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From: Peter Reitzes
Date: 09 Oct 2009
Time: 08:05:37 -0500
Remote Name: 165.155.192.75
Dritan, thanks for writing. You wrote that with pausing the speaker has to “choose to disregard the urge to go on speaking.” This could be said about any speech tool including pull-outs, cancellations, fluency shaping, etc. In my opinion, that is the whole point of using speaking strategies – the speaker is doing something different. You wrote, “the emotional charge (like laughter or anger) makes it nearly impossible to act at the right time.” My experience has been different – the more I used a strategy and experimented with it, the more I was able to choose to use that strategy when I most needed it – during challenging speaking situations. You wrote, “I do pause now very gracefully when I do need to, because it has become part of my speech pattern, but the way I have achieved this is very personal and nearly impossible to replicate.” I would agree that personalizing speaking strategies is important, which is why so much of what I do is “plant seeds.” I can suggest different approaches and strategies to my clients and suggest different ways to experiment with the strategies, but at the end of the day, the clients are going to figure out what is best for them and how they are going to focus on their stuttering. You wrote, “I do not teach my friends to speak fluently, but to "stutter fluently", easing bit-by-bit their blocks and forced speech. It works.” I am very careful to avoid using terms like “it works.” In my experience, each person who stutters is different and each person will find what is best for him or her. You write, “pausing works just fine when you really believe in it, so you need a bit of "faith", that we (stutterers) generally don't have.” Dritan, let me suggest to you that you may be projecting your own experiences with speech tools onto the stuttering population as a whole. I would agree that pausing, like many other speech tools, takes a bit of faith and a lot of experimentation. But I disagree with your statement that stutterers don’t have faith in using speech tools. It seems that you may be generalizing from your own personal experience onto the stuttering population as a whole. Many people who stutter, at different points in their lives, are ready to experiment with making changes, are ready to leave their comfort zones and are ready to try new ideas.