Passing As Fluent

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Re: Telling people that you do stutter

From: Terry Dartnall
Date: 10/4/03
Time: 8:33:24 PM
Remote Name: 132.234.9.160

Comments

You might like to have a look back at my exchange with Valentina, which is about this issue. He describes how he came out into the open about his stammer, and felt empowered by doing so, but that his stammer got a lot worse afterwards. I can only speculate, but my guess is that disclosure led to a loss of self-confidence.

The received wisdom in the overt community is that we should come into the open about our stutters. Coverts find this hard to do. I suggest in my paper that we feel that better speech (however we achieve it) will lead to increased self-confidence, which will lead to better speech, and so on, in a virtuous circle. This has been my experience with teaching large classes, which I have been able to do for many years with complete self-confidence. Valentina’s story seems to be consistent with this, but in the opposite direction. Coming into the open seems to have decreased his self-confidence, which has led to his stammer getting worse.

You ask whether it would become harder to cover up stuttering, once you’ve disclosed. I suppose the answer is: it depends who you’ve disclosed to. If you’ve only disclosed to family and friends I don’t see why it would make it harder to cover up your stuttering in public. (It made no difference to me when I told my wife, for example.) Valentina’s experience seems to have been pretty sobering, though. When he had disclosed he found that he couldn’t get his covering mechanisms back.

Terry


Last changed: September 12, 2005