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From: Walt Manning
Date: 09 Oct 2007
Time: 17:35:16 -0500
Remote Name: 141.225.97.215
Expanding on some comments so far, especially those by Lynne and Greg, there are lots of things operating for someone who appears not to be motivated enough to use techniques in everyday life. Beyond high degrees of motivation it's very important to have a clinician who is willing to do what they ask the speaker to do. The speaker has to have achieved a high degree of desensitization and be able to "stay in" the stuttering moment, especially when speaker in the upper ranges of his or her hierarchy of difficult communication situations. And, as I believe Greg suggested, many of the techniques not only sound and feel weird (in most cases stranger than the stuttered speech that the person has adapted to to some extent) but they are nonintuitive. That is, the new coping responses really have to be over-learned until they begin to become a natural response that makes sense and feels right (like steering in the direction of a skid in a car or moving toward the opponent rather than away from them in martial arts). Most of the therapy techniques are not terribly complicated but the trick is to get peole to stick with them and practice them long enough for the person to begin to (a) believe they can do them under difficult situations and (b)incorporate the techniques as part of who they are as people and speakers. So, I suspect it's far more than motivation that this person will have to deal with but taking small, achievable steps in the right directions should help.