech blocks. I noticed some of my classmates turned with an astonished look, as they had never heard me speak. They were probably very surprised. I had stayed silent in the class before that moment.
I left the class that day feeling defeated. I went to the admissions office and dropped the class. I lost a percentage of my tuition, but I gained leverage on myself to finally begin changing. That was it. I could not go on like this anymore.
Later that day I was in my room alone. I was reading aloud the very same text I had read earlier in class. I read totally fluently and totally at ease. I thought I sounded like a news correspondent, or actor. My voice was rich, my chest was relaxed, my tongue moved from sound to sound and syllable to syllable with ease and fluency. Was I hallucinating or was I really capable of speaking this way? I was in a different identity at the moment. This “alone identity” did not expect or know how to stutter. Then I got the idea to record myself. I went to push the record button, started reading it, and immediately started stuttering. I turned off the machine in disgust.
I can reflect back and make an association to telephone answering machines at the time. You see, for about a decade I had hung up instead of leaving messages on answering machines. Caller ID was not born yet. At the time, all I knew was that I was doing something to sabotage my speech. I believed that because I could speak with total ease in fluency when alone, that I was created perfectly by God. At that moment the pain was so great that I finally had leverage. I would reach my goal of effortless, block-free speech if it killed me.
“The journey begins within and it ends within.” — Sufi
At that time in my life, age 19, I lived with what Joseph Sheehan called the “giant in chains complex.” Like the giant in Gulliver’s Travels pinned to the ground by the tiny Lilliputians, I felt shackled by my stuttering. I blamed everything on my stuttering. For instance, the manager at the exclusive restaurant I was working had offered me a promotion from busboy to waiter on several occasions. I made up illogical excuses and deferred promotions each time. I would’ve gone from $50 a night in tips to about $200. Again, pain was applied to my stutter. I wasn’t dating much because I wouldn’t call any of the women I met. Not calling women was self-induced torture.
I have learned that when people finally take action they are either motivated by pain or pleasure; the pain of continuing to struggle as they are or the perceived pleasure of overcoming their obstacle. Like the proverbial mule that starves between two haystacks, I had been immobilized by indecision. I had refused speech therapy for many years. I was caught in the middle, suffering but not taking action. Ironically, it was in Boca, meaning “mouth” in Spanish, where I finally developed enough pain that I took action. Raton means “rat” in Spanish. Up until then, I felt I had a rodent living in my brain and in my mouth.
“Timmy, you stutter!”
Until second grade I had no idea there was anything different about my speech. I was a little blond hair, blue-eyed boy running through life. One day in elementary school we were planting seeds into little cups with dirt in them. Apparently I stuttered. My teacher took me by the wrist, led me into the hallway, closed the door, and in the privacy of the hallway looked down at me and said: “Timmy you stutter!” She had a look of concern and urgency on her face. I had never heard the word stutter before, but I knew it had to be bad based on her facial expressions and the inherent need to take me into the hallway to deliver the news.
I became her project. She began pushing me to talk more than the other children did. She assigned me the lead in a play called The Lincoln Pennies. I recall standing on the stage one day in our small auditorium and stuttering in front of all the parents of the children—including my mother. My teacher had good intentions. She wanted to help me. She, and anyone else I used to blame for my feelings about stuttering, have been completely forgiven — a crucial step towards healing. It was not her fault that I stuttered. There is a family history of stuttering on my paternal side. Even though my family does not recall any stuttering prior to that, maybe I had some age appropriate disfluency. Either way, it is of no benefit to look back.
Whatever this problem was that I had with my speech, it was apparently significant to others. I recall a very brief enrollment in speech therapy that was held in a utility closet at my elementary school. There was Tim, a mop, a bucket, some toys, and my speech teacher. I was discharged from speech therapy after a short while.
Earlier, in first grade, I loved being singled out for my accomplishments. Apparently my handwriting was good for my age. I was often asked to come to the front of the room and write on the chalkboard. Expressing myself brought me great pride. In third, fourth, and fifth grade I gradually began “acting out” more in classes. I chose to be a prankster and instigator as a form of expression. My stuttering remained about the same for the duration of elementary school.
I had several situations of blatant teasing and taunting in elementary school. One girl in particular was a frequent pain to me. After seeing how much she could anger me, she recruited some friends and choreographed a skit in which they put their hands on their hips, move from side to side and called me “stutter butt” in unison. One day I walked out of a class into the hallway and was greeted by them with their new dance routine. A number of people asked why I stuttered or imitated it. In hindsight, it is clear to me that my reaction to these experiences are the reasons why I started programming myself to prevent stuttering. Many years later I would learn Charles Van Riper’s famous quote: “Stuttering is everything we do trying not to stutter.”
Middle School
The first day of homeroom in sixth grade we sat in a circle and introduced ourselves. Across from me sat what I thought was the most beautiful girl I had ever seen. After spying her at orientation that summer, I thought I hit the lottery to have her in my homeroom. We were told to say our name and what we did the previous summer. I had been trying to flirt with her using my eyes. As my turn approached, I became very anxious and anticipated stuttering. When I started to stutter, she looked down, and when she looked back up at me, she had an uncomfortable smile. She now knew my secret. I tried to pretend like it didn’t happen. The number of events that involved stuttering—events that helped build my phobia around speaking—developed quickly in middle school. Reading out loud was my biggest nightmare until eighth grade. Oral presentations would soon be torturous, as well. The telephone became as painful as picking up a piece of hot charcoal.
Taking a principle or belief such as “I will protect myself from feeling embarrassment by avoiding speaking and using tricks”…and translating that into physical behaviors…is called mind-to-muscle, by cognitive psychologist L. Michael Hall. This physicalizing of my speaking fear manifested itself in such behaviors as eye contact aversion, word changing, avoiding, sitting low in my seat in class, hanging up instead of leaving phone messages, inserting “uh um” as filler words before stuttering, using character voices, speaking on expiratory reserve and raising the pitch of my voice, jerking my head down during blocks, and so on. Over time, these avoidance strategies evolved into automatic and unconscious habits. Every behavior had a positive intention at first but ultimately, did not serve me well at all!
By middle school I had begun associating fear with specific words. For instance, the name of our street was Yellowstone Drive. If people asked me what street I lived on, I could remember past experiences of stuttering on the word and would go into a panic. I remember calling for pizza delivery to our home and when they would ask the name of the street go into choking speech blocks. I would later name this mechanism inside the brain that can scan into the past and/or forward for feared words a Linguistic Search Engine (LSE).
I was back in speech therapy now. I was being helped by a lovely woman with good intentions. I was being told that if I said five words, took a new breath, and said five more words, I would stay smooth and fluent. One day before a planned oral presentation in class, I came to her with great concern. I shared my fear of stuttering. She said: “Don’t worry. Go in there, say your five words, take a breath, and five more words each breath and you’ll stay totally smooth.” I went to class that day, stood in front of the class, stuttered, and I was snickered at by several children. Speech therapy had lost credibility for me, and I convinced my parents to let me quit. They offered to take me to the local university clinic, but I refused. Little did I know that I would end up at that very clinic many years later to start exterminating the rats in my mouth and brain.
High School
Speech-wise, high school was a nightmare. I taught myself a myriad of strategies to avoid stuttering. In the classroom, I sat low in my seat, attempting to hide from teachers. I faked sick on days when I was to give an oral presentation. I negotiated a “D” grade for not doing an oral report in one class. Would you believe the teacher let me and did not call my parents? I take full responsibility for my cowardly choice, and at the same time, wonder what would have happened if he had convinced me to face my dragon?
I asked some teachers to excuse me from reading aloud. I substituted words, and avoided words so frequently that when I got done saying something, I would often be asked “What did you say?” Then I would end up stuttering through what I had originally intended to say. A very inefficient and frustrating way to communicate.
I did my best to avoid making any phone calls for nearly a decade. I sabotaged dating. I would ask a girl to “go with me” but then never call her. Sending these mixed signals, such as being nice at school but never calling, made the relationships short-lived. Confiding that I stuttered and was uncomfortable calling may have taken care of the whole problem. But I assigned great shame to my stuttering. I began mind reading my listeners, creating toxic thoughts such as “What would her mother think if she heard me stutter?” Some of the names of these girls continued to be feared words later in life.
We belonged to a country club at the time. Golf was my escape. Being a member of the club, I was entitled to make a tee-time by simply picking up the phone. Instead, I would ride my bike about 10 miles, put my name on a waiting list in the pro shop, and wait up to two hours before playing with people I often did not know. I would see other kids my age organizing foursomes and playing together on a routine basis. This self-induced outcast role was very painful.
The University of Wisconsin
Before going to Boca Raton I spent my freshman year at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. That year in the dormitory was a blur of drinking, stuttering, and learning that I did not know how to study. When drunk, I forgot about my stuttering and was more fluent—liquid fluency. My moving to Boca was intended to give me an opportunity to step away and reevaluate my life.
One of the first things I did upon returning to Madison in my third year of college was to go down to the speech and hearing clinic to inquire about speech therapy. The waiting list was more than a year. At the clinic I met Florence “Flo” Filley, the clinic supervisor. I felt that she could see into my soul— my stuttering soul, that is. I arranged a few private sessions with her before getting a phone call from the clinic.
Half way through my evaluation at the clinic, the graduate student said “Tim, we are not really hearing a lot of stuttering.” I knew this was a nice way of saying that I was changing words and avoiding too much. I replied, “Give me something to read.” When I started reading, the mask was off, and the monster came out of my mouth.
I had two semesters of speech therapy with graduate students at the clinic under the supervision of Flo. I started learning that I had some choices: I did not have to stutter the way I was stuttering, and I did not have to avoid the way I was avoiding. I made every appointment and was thirsty for knowledge. My covert avoidance was far from over though.
I recall praying in a church on campus. Between classes I would go in alone and cry in the front pew. I had initiated an inner turmoil by finally confronting my dragon—stuttering. It was breathing flames and daring me to raise my sword.
On speech “field trips” to a local shopping mall, my assignment was to stutter on purpose with store employees. When I did it, I would walk away from those sessions with a euphoric tingling in my stomach, knowing I just did what I feared the most. In retrospect, that very area around my abdomen I would later learn was ground zero for my anticipatory anxiety that precedes stuttering.
I took a job as a taxi driver. This proved to be one of the most powerful experiences of my life. Here I had the challenge of speaking to strangers in my cab and talking into the radio. I had established a hierarchy of fearful scenarios in my cab. Some of the worst speech blocks I have ever had were heard in the dispatch office of the taxi company as well as other drivers and employees. I started to fear saying certain street names and common pick up points. After several severe blocks on “hound,” I changed the word Greyhound into Graydog. Thinking it was cute, other drivers and dispatch adopted this new term for Greyhound. If people were in the car to hear me, I stuttered even worse into the radio.
I learned that changing street names was a problem. Henry Street is a major artery through the campus. One day I was called to give my location. I gave the name of an adjoining street to avoid saying the dreaded Henry; a wicked block-inducing word. Another driver passed me on Henry and when he heard me give a different street name he reported me for attempting to steal fares. In hindsight, I did not know where the fare was going to, hence I had no advantage in lying and reporting that I was about a block away from my actual location. Nevertheless, I was being dishonest with myself.
One day I was faced with the moment of truth. I had picked up three attractive sorority girls on Henry Street. In their presence I was to call in and report that I was picking up a fare on Henry Street and where I was going as a final destination. In speech therapy I had been practicing the traditional strategies of easy onsets. Easy onsets are done when initiating a word beginning with a vowel using soft, prolonged voicing.
It was show time! I decided that I was going to say it. I did my best to calm my racing mind and my panicked chest enough to use and easy onset into Henry. Little did these girls know that I equated the upcoming feat with making a 4 ft. putt to win the U.S. Open golf tournament in front of several million television viewers.
I started the word by emitting air through my larynx and stretching the /h/ sound for a couple seconds. When Henry Street came out of my mouth without a stutter, I wanted to park the car and begin a Mardi Gras-sized street party. That moment changed my life.
I could not wait to tell the folks at my next speech therapy session. That moment saying Henry Street without a stutter put me on the road to change. It showed me that I could control the monster in my mouth. If I was the giant in chains, then I had just started to break some of the shackles. Flo gave me a copy of an article called “And the Stuttering Just Dies” that was written by a man named Jack Menear who had overcome stuttering. A belief was born: the belief that others have overcome stuttering. Stories like this are metaphors that drove my determination.
All the time I was in speech therapy on campus I was concealing it from all but a few people. When friends saw me coming out of the building, they might inquire what class I was taking in that building, a building they were unfamiliar with. I would lie and say that I was using the restroom in that building. At one point, I had asked my clinician if she would use a plain envelope when sending me progress reports instead of stationery with a clinic address. Fortunately, they refused.
Nearing graduation in the spring of 1987, the student clinicians asked me when I thought I would be done working to improve my speech. I replied: “This May.” God is that funny now! Knowing of my plans for moving to Atlanta, they recommended I pursue speech therapy when I got there.
I wonder if the graduate students who helped me will ever read this. I hope they do. People with communication disorders worldwide can thank the professors and graduate clinicians who make speech therapy affordable to so many at university-based clinics.
Checking In
I moved to Atlanta in spring of 1987 with $150. By day I was working as a laborer for Manpower— the temporary agency. I was earning about $9 per hour carrying sheet rock. I was also accepted into a training program for insurance salesman that met in the evenings. The insurance training program required us to cold call prospects and develop a list of 500 contacts. I was hung up on chronically word substituting or silently blocking during those calls. It felt like too big a challenge, and I dropped out of the program.
But I kept pushing. I took a job at the front desk of a major convention hotel in downtown Atlanta. I had to check in customers, answer the phone, and call guests in their room. I had to speak to supervisors, go to training meetings and speak, and take on other challenges. I was definitely facing the dragon; in fact, I’d call it total immersion.
Once again I developed my personal list of feared situations. Answering the assistant manager’s private line was one of them. We were ordered to answer it within the first two rings and say: “Assistant manager’s line, this is Tim speaking. May I help you?” After a few massive blocks on the words “assistant” and “manager” I began avoiding. I would act busy and let others answer the phone, but there were some situations, for example when the assistant manager was standing right there, when I would have to answer. I would turn away so he or she would not hear me and create a block. Several times, guests who were already irate about something and calling to complain would remark by saying: “Easy for you to say,” or scoff at me in their moment of no patience.
When I interviewed for a management training position at the hotel, my supervisor asked if I could handle it with my stuttering. After blushing, I said yes. You see, I only spoken of my stuttering problem with a select few people, yet everyone knew. I moved on to manage 120 people before resigning to attend graduate school. Overall, it was another pivotal and rewarding sparring match with my dragon. I actually chose to do what I feared the most: phone use, conversations, introductions, oral presentations, and so on. I was desensitizing myself to stuttering and earning new confidence.
Later I would learn the process by which I would “grow a word fear.” It helped me understand how I acquired feared words as a child; many still provoked anxiety as an adult at this stage of my recovery. In college and early careers, words such Henry Street, manager, and others entered my daily vocabulary. When I started stuttering on those words I would remember them using a phenomenon known as somatic* memory. My brain filed them away as feared words. By attaching meaning and emotion to a stuttering event, I would remember it vividly. I would replay the moments in the cinema of my mind: hearing, feeling, and seeing the moments of stuttering. When encountering those words in the future I would feel anticipation in my stomach—a sort of panic sensation like the fight or flight response—and then avoid or speed up and stutter.
* “Somatic” means of, relating to, or affecting the body
Self-Help
At this stage of my recovery, I was devouring materials from stuttering textbooks and from the Stuttering Foundation of America. I also organized the Atlanta chapter of the National Stuttering Association and served as its president for several years. Seeing successful business people who stutter helped to minimize my fear of gainful employment in the future. Opening up, talking about stuttering, and removing avoidance was essential to my recovery.
Toastmasters
Shortly after arriving in Atlanta, I decided to confront my biggest fear—public speaking. From eighth grade through undergraduate school, I had escaped, avoided, dropped classes, switched professors, and done everything else within my power to avoid speaking in front of a group. And I had been 100% successful.
Then one day in a local paper I found an advertisement for Toastmasters. The nearest chapter was in the president’s boardroom of a local university. I knew nothing of the format for a meeting. I arrived wearing jeans and a hockey jersey. Walking in late, I entered a room with wooden paneled walls and oil paintings. Everyone else was a professional and dressed in their work attire. I later learned most of them were realtors, attorneys, and sales people.
At the end of the meeting, I was asked to stand, introduce myself, and share why I was there that evening. The hounds had me in the tree, but this time I was going to bark out the words. The room started spinning, and I thought I was going to vomit. As I stood, I kept my vow and told everyone that I stuttered and that I wanted to improve my speech. I stuttered wildly through my introduction. After the meeting, several people came up, shook my hand, and told me they would support me.
I continued in Toastmasters for five years. There were breaks as I moved around in Atlanta and joined new club’s closer to my dwellings. At the first meeting of each new club I joined, I would introduce myself and tell them I stuttered. I knew by disclosing that fact I was less prone to anxiety and avoidance behaviors. I earned two CTM degrees (Competent Toastmaster), an ATM (Able Toastmaster), and an ATM bronze. I competed in some local speech competitions and won many ribbons at the nightly meetings. I have a first-place trophy from a humorous speech contest.
When I first started Toastmasters, I was guilty of black and white thinking. After giving a speech I would judge my performance solely on how much I stuttered. If I had three or four significant stutters in a five-minute talk, I would beat myself up. It was a roller coaster the first year. Well-meaning people would give me feedback on my stuttering. They might say something like: “Tim, it’s not that bad. Just relax.” They had good intentions and wanted to help me, but because I was not open enough about the stuttering, I did not give them direction and guidance. It’s critical that the person who stutters “sets the frames (i.e.: framework)” for his stuttering. This means letting people know how to talk about it, when to talk about it, and anything else important to the person who stutters.
Communication is like dancing a waltz. Sometimes you have to ask your partner not to step on your toes. If you try to conceal your stuttering and act self-conscious about it, your dance partner may step on your toes without realizing it. Averting eye contact, substituting words, saying “um,” and other avoidances can discourage you from continuing the waltz.
I eventually got to where I transformed anticipation and fear into adrenaline. I would sit through the meeting eagerly waiting my turn to give a prepared speech. I volunteered at every meeting to do table topics or evaluate a speech. My black and white thinking started developing shades of gray. I was enjoying personal growth. Failure was replaced with feedback. If I slipped, I got right back up.
Speed skater Dan Jansen is a role model for me. In his late teens, after training since a child for the Olympics, he fell in Albertville, France. Four years later at the next Olympics, he learned his sister died moments before his race and fell again. Four more years of training, and his final Olympics, he fell during the race he was all but guaranteed of winning the gold. He had one more chance—the 1,000 meter race.
Dan was a distant third in the rankings for the 1,000. His sports psychologist told him to walk around saying “I love the 1,000.” His teammates and family were asked to listen and confirm he was saying it.
In his third Olympics and his final race, in an event where he was not favored, he won the gold medal. You may remember someone passing his baby to him to carry during a victory lap.
What was more important to him than falling? How could Dan keep getting up? How could he silence thoughts like “Others judge you…you’re a choker…you’ll never win.” His goal—the gold medal and personal redemption—must have motivated him to endure all the heartbreaks. In 1983, in Boca Raton, Florida, I saw my own freedom of speech as the gold medal I simply had to have.
Graduate School
“When the objective is clear enough, there are no obstacles” –
Napoleon Hill
I think I originally entered graduate school with the intention of learning to slay my stuttering dragon. I made an unreasonable goal of curing my stutter during graduate school. I was open about it, and all my classmates knew I stuttered.
Going into speech-language pathology (SLP) as a person who stutters has the potential to introduce a number of unique frames of thinking. Some of my “frames” were: “What will people think about a stuttering SLP?” “I must overcome it by the end of graduate school!” “How will my supervisors evaluate me in the clinic if I stutter with a client?” As a graduate student in the speech and hearing clinic we performed therapy while supervisors and parents observed through a two-way mirror. I quickly learned what it might be like to be a goldfish in a fishbowl. I was very self-conscious of the possibility of stuttering in front of the parents of the children I treated. It was the meaning and significance that I gave stuttering that was at the core of the problem.
I thought stuttering took away from my credibility. It was always a challenge for me to say “speech pathology” and “speech therapy” as I feared stuttering on those very words. That was because I was “mind reading.”
Mind reading is presuming to know the reaction of the listener. Later, I realized the humor of introducing myself as a speech pathologist specializing in stuttering while I stuttered during it. Again, it came down to whether I personalized stuttering, whether it permeated my identity, whether I thought it took away from me as a person, and whether I would have less credibility if I kept stuttering.
During graduate school in 1991, I served as a clinician at the Successful Stuttering Management Program (SSMP) in Washington State. My eyes were opened to the power of directly confronting the stuttering. Under the supervision of Dorvan Breitenfeldt, Ph.D., the clinicians and the people who stuttered went out on the campus, telling people they stuttered (advertising), and interviewed these individuals, asking them what they thought about stuttering. Phone calls, speaking into a mirror, and trips to a shopping mall to interview people were all part of the program. One of the most important things I learned was that listeners did not react to my stuttering as I presumed they did. I learned to stutter on purpose. I learned to push myself further into speaking situations. The semantic meaning that I gave stuttering was further changing. By the time I left SSMP, I had taken several more swipes at my dragon.
Lunch with Dean Williams
In 1991 in Knoxville, Tennessee I had the rare pleasure of having lunch with the late Dean Williams, a pioneer in stuttering therapy and a person who stuttered. With several other influential people sitting around, I built up my courage to ask him point blank, “What do you believe is the secret to overcoming stuttering?” He replied: “I’d want to know what I did when I stuttered.” At the time I felt almost cheated by the brief answer. However, as I drove back to Atlanta the next day, it dawned on me how profound his reply was. I still smile when I think how accurate he was. I am sure he was referring to whether I knew what I did before, during, and after the stutter. What thoughts and feelings preceded the stutter, what did I do during the stutter, and how did I reflect back on the blocks I experienced.
The hospitals
My first position as a licensed speech pathologist began in 1992. I functioned as an acute care SLP, going up into patients’ rooms. I was also on a stroke team with other therapists, nurses, dietitians, and doctors. Reflecting back, this was also a critical period on my time-line.
The meaning I gave to being an SLP who stutters manifested in situational stuttering. My percentage of fluency and how I presented myself was much improved from when I began graduate school. Toastmasters and the SSMP were a big part of it. However, I still had specific speaking situations in which I consistently felt anxiety and stuttered.
One situation that speaks volumes about my status at that time was my level of comfort and fluency when at the bedside talking to a patient and the patient’s family. When a nurse walked in the room I was more self-conscious of my stuttering and, in turn, was more likely to block. Giving formal tests where I would have to read to the patient would trigger my stuttering, especially if the nurse were working in the room. This anxiety went right back to my experience of reading in middle school. The memory of those situations, especially the way I felt at the time (my somatic memory), still had enormous power to run my life.
Speaking to doctors brought out some of my worst stuttering. When they entered room, it was as though I were two people. If I had stuttered in front of that doctor before, I would remember that and get anxious. If I did not know the doctor, I would become anxious because I wanted to conceal the stuttering. Typically, I would have my worst stuttering when calling a doctor’s office for orders to see a patient.
This, of course, was a combination of my timeline of phone avoidance combined with the meaning that I gave stuttering as a speech pathologist. (A “stuttering timeline” is similar to the type of timeline you see in a textbook that records historical events along a horizontal line.) I believed that if a physician heard me stutter, he or she would think less of me and would give me less credibility. Typically, my stuttering would be triggered by the memory of a specific phone call 20 years previously in which I stuttered. The embarrassment and shame I had attached to these early calls explained my ability to recall them so vividly.
It was those early remembered feelings—the somatic memories—that explained why I had so much anxiety in my stomach and chest before calling. It was as if I were experiencing those early crises all over again. I believed that leaving a voice mail was worse than talking to a live person. If I stuttered, they would have permanent history of it. So I would mind read and presume that what I thought they thought was the actual truth. I later learned that these were only my projections.
One time when calling a doctor’s office and introducing myself to the receptionist I had a massive block on my name and the title “speech therapist.” In response to my stuttering, the nurse started laughing. I said, “May I presume you laughed because I stuttered while announcing myself as a speech therapist? I happen to be a speech therapist who stutters.” When she began to apologize, I assured her that I might laugh, too, in the same situation. Perhaps she had thought it was a prank call at first. Considering she was a member of the general public with little or no knowledge about stuttering, I can now see the potential humor of the situation.
We started talking, and she told me her grandchild was starting to stutter. Using the internal mail in the hospital, I sent her materials from the Stuttering Foundation of America. We maintained a dialogue for a couple months as I continued to advise her and her daughter.
Her granddaughter benefited from my willingness to take a second perceptual position. What I mean by “second perceptual position” is that I considered what her experience might have been when I first called and stuttered. By considering the position of the listener, finding humor in it, and immediately forgiving her for laughing, I was able to turn the interchange into a win-win situation. Had I responded the way I traditionally did and ended the call with my tail between my legs, it would have been a loss, not just for the both of us, but for her grandchild as well.
One day I was talking to a neurologist with whom I had frequent interactions. As we sat at a nursing station he asked me why I had gotten into the field of speech pathology. He said I was the first male he had ever met who was an SLP. I told him that I stuttered and that I had gotten into the field to help myself and help others. He said, “You know, it seems to me I have heard you stutter a few times. And come to think of it, you are ideal for your job. When you go to see my patients who have had a stroke and cannot speak, you bring a compassion that others might not have.” I remember that as being a very emotional moment. In fact, tears just welled in my eyes as I dictated that quote into my IBM voice recognition software.
That moment was like the proverbial hand slap to the forehead. In an instant, he reframed several years’ worth of illogical thinking about being an SLP who stutters. Once in awhile people will say something seemingly simple that will suddenly change your mind. It was something I knew but was refusing to believe because of my habit of mind reading. That moment has continued to have a profound impact on my life.
Another profoundly important moment on my recovery time line was when I was going through orientation at a hospital and was told I would have to page people on the intercom. That meant several hundred people would hear me speak at once. As toxic thoughts entered my mind, the dragon belched his nasty breath. I took a quick inventory of the mental “frames” that controlled my thinking at that moment. They could be summarized as this: “If I stutter, people will ask who was that? Oh, it is the new speech pathologist stuttering. Who hired him? They’ll hire anyone!”
I knew I had to find a reason to page someone that very day. If not, I would develop a phobia. Even though I had no reference for an intercom in my life, I projected the fear based on past references of stuttering on telephones and at drive-through windows. I got ready to page respiratory therapy to a room I was working. My Linguistic Search Engine predicted I would stutter on “respiratory.” I felt panic. I decided to face the dragon head-on. I walked to the nursing station with a speaker directly above me, and several people sure to connect my voice and face to the intercom.
I looked right at a nurse and elongated the /r/ sound; getting the page out free of a stutter. It took great restraint to not do an end zone dance and spike the phone. A huge moment! My mental radar had picked up the toxic frames of thought, I faced the dragon, and slew it.
Over my first eight years as an SLP, I gradually improved my fluency and freedom of speech. In serving several hundred patients, only two times did a parent of the prospective client mention my residual stuttering on the phone during an initial contact as a reason why they would seek services elsewhere. I have lost track of the number of times parents of children who stutter and/or adults who stutter have cited my history as a reason why they chose to work with me. It was important to keep track of that ratio in my mind.
The phone was my last link in the chain. Sometimes I would go months at a time with relative easy introducing myself on the phone. Other times, the somatic memories of earlier catastrophes would fire up my anxiety, and I would really have to focus on my stuttering modification tools: easy onsets, light contexts, and pull-outs. They worked most of the time, but not always. During the recovery process, there are always times when the person’s anxiety is so overwhelming that his or her speech tools don’t work. This is why it’s necessary to develop strategies for running your mind as well as your speech.
I first tumbled on an NLP book in 1995. As I read it, I found descriptions of therapeutic processes that looked applicable to stuttering therapy. They talked about concepts such as re-imprinting painful memories, visualizing to prepare for future events, conversational reframing, learning how to relax in a matter of seconds, how to get into rapport with people, and how to manage your physical and mental state. I knew my stuttering was much more than simply a motor speech problem. There were too many inconsistencies in that theory. How could I be spontaneously fluent in so many contexts using no modification strategies at all? How did I “turn on my stuttering” consistently with certain people or in certain situations? How is it that specific words from childhood would still provoke a panic attack? NLP seemed to offer some of the answers.
NLP is an umbrella term that encompasses a myriad of therapeutic processes originating from the cognitive-behavioral sciences. The pioneers of speech pathology have utilized gestalt therapy, Rational Emotive Behavioral Therapy (REBT), transactional analysis, Carl Rogers’ Rogerian-style counseling, reframing, and many other approaches. Drawing ideas from psychotherapy is not new to speech pathology, and desensitization to stuttering is absolutely critical to complete recovery.
After confirming the relevance of NLP processes to traditional speech pathology, I decided to earn my NLP practitioner certification. This was a 150 hour experiential, classroom process. The final weekend included an outdoor ropes course. Each activity on the ropes course was set up as a metaphor for change. We would identify an obstacle in our life—a thought or feeling. There was then a physical manifestation of that obstacle in the form of a challenge that we had to overcome. I started to change inside out. I began learning strategies to run my brain. All of this was applicable, not just to my own recovery process, but to my practice as well.
2001 to Now
“It is by changing our inner thoughts that we change our outer behaviors.”
– William James
By 2001, I had been using stuttering modification, desensitization, voluntary stuttering, and pushing myself into more speaking as my framework for recovery for 15 years. My stuttering had become so situational and context specific that I felt like it was just a matter of time before it was defeated. If I stayed focused on those last few targets, and figure them out, I would finally have spontaneity. I knew that closing the final loops would be difficult. Nevertheless, I knew there was no quitting now. As former Green Bay Packer football coach Vince Lombardi once said: “The harder you work, the harder it is to surrender.”
I started corresponding professionally with Bob Bodenhamer, a trainer in NLP and Neuro-Semantics®. Finally, I had found an authority on NLP who had a specific interest in helping people who stutter. He helped me identify specific therapeutic processes in NLP to eliminate the thought patterns that led to stuttering. He put me through these processes and then taught me how to do them.
As I continued to resolve my remaining stuttering I noticed that my stuttering seemed to follow a 1-2-3 sequence:
1. Negative thoughts. The circumstances leading up to a block usually began with a negative thought. After 15 years of hard work, my stuttering had become very context specific. I could pretty much name the people, places, and words I still stuttered on. The blocks were usually preceded by negative thoughts such as “I anticipate stuttering.” “I do not want to stutter with this person.” “This word is hard for me.”
2. Anticipatory Anxiety. This is also known as the General Arousal Syndrome or the fight-or-flight-response. My negative thoughts would instantly lead to anticipatory anxiety. When I anticipated stuttering, I always had a nervous sensation in my stomach that felt very much like panic. The level of panic was usually dependent on the situation.
3. Choice Point. Someone once said that “between a stimulus and a response is a choice.” In the past, once a thought about stuttering (#1) had created anticipatory anxiety (#2), I would do one of two things:
a) Avoid: use tricks like saying “um,” switch words, not raise my hand, and employ other strategies to try to not stutter. In this situation my intention was to protect myself from the pain of stuttering and more important, to shield myself from all the bad things that stuttering meant to me.
b) Push and block: this is the impulsivity that I had translated from mind into muscle. In a state of panic, to rid myself of my anxious feelings about stuttering, I would jump into a word and create some or all of my familiar stuttering symptoms (repetitions, blocks, facial contortions, eye contact aversion, etc.)
It is essential that a person who stutters slow down his mind and body so he or she can make different choices and practice new behaviors. This is called “interrupting the pattern” or “breaking state.” Thus, once I was in a moment of anxiety about stuttering, or actually stuttering, I had to find ways to interrupt this process.
Through traditional speech therapy I had learned to get myself out of a block by executing a “slide.” A slide is done by prolonging the first sound of the word with light contacts in the articulators and larynx. If I started to stutter, I would use a “pull-out.” A pull-out involves realizing the block, stopping your speech completely, and then saying the word again with a slide. But when my anxiety was raging, my mind went numb, and these strategies would become difficult and sometimes impossible to use. The classic strategies did help me reduce the severity of my stuttering over a 15 year period, but I found that even when using slides and pull-outs, there was still a level of tension in my larynx, mouth, and abdomen. The amount of anxiousness about stuttering dictated this level of residual tension. And ironically, the more I would try to prevent stuttering, the more tension I created.
Previously, I had never paid much attention to the sensations in my abdomen. I didn’t think they were significant. I always focused on managing my stuttering in the area between my larynx and mouth using slides and pull-outs. But now, I was also doing my best to desensitize myself as well. I was seeing the importance of digging deeper and understanding my anticipatory anxiety.
Since the feeling of anxiety in my abdomen was a messenger telling me to use the slides and pull-outs, I wondered what would happen if I could remove that very anxiety. It made sense that the thoughts and feelings I had about stuttering that caused the anxiety was the core of my problem. Could I learn to say the words without any anxiety, residual tension, and without having to resort to slides and pull-outs? That’s when I started changing my objective, moving away from focusing on motor speech strategies to removing the process that created anxiety.
My new choice was to use a neuro-semantic technique to resolve the anticipatory anxiety. It is called “Drop-Down Through,” and it helped me reframe my thoughts to eliminate the panic sensation in my stomach before initiating speech. Now, instead of focusing on a fluency technique such as the easy onset, I focused all my energy and attention on the release of the anxiety. When the Drop Down Through technique was done effectively, the word was uttered with no residual tension in the articulators.
In the summer of 2002, I earned my master practitioner certification in NLP. This was a 14-day intensive course with Bob and L. Michael Hall.
What I learned
Considering my family history of stuttering, perhaps I was predisposed to be at risk. However, I have learned what I believe to be the key contributing factors to my stuttering, and the necessary components needed to recovery. Here are some of the concepts, tools, and techniques that I’ve found useful.
• Somatic memory. As mentioned earlier, this refers to the physical sensations associated with a past event—a kind of mental movie in which we can re-experience what a previous event actually felt like. Try it out. See if you can vividly recall a wonderful vacation or holiday. Notice the positive sensations. If it was a holiday at the beach, notice the warmth of the sun on your skin. Smell the salt air. Feel the sand under your feet. Thinking back on such pleasant moments will help you recall the good feelings associated with this earlier experience.
However, the reverse is also true. Recalling negative memories will trigger uncomfortable feelings. I started a list of specific situations, people, and words in which I anticipated stuttering. I clearly defined what these moments meant to me and identified the specific feeling patterns. For example, when I went to use the intercom at that hospital, even though I had never used one before, it brought back my phone phobia, which in turn, led me to feel like I would stutter. It also recalled my tendency to mind read what my listeners might think if I did stutter. My list of other feared situations included the telephone, reading aloud, oral presentations, specific girls names, my street name, my own name, and saying the word “stuttering.”
I began to see that if I sat in class “knowing” I was going to have to read aloud, my somatic memory would trigger the panic sensations associated with similar unpleasant experiences from the past. This is what inevitably led to my stuttering and blocking. My big question became—“What could I do about it?”
The good news is that negative memories can be edited and the emotion removed from them. There are a number of strategies that allow me to observe a past stuttering event, change and “reframe” the meaning I had assigned to it (i.e., embarrassment over teasing), and then alter the visual picture of the event. Once the meaning has changed and it is difficult to visualize the event anymore, the unconscious mind will not reflect back on these time-line moments. The only way I knew to anticipate stuttering on certain words, in specific situations, or people was to reflect backward with somatic memory.
Once my somatic memories of stuttering were edited and stopped showing in my “mental cinema” I experienced less of the panic sensations in the specific situations I would consistently stutter. That allowed me to initiate speaking with ease and confidence.
• Anchors. An anchor is a specific memory that allows you to tap into the feelings and meanings of a previous experience. For example, think of a favorite song. You can go back and fully experience where, when, and with whom you heard it, how you felt, and so on. You can choose to replay the song to re-experience what you felt like back then. The song becomes an anchor to that earlier, positive mindset. Going back to re-experience a past feel-good event explains why we like to repeatedly play particular songs, albums and movies.
Through many uncomfortable speaking experiences, I began to see how I had developed a stuttering timeline with anchors to many fearful words and situations. Whenever I experienced one of these stuttering anchors, I would slip into my familiar panic state. For example, when the assistant manager’s line rang at the hotel, I was instantly anchored to an earlier feared event, and I’d quickly slip into a state of panic.
On the other hand, if at the first sign of fear I could anchor myself to a positive experience from the past, I could short circuit that panic state and stop it from developing.
• Time line. Each situation in which I’d stuttered and endowed with embarrassment, shame, and frustration became another point on my stuttering time line. Eventually, this time line stretched over 20 years. Points on this time line were somatic memories and anchors for specific moments of stuttering, and they heavily influenced my present behaviors and choices.
For instance, how would I know to anticipate and avoid specific words or situations if not for previous references? Sometimes I would find myself drifting back and replaying past moments of stuttering or imagine that my stuttering was to blame for events that did not turn out as planned.
One thing that neuro-linguistic programming offered was an approach to time line re-imprinting. By going back and changing the meaning I gave to the stuttering that came up with I read aloud, and doing this all along the timeline, I eliminated the anticipatory anxiety that always preceded reading aloud. Today, it is very rewarding to read verbatim during an oral presentation or sit on the sofa with my children and read them stories without ever thinking about stuttering.
• Linguistic Search Engine (LSE). This refers to the mechanism in our brain that allows us to instantly identify a feared word. The LSE is like a forward-looking radar on a jet fighter that’s flying low to the ground. It scans ahead for potential dangers so it can take evasive action. With stuttering, it allows us to reach ahead and instantly identify the feared word. For instance, when I moved to Atlanta from Wisconsin, if I was suddenly asked where I was from, my LSE will alert me to a feared word (Wisconsin). I would panic and say “up north” or go into a block. Many people have told me how they look ahead of the passage they have to read and identify specific words they fear stuttering on.
By re-imprinting our somatic memories of feared speaking situations and removing negative meaning from them, we find it less and less necessary to fire up our linguistic search engine. The only reason we remember the stuttered words in the first place was because we applied meaning to that past moment of stuttering. Thus, when the search engine is not running any more, we remain more grounded and fully in the present.
• Reframing. If stuttering events were emotionally neutral to us, would we recall stuttering and make choices to change words, look away, avoid, and the like? I think not. Anticipating stuttering, feeling panic, remembering specific words, sounds, speaking situations, and all other cognitive memories of past stuttering events are made possible only when we apply meaning (negative) to stuttering.
Alfred Korzybski, the developer of general semantics, said: “Human beings are a semantic class of life.” What he means is that humans are programmed to endow their experiences with meaning. We do that by setting up frames-of-reference. Hence, it is essential to reframe the very meaning we have created for our stuttering. Remember how I thought that my stuttering meant having no credibility around doctors. That frame was what triggered the panic sensation and led to stuttering. Marcus Aurelius once said: “Men are not disturbed by things, but by their estimate of things.” He meant the meaning we give things.
One part of the recovery process, then, is to reframe the meanings we give to the speech-related moments of our life — turning negatives to positives.
• Breaking state. I had to learn to identify when I was going into a stuttering state and break, or interrupt, that state. When I realized that I felt anticipation in my stomach prior to stuttering, it made sense to me to look into that and see what I could change. By using time-line therapy techniques, reframing, the Drop-Down Through process, and other neuro-semantic and NLP processes, I was able to gradually dissolve the panic feeling that preceded stuttering. My speech flowed more and more spontaneously without ever having to resort to my old fluency modification techniques. I just talked without interruption.
Peeling back the layers of the onion
In summary, it was essential that I re-imprint my time line—that is, reframe and revise the negative speech-related experiences covering many years—so that the memory of past stuttering disasters did not continue to cause anticipatory anxiety in my present life. Re-imprinting memories of stuttering erased many of the frames-of-reference they created for situations such as oral reading, telephone, and oral presentations.
Could Dean Williams have been planting this very seed in my brain in 1991 when he asked me if I wanted to know what I did when I stuttered? I like to think so. The evidence of my recovery is that I no longer think about stuttering nor do I rely on behavioral fluency strategies to produce modified fluency. I no longer even feel the sensation of anxiety in my stomach. I just talk.
At the time this article was written, March 2003, I have anticipated a stutter five times in the last six months. They were old references, old feared words that popped up in my linguistic search engine. One of them arose when I asked to speak the manager at a hotel. As I did with the other four occurrences, I used a neuro-semantic process like reframing or the Drop Down Through process to remove the anxiety, and I was able to speak fluently.
Today, before a public speaking engagement, my focus is on pushing myself to achieve excellent platform skills. I still have the normal, typical disfluencies that all speakers have (i.e., loose whole-word repetitions), but my blocking and struggle behavior are history.
This is further evidence of the power of clearing my head of stuttering thoughts. I am 100% confident that I am now cognitively Teflon-coated and relapse proof.
Having come this far, do I regret that I had to endure more than two decades of stuttering and self-punishment? No. Next to Christopher Reeve’s ability to stay positive with quadriplegia my story seems trivial, although I know it’s not. I believe I am a more compassionate person, a better parent and spouse, and I love my work as a speech pathologist. The journey through stuttering has been a personal metaphor that will make all things possible for me.
The dragon’s fire is out.
Author
Tim may be reached through his website at http://www.stuttering-specialist.com