Emotional Intelligence and Stuttering Intervention

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Emotional Intelligence and Stuttering Intervention: My Story

From: Mark
Date: 13 Oct 2007
Time: 22:18:04 -0500
Remote Name: 24.185.56.208

Comments

Hi everyone I'm one of Isabella Reichel's many clients and want to share my story. Like Isabella Reichel, I'm from the former Soviet Union too. I was born in Uzbekistan and immigrated to America with my family at about age 12. Ever since then me and my family have been living in Brooklyn, NY. The transition to living in another new country was hard because everything was very new to us. It was even harder for me than for my family because of my severe stuttering that I have. It was so bad that often when talking with a new person, my mind would go completely blank and I wouldn't know what I wanted to say. I also had big blocks on almost every word. As a result I spoke a lot slower than other people and often wasn't understood at all no matter how hard I tried to be understood. Because of that I sometimes was forced to turn to writing on pieces of paper when talking with new people. My stuttering was that bad. Everything began to change when I met Isabella Reichel. I believe my parents saw her advertisement in a newspaper and decided to contact her. I started going to Isabella Reichel when I was in high school. Right now I'm in college and still remember how the day I met her was like. Ever since meeting her, I began to get a lot better. Since my stuttering was so severe, we first started to work on pronouncing successfully the syllables that all words have. Once I was able to say them very well, we moved on to very short words. After a while I was able to say short words too with no problems. When that happened, we finally were able to move on to saying first short simple sentences and then more complex longer sentences. At the end with a lot of hard work, motivation and God's help I was able to reduce my stuttering dramatically if not miraculously. All of this was achieved because of Isabella Reichel's program that is designed to free people from their stuttering. My dramatic progress in my fight against stuttering was due to the many rules that Isabella Reichel taught me. After practicing them enough times under her direction, I was able to use them very well. As a result my stuttering got a lot better and secondary behaviors that I had disappeared for the most part if not completely. But this wasn't enough for me to truly and completely overcome my severe stuttering. To be successful I also had to work on my negative feelings that I still have as a result of my severe stuttering. As always, Isabella Reichel had a good strategy to fight and reduce them too. She discusses part of this strategy in this paper I'm commenting on. One of the first things we did was to discuss my negative feelings. During these discussions, Isabella Reichel tried to show me that my negative feelings didn't make any sense and that I should try to forget about them. She provided me with lots of examples in which people were in far worse situations than me and that those people didn't care about what other people thought. They just lived their lives as best as they could. Another thing that we did is to wait until I had sufficient control over my stuttering. When I was at that point, with the encouragement from Isabella Reichel and support from my family I started trying to stop avoiding talking with new people and instead started speaking with new people. She even invited me several times to talk to her Speech classes that she taught. This contact with new people helped me see that it's not that scary to talk to new people and that most people simply don't care whether I stutter or not. Despite all of this, my negative feelings like shyness and low self esteem persisted. It was mainly because I really didn't have a good management over my negative feelings. In other words I got very nervous just before talking with a new person and had strong negative thoughts. An example of a negative thought is that I kept telling my self that I was going to stutter severely every time I talked to a new person and might have trouble being understood by the other person. This naturally increased my stuttering and nervousness almost every time I spoke with new people and slowed my progress in my fight against negative feelings. As a result of all this, I with the help from Isabella Reichel started working on actively managing my negative feelings or emotions. Right now I'm trying to stop them by trying to replace them with positive thoughts. For example, just before talking with a new person I'm starting to tell my self that it will be all right and that my stuttering and what the other person might think is irrelevant instead of putting my self down and saying that I will have no control over my stuttering and will continue having severe blocks. Another thing I tried to do is to list all of my positive qualities and achievements in order to increase my positive feelings. This helped me see that there's a lot more to me than my stuttering and that stuttering isn't really big at all when considering all of me and what I have to offer. Isabella Reichel also taught me how to effectively manage my stress level since I usually get very nervous just before talking with a new person. She showed me a meditation technique that seems to help reduce my stress level and make me less nervous. The goal of all this is to greatly reduce if not completely eliminate my negative feelings and replace them with positive feelings as much as possible. This will finally enable me to completely suppress my severe stuttering and negative feelings that come with it and live a normal independent life like all the other people. Hopefully with God's help I will succeed very soon. If you have any questions or just want to talk, you can email me at agantx@aol.com... :)


Last changed: 11/04/07