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From: Gunars Neiders
Date: 10/8/03
Time: 3:57:42 PM
Remote Name: 12.211.116.92
Dear Doug,
Although I have not read your primary reference, I believe that as we teach ourselves to struggle, force, tense, become anxions, and down ourselves, so we can unlearn by peeling away the extraneous crap from our speech.
In my life experience that means that the goal is what you call fluidity, Starkweather calls forward moving speech, and I have called flowing speech is the goal.
The question is which layers of useless struggle, self-deprecation, self-downing, catastrophizing about speech, awfulizing about speech and struggling do we try to peel off first.
I suggest that we may have to work on two or three aspects at one time. For example, desensitization both cognitively and by using voluntary repetiotions followed by analysis of self-talk may have to be the first therapy step.
This might consist having the client see the therapist on the first day go out in public intentionally fake a struggling way of stuttering and calmly do a monologue on self talk about stuttering without awfulizing, catastrophizing, or overgeneralization.
The second step may have to be "playing" with various types of stuttering such as a) cancellations, b) easy voluntary repetitions, c) pullouts, d) pre-pullouts, e) easy onsets, and d) vowel elongations. All of these, in my humble opionion, are stuttering incidences, however well hidden. All of these mess around with natural prosody.
Some other ways to stutter is by using an 1)orator voice, 2) acting (both on and off stage), 3) low vibrant voice (e.g. Earl Ray Jones of the Darth Vader fame, and 4) breathy voice a la Marilyn Monroe.
Being a cognitive constructivist therapist I believe that a chronic stuttering client should have some lattitude in choose his style of stuttering. This means that the therapist should not count those type of stuttering events that the client does not want him to count. Or if the therapist insists on counting, he should keep his trap shut and not "punish by rewards" such as praising the client when he no longer does repetitions but uses pullouts.
By constantly working on the clients self-talk and beliefs about stuttering, I hypothesize the struggle, forcing, and tenseness will disappear. However, they may well be a lagging indicator with the attitudes being a leading indicator.
My question to you is as follows: Is this what you also do in your therapy? If not, how does it differ?
Respectfully yours,
Gunars