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From: Melissa (a second year SLP grad student)
Date: 09 Oct 2011
Time: 11:25:09 -0500
Remote Name: 68.119.43.22
Dr. Silverman, thank you so much for writing about mindfulness and stuttering. I am relatively new to mindfulness practice (2.5 years), and the way you describe the worry about how others will perceive it is something that hits very close to home. In my Fluency Disorders class this semester, my professor was talking about Sheehan's concept of the stuttering iceberg, where the visible aspects of stuttering are depicted as the small part of the experience and the invisible aspects (shame, anger, etc...) are depicted as the much larger part of the experience. I immediately started thinking about the "two arrows" of experience that I had learned about through insight meditation, where the experience itself is the first arrow, and the second arrow comes with all the stories we tell ourselves about the experience (which you describe so well in your paper). While the pain from the first arrow certainly hurts, it does not linger the way the pain from the second arrow does. That's when I became interested in learning more about how mindfulness could be used as an adjunct to 'mainstream' stuttering therapy. For a research class, I am designing a study on the effect of mindfulness training on relapse rates in school-age children between the ages of 9 and 13. Do you have experience teaching mindfulness techniques to children or teenagers who stutter? If so, it would be wonderful to know how you went about doing it and what the particular challenges were. If you haven't used those techniques with school-age children, I would still be interested in knowing how you apply mindfulness in stuttering therapy. Thank you, Melissa