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From: Reuben Schuff
Date: 15 Oct 2011
Time: 11:24:37 -0500
Remote Name: 72.165.233.66
Myisha, Each situation is different, but a few hallmarks of good communication are eliminating secondaries. This started for me by recognizing what all mine were/are. “Secondaries” are those physically things that are part of our pattern that don’t have anything to do with making sounds, such as closing our eye, nodding out head, tapping our leg, etc. These behaviors for some reason helped us get out of the stuttering moment at one point in our lives and have now become adopted behaviors in our pattern. Yet, they have nothing to do with the speech system. They mostly are now distracting to communication and maladaptive mechanisms to cope with struggling. Specifically, the process goes something like: 1) Identify 2) Monitor 3) Choose not to continue the behavior A few others hallmarks that nearly always interfere with communication are poor eye contact, substituting words, circumlocution and running starts (backing up and saying words again that we’ve said fluency in an attempt to bust through a blocked work, an example might be “my name is….—my name is… -- my name is….----Reuben) Speech therapy helped me to identify and recognized these behaviors, but the real work of changing them happens outside of the clinic. But we have to make success not be our best “fluency of the moment” to exercise new choices. We’ve developed our particular set of tricks for exactly the reason of minimizing the uncomfortable of the moment of stuttering. For example in the moment, I find keeping eye contact during a block is really pretty hard and more uncomfortable temporarily than looking down. And allowing yourself to get stuck on the word you were going to say is more temporarily uncomfortable that playing the endless switch-a-roo to find a false fluency. The hardest thing for me to realize is the stuttering with noise is always better than silent blocking, even when that noise in ugly and awkward. My unknowing friends at random gas stations, mall sales clerks, hotel operators and others have helped with those speech assignments. From time to time I find that my modification tools will just turn on by themselves, a little bit of sprinkled voluntary stuttering will just happen or I’ll do a really nice pullout answering the phone or introducing myself. It’s important to understand that the goal of my work in speech therapy was not controlled fluency but spontaneous fluency. So the behavioral approach was not to get controlled fluency to become automatic, but rather to get to uncontrolled fluency. There are times now when talking happens automatically. I don’t use anything, I just get to open my mouth and words come out. And that has been the most amazing thing of my life! It doesn’t happen all the time, I still have times (a lot of times) when I really need to set clear goals for communication and really focus of many of the things I described above. My SLP, her students, and the other people in speech group, motivate me, teach me, and hold me accountable. They help me analyze when things are going well, and make adjustments when things are not going well. They help me plan the work I need to do on my own, define success and celebrate progress! Thank for your very thoughtful questions, I hope I was able to answer them. Good luck with your studies and clinical work. ~Reuben