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From: Marija
Date: 10/15/03
Time: 4:08:19 PM
Remote Name: 195.29.96.239
Hello, Beth; yes there is speech therapy in Croatia but I haven't been attending it for many years now. They first "picked me up" on that pre-school check-up when I was 6 and I had been almost continuously attending speech-therapy until I was about 15. I never had any results and never expected to. I would get to hospital on my bike, read some text with my headphones on for 45 minutes, hop on my bike again and rode home with no influence whatsoever on my inner self by the "therapy". It was something I had to do, an errand to run, like my English class in the afternoon. While I was in Zagreb I sought therapy in speech and hearing center named SUVAG and read the text with a feeling. The SLP there told me a sentence that I will hardly ever forget; she said: "Stuttering needs audience", meaning that that's the reason why I never stutter while alone in the room. I did not like that attitude because my point of view was and is different: that the audience CAUSES stuttering. So my experience with SLP's hasn't proved to be... productive. My opinion is that I got more from a psychoanalysis which I attended when I was 16 and then again at SUVAG. Because I needed somebody to talk to me and acknowledge that I had a huge self-image problem, a neurosis, a logophobia. I needed a scuba-diver and not a iceberg-stratcher - to paraphraze Ross Hick's analogy. I still drag emotional baggage and probably always will, but I don't think about it or let it burdain me (except when I get my baaaaad moment). I'm sorry that I have made such a long answer about this! Warmest regards to you.