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From: Ryan Pollard
Date: 04 Oct 2012
Time: 21:42:28 -0500
Remote Name: 69.116.220.90
Pam, I genuinely appreciate your thoughts and the interest with which you’ve read my paper. It’s only right that I respond to your comments with as much candor as you ventured in posting them. Maybe someone else besides the two of us will read this, maybe not; either way, at least we’ll have a good dialogue :) I actually thought about calling my paper “The Devil You Know.” It’s such a fitting expression for why real change can be so difficult to achieve. I believe that people tend to stay where they are because they fear the devil they don’t know. Only when one has gained insight into what change actually means, how it would play out in one’s life, what sacrifices, compromises and risks it would entail, only then can one choose that path. Or, not. And THAT’S where you hit the nail on the head! Your line about loving yourself anyway, whether you choose to change those traits (identities?) or not, resonated strongly with me. Let me explain. I entered psychotherapy a year and half ago because I needed to understand why I still struggled so much to accept my stuttering. I’d done every desensitization activity in the book, I didn’t avoid anything, I said exactly what I wanted regardless of my stuttering, I was the epitome of the “happy stutterer” (a personally and socially well-adjusted person who continues to stutter noticeably). But I was still angry. I still resented like hell that it took me so much effort to speak in spite of all the work I’d done to modify my stuttering, lessen my tension, minimize my secondaries, etc. I just didn’t understand it—I’d done everything right and I STILL couldn’t make peace with my stuttering. Well, this past year and a half has been one revelation after another. The insight I’ve gained into my distorted thought processes, my black or white thinking, my rigidity, my unrealistic standards, my tendency to catastrophize and be harshly self-deprecatory, my risk aversion, and, ultimately, my choices has helped me reach a point where I recognize the wisdom in your statement. Once we understand ourselves, our options, and their significance, then we’re free to change… or not. And—here’s the kicker—whatever we decide is OK. We can choose to change, work toward that change, and not beat ourselves up when we have setbacks. Or, we can choose to remain where we are, provided it’s working for us and serving us well, and not beat ourselves up for that either. It turns out that I’ve actually chosen the latter path (your path, coincidentally). Deep down, I actually prefer to stutter. I’ve come to see that stuttering hasn’t cost me very much in life. Socially, interpersonally, vocationally, spiritually: you name it, I’ve had a pretty great life all long, despite always telling myself how awful it is to stutter, to be flawed. The insight I’ve gained is that, to me, stuttering is ego-syntonic. Fluency (i.e., the Normally Fluent Speaker identity) is not. When I want to, I can turn on my fluency shaping skills and pass for a nonstutterer. I’ve done this in front of my class, clients, and parents of CSW and watched their jaws drop. It’s that dramatic of a change from my normal speech. They ask me (understandably) why I don’t just speak that way all the time. The reason is that too-fluent speech makes my skin crawl. It feels like I’m walking a tightrope, like I’m not being myself, which makes me MORE anxious, not less. This is why I say that I understand now why I choose to stutter and “remain where I am.” I could work on changing the oldest and strongest identity I have, I could experiment with fluency in more situations and for longer periods of time, and I could really commit to living a fluent lifestyle where I’m treated as just another normal speaker. But right now I’m not choosing to do that. And, truthfully, I don’t have much incentive to since I love my life in spite of having a stutter that’s moderate in severity and obvious to everyone. I realize that’s a very long way to finally get to your question. Here’s my answer: if you’re self-actualized, if you’ve learned to accept and love yourself as you are, and your current choices are serving you well, then you’re at a very good place. People who are overly hard on themselves (e.g., the old me) confuse imperfection with “failure” and good enough with “settling” or “resigning themselves.” The truth is, if you’re content with yourself, then good enough is just that :)