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From: Tom Brennan
Date: 20 Oct 2009
Time: 08:37:34 -0500
Remote Name: 144.96.128.14
Whitney, you've certainly given me a few things to think about in answering your questions and comments I want to make about what you wrote. When I was at SFA and approached their counseling department about taking counseling courses and getting that degree they led me to believe that they felt that speech path was speech path and that it was inappropriate to mix professions. I actually had one professor tell me that a person who stuttered could not counsel and needed the counseling themselves rather than to be doing the counseling. That person has retired but I think it represents more professional thinking than we like to acknowledge. I think that many times professional responses to me run something like "if I was blindfolded I couldn't do it so I know you can't do it". I suppose that my treatment sessions are different in two ways from many folks. First, working with stutterers sometimes makes me stutter and I'm up front with that. When I was a grad student I had a young client who thought I was making fun of him so I've always been up front with it. I guess secondly my sessions are different because they are literally more hands on so that I can observe the clients face, breathing, etc. and I tend to sit in relation to the client to afford better hearing for me rather than vision. I need to hear what my clients are doing with their mouths, how they're moving, when they're turning away, etc. I obviously don't enforce "look at me" but I do at least get them to point their faces in the correct direction. I don't think that other professionals have exactly feared my position as speech path or audiology, they just figure, as I stated above, that they couldn't do it blindfolded and they were/are professionals so obviously I couldn't do it either. I have sometimes had folks in a university setting express the idea that I was just given my degrees because I was "handicapped" or "disabled" which completely misses the idea that most of any "disability" that I have is imposed on me from the outside.