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From: Elizabeth Sliver
Date: 10/10/03
Time: 10:15:27 AM
Remote Name: 157.182.12.174
Hello: My name is Elizabeth Sliver, and I am a graduate student studying Speech Pathology at West Virginia University, USA. After reviewing your paper on, "Expanding Your Comfort Zone," I feel that you have profoundly applied a subject that affects all of humankind directly to stuttering, and your illustrated application allows for greater acceptance and understanding of people who stutter. I appreciate your view that self-acceptance is just as important, if not more important, than fluent speech. Your anedcote explaing your lack of self-acceptance even after gaing greater fluency is extremely powerful in illustrating that point. I think so often, people come into therapy thinking that all of their "problems" will vanish with greater fluency, but you have demonstrated the important issue of having a need to remediate your self-concept as well your speech. Your list of strategies used to desensitize yourself through a variety of speaking situations is applicable to people who stutter as well as to speech-language pathologists! As a beginning clinician, I am interested to know if you feel that formal speech therapy is more or less important than desensitization and self-accpetance? Or do you feel that they are both of equal importance? Should one be done before the other (e.g. therapy before desensitazation activities?) How do you feel that a speech-language pathologist could best help a person who stutters (i.e. what methods, therapy activities, etc.?) Thank you for taking part in this conference...I have learned a great deal by reading your paper! I look forward to hearing back from you. Thank you for your time!