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From: David Shapiro
Date: 05 Oct 2009
Time: 08:52:46 -0500
Remote Name: 71.125.100.48
Hi Ari, You’re asking a good question. I see that others who have already responded highlighted the difference between fluency shaping (which primarily addresses fluency behaviors) and stuttering modification (which addresses stuttering-related thoughts, feelings, and attitudes, in addition to behaviors). The focus of the interaction, however, has been on the disfluency, or stuttering. I recommend that you attend to what you are doing differently (thoughts, feelings, and behaviors) when you are fluent than when you are disfluent. Often fluency is characterized by evenness in rate, gentleness in onset, and natural-sounding inflection. Although disfluency tends to get more attention, I bet that you have more fluent speech than disfluent speech (i.e. more words spoken fluently than disfluently). In any case, by studying, understanding, and increasing what you do when you are fluent and learning how to do it even more often, fears often reduce as you gain control over the fluent speech, thus increasing the amount of fluency and decreasing the amount of disfluency. So often, although the majority of our speech is fluent, we forget to focus on the fluency, but rather focus only on the disfluency. You may want to try this. Sometimes that which seems most obvious can be overlooked. Good luck. David Shapiro