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From: Kevin O'Neill
Date: 20 Oct 2012
Time: 19:47:18 -0500
Remote Name: 24.18.229.12
If you like what I have to say, check out other comments here (or take a look at my blog couragetostutter.net). But here's a few quick tweet-style tidbits. / Adult stuttering is much different from stuttering in early childhood, due to learned habits and cognitive emotional factors. / You're treating a general communication disorder -- main goal should NOT be "fluency" but minimal impact to relationships, work, self-image. / See Russ Hicks's "iceberg analogy" paper from 2003, it's very helpful. / AVOIDANCE should be the first thing to address and practice. Being mostly fluent but relying heavily on avoidance is terrible. Without confidence that you can approach and handle almost any speaking situation, fluency-shaping techniques will only work in controlled situations and thus be basically useless. / Voluntary stuttering is an amazing exercise for working on avoidance in a therapy setting. You should also practice in "real" situations (e.g., starting with phone calls). / Stuttering is like a chinese finger trap: the harder you try to pull out your fingers the more the mechanism fights back to make it harder to do so. If you panic and pull hard you're totally stuck, but if you're gentle and patient and pay attention to what the physical mechanism is telling you, it's not hard to release. / In addition to therapeutic methods you learn in class, focus on the basics: breathing, vocalization, movements of jaw/lips/tongue. That's all there is to speech! / If your chest is tight and you're out of breath and your jaw is clenched, it's hard to speak. Sounds obvious, but it took me 20 years to get that and I think I'm a reasonably smart guy. The problem is that I was trying too hard not to stutter to pay attention to what my body was telling me. / Stuttering is a difficult problem to treat, so go easy on yourself and have reasonable expectations. / Ultimate goal is for your client to become a "student of stuttering" so they can be their own therapist. / Good luck!