Therapy For Those Who Clutter

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Re: emotions

From: Joseph Dewey
Date: 08 Oct 2009
Time: 06:01:33 -0500
Remote Name: 63.82.19.2

Comments

I can add to Lisa's answer about Joelle's question #2 from my experiences, since I'm a clutterer. Q: What are the emotions felt in a clutterer? A: Most of the time, I have to keep reminding myself that I have a speech problem, or I'll forget about it, and my speech will lapse back to how it was. This is really different than someone who stutters, because those folks typically can't get stuttering and the emotions of stuttering out of their heads. Even though I don't have strong emotions to remind me of my speech problem, there are two things I can think of that I don't like related to my speech. One is when people give me what I call "the face." It's when I'm talking but I've completely lost the listener, and the listener is trying to follow along, probably thinking, "What is he even talking about?" The second is when I have what I call a “speech meltdown.” It usually occurs when I’m trying to talk about a few things at once, and can’t organize my jumbled thoughts into something ordered and cohesive that makes sense and I get tons of disfluencies, and have maze after maze with my narrative. To the listener, it probably sounds like complete nonsense for 2-3 minutes. I can usually avoid this by using the stuff I learned in therapy, but it still happens every few months. These “speech meltdowns” are kind of embarrassing for me, but absolutely nothing like the embarrassment I’ve heard people who stutter express. Lisa did an excellent job in this presentation explaining the somewhat-long process of helping each clutterer to figure the motivation to improve his or her speech. I think this really ties into the emotions felt by a clutterer, too. I had speech-related goals even before I learned that I had a speech disorder. A couple goals I’ve always had are 1) I wanted to be really good at public speaking, and 2) I was fascinated with vocabulary and grammar as I could. The stuff I did with my #2 goal, I’d classify as ineffective self-correction. I became extremely good at Scrabble and Boggle, which I don't think help cluttering much at all, but I completely avoided games that would have actually helped, that Lisa actually mentioned in her presentation, Catch Phrase and Taboo. My point is that I’ve done a lot of vague or high-level thinking about goals in speech, but I’d probably need a professional to help me to translate those things into specific things that I want to accomplish.


Last changed: 10/08/09