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From: Retz
Date: 21 Oct 2011
Time: 20:51:53 -0500
Remote Name: 76.230.227.88
James - I am not one of the expert professors on the ISAD panel, but your plight and questions moved me to respond. Your question regarding "Do Fluency Shaping Techniques work in 'Real Life' Situation?" Dr. William Perkins (recipient of the Honors of the Association (ASHA) and Distinguished Emeritus Award at USC for his 50 years of Stuttering Research.) was one of the original researchers, developers and promoters of fluency shaping therapy with PWS; he is considered a GIANT in the field of stuttering by many professionals. After he retired and formed relationships with a number of individuals in the NSA, he authored a number of articles published in the NSA's publication "Letting Go". Some of his published observations of Fluency Training therapy are as follows: "I assumed...that if we could keep our people fluent long enough, eventually their fluency skills would become habitual. Not once did that ever happen. --- Failure to maintain fluency was the clearest evidence of dissatisfaction as speakers gave up hope that this therapy would ever lead to natural speech free of stuttering. --- The blame for failed therapy lay in the professional's failure to recognize that fluency is not the proper objective of therapy. --- The speaker is helpless to prevent involuntary blockage. --- Neural mechanisms of naturally fluent speech cannot be brought under voluntary control no matter how long you try. --- Expecting to speak naturally with voluntarily controlled fluency is like pasting feathers to your arms and expecting to fly. --- Fluency is simply a natural by-product of the speaking system functioning automatically. --- My colleagues and I have been to blame for the fluency failures. --- Voluntarily controlled fluency is the wrong scientific objective, to say nothing of the wrong treatment objective. --- The very existence of self help groups speaks to the failure of professional therapy to address the needs of those who stutter which is not about making speech acceptable to the listener. It's about coping with the feelings that create stuttering and understanding how they offer a path to full recovery."