[ Contents | Search | Post | Reply | Next | Previous | Up ]
From: Marissa Fappiano
Date: 11 Oct 2009
Time: 06:59:54 -0500
Remote Name: 141.155.148.216
Hi my name is Marissa and I am a graduate student at New York University studying to become a Speech language Pathologist. I think that you have shared a very powerful story. There are many people who stutter that are known be use the same avoidant strategies that you mentioned in your paper. As a student in a fluency disorders class, we have taken a lot of time to talk about the emotional issues that individuals who stutter face. I think it is very important for future SLP’s and current SLP’s to understand that in a therapy session, our job is not to just help stutter, but also the emotional impact of stuttering that is affecting our clients. We have learned in class that an individuals stutter can not be effectively treated until many of their emotional issues such as; depression, and anxiety, are alleviated first. From reading your story, it seems that this is what your experience was like. You had negative feelings towards stuttering and in-turn used avoidant strategies to try and hide your stutter. However, once you were able to see that progress can be made you were able to let some of the negative feelings go and were able to make significant progress. I was wondering if there was any advise that you could give me that I would be able to use in my therapy sessions to help my clients overcome these negative feelings their have about their stutter so that they can begin to see improvements.