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From: Vivian Sisskin
Date: 13 Oct 2011
Time: 08:23:05 -0500
Remote Name: 173.66.20.142
Melissa, You pose a very, very important question! And it gives me an opportunity to address it here. Secondary behaviors are often learned through negative reinforcement (in the operant sense). That is, they are conditioned as part of the stuttering pattern because they operate as an escape from the moment of struggle. Soon, the secondary behavior replaces the struggle, and the struggle is suppressed or hidden. Over time, the secondaries lose their effectiveness, and only work intermittently, and new secondaries are needed to hide/suppress. I find that a deep breath before a feared word will definitely replace the struggle... for a while. However, the client is left with a legacy of an "inhalation pattern" of stuttering, where they are gasping and inhaling on speech... speech is always produced on exhalation. From my perspective, a deep breath is a short term fix with the cost of a long term problem that is very difficult to eliminate.