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From: Lisa Franco
Date: 10/21/03
Time: 10:10:50 PM
Remote Name: 152.163.252.104
Jennifer,
I enjoyed reading your article and I am a huge advocate for implementing self-awareness, self-acceptance,and self-assertiveness in therapy along with modification techniques. I am currently a 2nd year graduate student studying speech-language pathology and during my first clinical experience, I had an eleven year old boy who was a moderate-severe stutterer. I thought it was going to be an easy task for me to establish rapport with this client, but I was mistaken. I read through previous reports that were written and tried to pick up where the previous clinician left off. I initially started working on feelings and emotions directly with this child and I am not sure that that was the best thing to do. I wanted to let him know that it was okay to stutter and that I was there for him-my heart truly went out to this child-For the first two times I saw him, all he did was cry. I needed help to see what I was doing wrong, so I asked my clinic director and she thought I should focus on self esteem, but not with him directly. She thought if I took him out of the situation and, for example, show him a picture of one child making fun of another child who was stuttering and ask, "How do you think the child who is stuttering feels that he/she is being made fun of?" It seemed like a good start in therapy, but unfortunately his parents took him out of speech because there were too many academic demands on him and he did not have time to do speech homework. Would you have targeted self esteem differently with a child who completely shuts down when you try to comfort them and ask them questions about how they feel when they stutter? Do you have any suggestions on what to do when you have extremely sensitive children who stutter and are in complete denial regarding their stuttering? I would ask him why he was here and of course he responded he did not know, but within the next minute he was crying and he could not tell me why he was crying. All I wanted to do was comfort this child, but I think by doing that, I made matters worse. Please let me know what you think. Your feedback is greatly appreciated.
Sincerely, Lisa