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From: Bob Quesal
Date: 10/3/02
Time: 8:33:28 AM
Remote Name: 143.43.201.67
Hi Becky:
This is a good question, but a difficult one to answer in a short reply. There are a number of reasons why my college therapy was "good." The primary reason was that I came to realize the role that my attitude about my stuttering was playing in how the disorder affected me. I was not that severe of a stutterer (I came to realize) but I was s pretty severe avoider. I'd often avoid words, listeners, situations, etc., because I was afraid I *might* stutter. When I avoided, I considered that to be a speech failure. In my college therapy, I was encouraged to confront my stuttering, to study it, to learn to *do* something about it. Confronting stuttering taught me skills to manage it when I'd have those fluency breakdowns, to make them less severe. Importantly, it helped reduce that feeling of helplessness that accompanies many moments of stuttering.
Had I not gone though that therapy, I never would have had the courage to lead a meeting like the one I talk about in this ISAD essay. Of course, then my clueless colleague would not have been able to criticize my less-than-perfect fluency, so perhaps there was a dark side to my "good" therapy. ;-)>
I also explored other things about my speech beyond fluency in my "good" therapy. I learned to speak with better inflection and phrasing, for example. I learned that I was a pretty constrained speaker - "walking on eggs," if you will - and therapy helped me realize that I could speak with more freedom than I had been allowing myself. I don't think that the constraints were an artifact of my previous therapies, but they might have been, at least to some extent.
Because I was in a college clinic, I had many different student clinicians working with me, and they all had a slightly different way of doing things. Some were better than others, of course, but they all were helpful to me in a variety of ways.
Perhaps most importantly, when I was in college I was in therapy because I wanted to be there - I was ready to change. Also, I was more able to be honest with myself about the role that stuttering was playing in my life. I was able to take advantage of therapy that addressed stuttering at multiple levels - not just in terms of fluency.
I hope this helps.
Bob Q.