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From: Scott Palasik
Date: 18 Oct 2010
Time: 11:48:33 -0500
Remote Name: 131.95.172.211
Maribel, Good morning!!! (or afternoon, however I always think it is morning somewhere). Nice to hear from you and what a great question. You question: “How would you explain to a person who stutters (at any age) that stuttering is not necessarily a bad thing, and that positive outcomes can arise from it?” is really getting at the point of “Acceptance”. This is one of the foundations of the contextual psychology approach Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) that Jaime and I are trying to develop as we speak. Through thought defusion (which is actually being able to look at thoughts as “word” and then defuse the power we give them), and getting clients (any age) to think about their “values” we can get at the idea of “acceptance”. Also by giving clients language like “can” we are providing them tools for their thoughts to NOT generate RULES, they can create OPTIONS. For example, a client may say , “I don’t talk good in class because I stutter.” This thought is very limiting isn’t it? It is creating a rule, a self fulfilling prophecy of “not being able to talk in class.” If we can lead client to think, “I can talk in class, it come out as stuttering, it may not.” , and lead them to this thought without judging (this is a key component of ACT, the process of NOT JUDGING THOUGHTS) we can lead them to the options of “talking in class with stuttering, talking in class without stuttering, talking with both stuttering and not stuttering, or not talking in class at all (we don’t want this one, however this is an options”. We are guiding them to the concept that we can have options and accept them all, rather than generate a “rule” and fail. This gets them now where…. The above is a very very very quick explanation of our general philosophy. If you read back over some of the posts we have above to other people you may see common themes arise “compassion, acceptance, values, “Can”)… Thank you so much for writing and please please feel free to share your thoughts with us. Have a great day! Scott