[ Contents | Search | Next | Previous | Up ]
From: Charlie Healey
Date: 12 Oct 2007
Time: 11:28:53 -0500
Remote Name: 129.93.99.57
Thanks Joy for your reading my article and asking the question about how to approach the affective component in therapy. A good resource to look at for children who stutter is the workbook on treating attitudes and emotions by Chemla and Reardon published by the Stuttering Foundation. It has a lot of great ideas of things to consider when working on attitudes and feelings. But, also remember that it's hard to work on how someone feels about something without taking into consideration how they think about something. For example, if a person who stutters fears the phone, the fear is an emotion driven by negative thoughts about speech performance and reactions from the person on the other end of the phone. With adults, you don't have to be psychologist to help the adult who stutters. Just be a good listener and discuss where the feelings and thoughts come from for situations that create a lot of stuttering. Also, you can do some problem solving with them to help them come up with a plan on how to change thoughts and feelings. Some of the textbooks on stuttering discuss working with emotions and a book by Lutermann (can't remember the publisher) discusses the counseling process for clinicians working with people with communication disorders.