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From: Gunars
Date: 10/13/02
Time: 12:06:52 AM
Remote Name: 206.63.151.166
Dr. Quesal,
First of all, I do sympathize with you. Maybe even emphasize with you.
There are a billion approaches to life as contrsturctivist psychology emphasizes. Each of us have a unique take on life. None of us will ever hope to know reality. Not even me. :-)
We construct reality out of our genetic ability to perceive things and store things in our synapses according to the environment in which we were brought up in.
There are six billion stories or six and a half that are evolving on our planet at this time. Do any of us have the privileged view on Reality or Truth? Highly improbable. Even scientists who gather together start with assumptions. Social sciences and sciences dealing with a person?s own psychology aspects are especially highly vulnerable to flippant and unsubstantiated assumptions. See any writings of the philosopher Wittgenstein, the historian and philosopher of science Kuhn, Walter Truett Anderson, and Kenneth J. Gergen. These authors talk about social constructivism and postmodernism is science.
Dr. Quesal, even though we have never seen eye to eye on many topics, we do have a few things in common. We want to help other people who stutter. And we stutter ourselves.
But we do also have our differences of opinions. I TRY not to take things PERSONALLY. Just a pragmatic reason: it never helped me to do so.
A self-disclosure: Sometimes I have periods of where I think I have normal speech only to be interrupted by periods of stuttering where well meaning people are trying to sell me anything from snake oil to electronic answers. (By the way, I will give a try to an electronic device to get me through some rough periods if I have them when I have to give timed cognitive assessment test to little kids who might be distracted by my dysfluencies. The adults will have to just deal with it. :-) )
Yes, Dr. Quesal, the behavior varies. Period.
The compassion for people who stutter and THOSE who don?t get it does not. Anyway not for me. If anyone who can find a 100% cure for 100% of the people that lasts over 5 years, I really would want to know about it. I really think that I could manage to "bottle and sell it" to get enough money to give away the cure for the rest of us who stutter.
You mention Dr. Larry Molt. He was one of the first people who took me seriously. Good dude! Hey, Larry, I hope your academic career is doing well. :-)
I really like you both. I like me also. So why should WE take things personally until we have been shown that in a double blind longitudinal experiment the author of this learned epistle has proved that he can be 100% successful with 100% of the people over a long period of time?
Now that my querulous ideas have been expressed fully, let me join you in a duet:
THIS TYPE OF STUTTERING THERAPIST, ALBEIT HELPING A FEW PEOPLE, COULD DRIVE A LOT OF OTHERS IN DEEP DEPRESSION IF NOT TOTAL ISOLATION.
Gunars
p.s. Should I contact my Soprano buddies and knee cap him? :-)