Iceberg of Stuttering

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Re: Denser than the average iceberg...

From: Russ Hicks
Date: 10/13/03
Time: 4:47:22 PM
Remote Name: 12.237.88.139

Comments

Hey Terry!

Those intensive fluency shaping techniques DO work for a relatively short time for MOST people. When you S--L--O--W-- --Y--O--U--R-- --S--P--E--E--C--H-- --D--O--W--N-- --T--O-- --A-- --C--R--A--W--L and concentrate VERY hard on things like relaxing and light contact and easy onset, heck, it's not THAT hard to be pretty fluent. If fluency is what you want, that'll give it to you. Sure, you sound like a robot, but hey, you're a FLUENT robot!

So that's what I did. I performed my fluency enhancing tricks for as long as I could stand them - say for about month thereabouts - and then it simply became too big a burden. People looked at me like I was nuts, and what I had really done was to substitute one speech problem with another. So it became easier to simply go back to my old way of speaking. I know the accepted theory at the time was that if you just kept at it for long enough you could develop the "habit" of speaking fluently. It may have worked for a small minority of people, but it certainly didn't work for me.

Remember the old story of lifting the calf? The theory went that if you went out in the pasture and lifted a small calf once a day and kept on lifting him every day till he grew up, when he got full grown, you were lifting a full grown bull! Maybe that's how Arnold Swartzenegger got his big muscles but it would never work out quite that way for the rest of us! <smile>

Could I lift the calf for a week? Sure. For a month? Maybe. For a year? Forget about it! Same thing with stuttering.

Stand by for some more email, Terry. We got a LOT to talk about! <smile>

Russ


Last changed: September 12, 2005