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From: Ellen-Marie Silverman
Date: 21 Oct 2008
Time: 00:49:40 -0500
Remote Name: 205.188.117.16
{{Wow, couldn't we all learn from these words! As a graduate student, how do you address the issues of relapse and taking the 'now' as a "present" when helping a PWS, especially through particularly difficulty, emotional times?]] Dear Anonymous Graduate Student, regarding my thoughts on how to deal with inevitable relapses, i.e., reverting to older, stronger mind-behavior sets while in the process of cultivating newer, less strong ones, please see my response to Pam Mertz in The Prof Is In area of this Conference. And regarding viewing the present as "a present" when times are rough, my response is that is a the sanest thing to do. Let me explaing: The present, or the now, is the only place and time where we can experience life, where we can learn and grow. That's why it's a gift, always. Of course, some moments bring us pain. We hate to lose things, like control of our body when we stutter. Stuttering can hurt our self-esteem. It can be emotionally painful. But in the moment, or present, we can actually do something constructive about our stuttering. We can refrain from struggling against it, and we can relax into it. Doing this can help us stutter with greater ease and less conspicuousness. I wrote about this approach to working with stuttering in a paper presented at the 2005 ISAD Conference entitled, "Shenpa, Stuttering, and Me," which can be accessed through The Stuttering Homepage along with the posts to the paper and my response to the posts. I think you might want to take a look at that paper. Thank you for taking the time to post your thoughts. Good Luck with your studies. Ellen-Marie Silverman