[ Contents | Search | Post | Reply | Next | Previous | Up ]
From: Paul Goldstein
Date: 21 Oct 2011
Time: 23:24:50 -0500
Remote Name: 88.88.238.25
Hi, Annie. Thanks for asking some very interesting and thought-provoking questions! To answer your first question, I'm really not sure. I only really came to self-acceptance of my disfluency after moving to Norway. Living here, it was rather easy to do that, though it was a slow and gradual process. Part of self-acceptance, I believe, also involves refraining from second-guessing life choices made in the past. When I lived in the U.S., and was intensely involved in practicing and monitoring fluency targets, I did receive much positive help and had many positive experiences. I'm not sure I'd want to take that all back - those experiences were then, and were very helpful to my life then. But now my life and its environment are different, and I have made new choices in life to fit the circumstances and environment as they are now. I'm not sure I would have as much life satisfaction as I do now if I hadn't had the many positive experiences of fluency therapy years ago. Your second question is a difficult one to answer. Building self-acceptance of one's levels of fluency and disfluency is a long and gradual process, and probably takes a substantial amount of life experience to completely reach. But small steps can be taken to help pave the way to success. One is to become desensitized to stuttering, by mentioning it in conversations with people, so that stuttering loses its personal sting. It should not be a "hush-hush" topic, but should be casually talked about with others in the same way as all other individual differences between people. It is also important to come to a realization that everyone is unique with both personal strengths as well as areas in which one may not have the same skills as many others. Skill in consistency of speech fluency is one example of such an area. Life happiness and satisfaction does not depend on one's consistency of speech fluency - one can achieve many personal goals, and be a wonderful caring, loving, and compassionate person without having a gift for fluency of speech. I know this concept would be a difficult one for a young person to grasp, but with increased life experience, these truisms will become clearer and clearer. I also feel that therapy for stuttering can be very helpful for young people, to enable them to feel more comfortable with themselves, to experience some fluent speech or reduced disfluencies for some newly found confidence, and to accept themselves as individuals who just happen to have a speech difference. I hope all this has been helpful!