[ Contents | Search | Next | Previous | Up ]
From: Gunars Neiders
Date: 09 Oct 2007
Time: 22:37:54 -0500
Remote Name: 67.183.183.115
Marissa on good-speaking days as compared to easy-living days I would defy anyone who does not know my history to tell me apart from any person without stuttering history. For example today I had to make about a dozen phone calls to correct my error of not taking along the exact addresses and "mapquests" of where to pick up my two grand daughters at their two places of learning. One in a kinder garden, the other in a pre-kindergarden nursery. Not only did I not have addresses of the places, I did not have phone numbers because they were all pretily sitting on my desk in the neatest, best organized package. I could not get a hold of my daughter-in-law an ER doctor because of voice mail purgatory; the neighbor who has our house key was working; chasing down my son took a number of phone calls, and time was of essence. Even with phone and time pressure I did not notice any stress in my voice, let alone any stuttering. My nemesis is a few beers. Not as much management of attitude at that time........and then there could be the strange time when I really believe that I can be a perfect speaker and am cured....that brings me down to my knees the fastest.............There are some people who change in a "born again" or "deep sudden insight" fashion....I changed in an evolutionary sense, I saw I could do this, nothing awful happened if I stuttered, I could extend a little more effort on voluntary-pseudo-stuttering without it causing me or anyone else any inconvenience-and I came to be able to stop rating my whole being, but only assigned satisfaction or dissatisfaction to my actions or inactions, never blaming my self for not having done more or less..........in highschool the therapy was non existent.....at Ohio State University it was really flaky both in the department of speech and language and psychology.....what is more astounding that I was at Ohio state when the great psychologists Carl Rogers and George Kelly were there.......I do admire soe of Kelly's work, but Rogers and I would probably not have gotten together well......on my 21 birthday my roommates gave me the collected works of Sigmund Freud......to me they were so much clap-trap that I who at that time read over a hundred non-school books a year only finished 6 pages of Freud.......The conclusinon we each have build up a reality, some based on scientific thinking (tough-minded) some of literary paens (tender-minded).....the methods that we let others help us with need to be in the same ballpark as what we come in with. Otherwise, the therapist has to be a systematic re-educator, with a lot of patience; and the client has to have at least a little bit of open mind...................In my case family, friends, and others who said "I feel your pain" I ignored...........they did not understand what I was going through.....not even another person who stuttered had tried to help themselves in the ways how I did, so they could not know how I tripped over my real or self-imposed hurdles.... the best thing a therapist can say to a client is: I know what helped other people and you know what so far has not helped you or what has helped you a little bit.....let us compare our notes and see what you are willing to do....and let me as a therapist evaluate if what you are doing is helping or hurting you....but above all, let us communicate.....