Working From The Inside Out

[ Contents | Next | Previous | Up ]


Beneath the Waterline of the Stuttering Iceberg

From: Russ Hicks
Date: 10/8/02
Time: 1:57:05 PM
Remote Name: 12.237.31.119

Comments

Hi Marjorie,

Wonderful paper! I enjoyed reading both your paper itself plus the comments/questions that followed. We are both lucky that John and Retz are both friends of ours. Both of them are outstanding thinkers! Really cool people!

I think you're definitely on the right road to some VERY important stuff. Are you familiar with the iceberg analogy of stuttering? If not check out http://www.russhicks.com/iceberg.htm for a quick synopsis including a pretty cool picture. <smile> What you are doing is teaching people to work BELOW that waterline far beyond where the old fluency shaping therapies go. It's not hard to produce fluent speech under controlled conditions, but the hard part is working on those emotions that form the bulk of the stuttering iceberg far beneath the waterline - in what you call intuition. Yes, that's where the real progress will surely be made.

However there IS a difference between John and Retz - and ME. Both of them are virtually fluent. If you talk to them over an extended period of time, you MAY detect some minor stuttering, but in all honesty you probably won't. Everybody has minor disfluencies and John's and Retz's are right up there in that area. Mine, however, are quite noticeable. You talk to me for 10 seconds and you KNOW beyond a shadow of a doubt that I stutter. It's not struggled, gasped, tense stuttering, but it definitely IS stuttering. It's easy, very open, relaxed stuttering. Actually, unlike most other stutterers, I DO stutter when I'm in a room by myself or talking to my dog. (C-c-c-c-come here, L-L-L-L-Lucy!) I stutter about the same all the time. But I really don't object to it, and I'm not struggling to find a way to speak fluently. You've read my paper on "The Gift of Stuttering," so know what I mean.

I like to think - and maybe I'm wrong here, but I honestly don't think so - that what you are hearing in my speech is my "core" probably physioneurological stuttering rather than any emotionally entangled struggle to communicate. I think I've made significant progress in eating away that underside of my iceberg. And when I consciously (not unconsciously, for sure) use my fluency shaping techniques I can become almost totally fluent for relatively short periods of time. I do that only for demonstration purposes as that really isn't ME. I don't long for fluency any more. That isn't MY goal.

What are your thoughts on this?

Great paper Marjorie! I'd love to meet you in person some day. Are you coming to my NSA workshop in Boston October 26th? Give me a holler sometime at russhicks@mail.com.

Best wishes,

Russ


Last changed: September 12, 2005