"Why I Hate All Listeners" and Other Reflections

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Re: Great Article!

From: Dale Williams
Date: 10/7/02
Time: 2:35:43 PM
Remote Name: 131.91.248.210

Comments

Thanks Angie. You’re the second person to tell me you went back to the beginning of the paper after reading the ending. I’m glad it held up under scrutiny.

Your question is a good one and one I touched upon in my response to Mohammad. For some clients, improved speech-associated attitudes actually result in fewer disfluencies. This isn’t my discovery; as with most everything else, Van Riper got there first.

There seems to be a deconditioning process at work here. Within a given individual, stuttering is cued by certain words and situations. When the individual decides to confront these feared words/situations, they can, in the mind of the speaker, become dissociated from stuttering and lose their power to cue future stuttering. In classical conditioning terms, they go from negative to neutral stimuli.

For example, if I’m afraid of my own name, I can handle this problem by putting myself in situations where I’ll be forced to introduce myself. Even better, I can voluntarily stutter when I do so. If I do these things enough, the fear associated with my name diminishes. It becomes just a word and not a cue.

Not that simple to do, of course, but you get the idea.

Dale


Last changed: September 12, 2005