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From: Woody Starkweather
Date: 10/19/03
Time: 9:50:09 AM
Remote Name: 216.240.100.82
Hi Maggie:
Thanks for your comments.
There are a number of cycles that operate in stuttering development,and the one you refer to is one of them. A stuttering event is always a bad experience, so naturally a stutterer tends to emerge from such an event with a somewhat worsened sense of his or her ability to talk "well." This lowered sense of ability can then lead to a larger apprehension about the next time a similar speech situation arises, and that apprehension leads to greater muscle tension, which results in more stuttering. So stuttering breeds stuttering, and stutterers have a tendency to get worse and worse until they hit a kind of bottom, where they are stuttering as badly as they ever have. At this point, they can only have an experience that is better than they expect, which lifts their spirits a little, and increases the likelihood that they will not stutter the next time they are in that situation. The same cycle then causes their stuttering to get better and better until they are talking as well as they ever have. At this point, the can only have stuttering experiences that are worse than they anticipate, so they start getting worse. I believe that this cycle of negative and positive deconfirmations of expectations explains the "good days/bad days" phenomenon that is so common in stutterers.
Woody