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From: Joseph Dewey
Date: 04 Oct 2005
Time: 16:27:19 -0500
Remote Name: 66.10.108.34
The books say that awareness increases fluency in cluttering clients, and that has been generally true for me. I don't think that awareness is a cure all--I just think that it helps to get speech a little better with clutterers. I was in ways a covert clutterer, in that a secondary behavior for me was inordinately long pauses. If I didn't say anything then my speech is perfectly fluent. For example, a 30-second pause would be normal for me in a conversation. I think that this was developed subconsciously in the 10+ years before I was diagnosed with cluttering as a reaction to how other people reacted to my cluttering. So, one of the things that I did was to stop pausing, even though it made my speech momentarily worse. Some people said to me..."Joseph, you're too focused on cluttering, and you're speech is getting worse." But, it has worked, because now I hardly pause and my speech is much more fluent. I don't remember avoiding speaking situations...I do remember that it finally made sense why certain speaking situations made me anxious, though.