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From: Anita
Date: 04 Oct 2011
Time: 00:56:47 -0500
Remote Name: 83.223.9.17
Hi Ross. Life is full of rainy days, but once you realize that there are way more sunny ones, you just bring an umbrella. :-) I feel the interest of SLPs in stuttering and people who stutter (PWS), varies. For example when I attended the NSA conferences in the USA I have found lots of therapists teaching and learning, just like us, sharing experiences, laughs and cries and vary in roles to be that SLP, but also to be one of us. On the other hand I have also experienced that there are SLPs not wanting to do that at al. They want to remain their role as a therapist. The teaching role. Not sharing, not learning. I find that both hard to hear and hard to understand. To sometimes be "one of us", to want to learn, means to not only learn about the physical parts of stuttering, but also the person ehind the stutter. What's on our minds. What is it that triggers us. How do we relate to ourselves, our families, our work, our relations. F ex att national meetings where PWS meet, you don't have to be a therapist. That gives you the opportunity to ask questions you would not ask yuor client. To have a drink and a dance together and get to know the person behind the stutter. At international congresses for PWS it always annoys me that professionals don't speak our language. I am not "a case" nor "a subject". I have no clue what all those scientific abbreviations mean. So please explain why I do what I do so that I understand. Don't make us try to read those research papers, but instead send us a resumé in plain language to put in our newsletters. We WANT to learn. And give us space in your newsletters to tell about us, about our work, about our activities. Why not simply save one page to share, from both sides? I would also like to stress the importance to open up conferences and educations for SLPs to PWS. Invite us (and make it payable for us non-clinicians!!!), let us speak for ourselves. You have the knowledge we lack, but we have the piece of the puzzle you might havebeen looking for. I simlpy believe that the only one to solve this problem is to all listen and learn from each other. PWS, SLPs, researchers, but also people who work with psychology, massage, relaxation, NLP, CBT etc etc. We're all a piece of the puzzle. So let's swallow our price thinking we know it all. If that would be the fact, why are there still so many people stuttering and still so many questions unanswered? And this responsibility goes both ways. I wish for the next world congress in the Netherlands (www.stuttering2013.com) to be a joint festival of PWS, SLPs, family, friends, teachers and others who have an interest in stuttering, to all share information, learn from each other and have a drink and a dance. We're in this together. And doesn't all this make stuttering an exiting challenge? :-) I hope my long and weirry reply was a little bit what you were looking for. :-) Thanks for your important question. happy ISAD! Anita