My Experiences With Cluttering

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Re: Did therapy address your thought process?

From: Joseph Dewey
Date: 07 Oct 2005
Time: 10:11:37 -0500
Remote Name: 66.10.108.34

Comments

Hi Dawn. This is a very insightful question, and I think cuts to the root of why speech therapy was useful but wasn't enough for me. My speech therapy didn't address my thought processes. It was focused more on the mechanics of eliminating the disfluency rather than controlling the organization. I think that the therapy of "slowing down" is a good example of not addressing thought processes, but instead addressing the surface disfluencies. I also think that research into therapies that address thought process is the next step that will give cluttering research giant leaps ahead. Your question also exposes how cluttering is different than many other speech disorders. With most of the other speech disorders, the therapies are centered on getting the disfluency to go away. With cluttering, the SLP should try to expose the disfluency during therapy, to get at the real problems, which are the underlying thought processes and the disjunction between thought and speech in a clutterer. Since clutterers, unlike people who stutter, can say short sentences very fluently, cluttering will tend to disappear in therapy, because traditional fluency therapy is about practicing to get rid of the disfluencies. A typical exercise would be to practice a problem phrase like “I’ll probably leave for the store to retrieve my bag,” until the client can say it perfectly and confidently. A typical cluttering client would be able to do this within two or three tries, which would be very fast for someone with fluency problems. However, if asked to “ad-lib” this, and tell the story in their own words, the cluttering would immediately resurface.


Last changed: 10/24/05