Understanding Stuttering as a Gift

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Re: Understanding Stuttering as a Gift

From: Walt Manning
Date: 21 Oct 2008
Time: 17:01:36 -0500
Remote Name: 141.225.97.59

Comments

Hello Saumya, My experience as a client had a major impact on my view of therapeutic change. It’s not so much that I model myself after the clinicians I had although I’m sure I did that at the outset. My experiences with my clinicians gave me the opportunity to experiment with myself and my speech. The group therapy experiences were especially interesting and, as much as anything, peaked my interested in becoming a clinician myself. As I said in the original paper, the formal treatment experience set the stage for years of continued practice and my ability to reconceptualizing myself and my possibilities. It’s a lot like graduate school in that sense for you just begin finding out what you can do after you leave school and get out on your own. My experience of being a PWS and being in treatment gave me an understanding of what we are asking our clients to do when we send them out into their daily world. It gave me the understanding that as clinicians, we better be ready to do what we ask them to do – although they won’t often ask us to do that. But we should be ready anyway. My comment about the client not being the problem but rather “the problem is the problem” is something I’ve been saying and writing about only recently as a result of some courses I’ve taken and some reading I’ve done on personal construct theory and constructivist-narrative treatment approaches.


Last changed: 10/21/08