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From: Joseph Dewey
Date: 08 Oct 2005
Time: 12:42:47 -0500
Remote Name: 24.10.194.97
Hi Amina. I was surprised that he thought that my speech was bad enough to need help with it. I also thought it was nice the way that he presented it to me...he said, "Joseph, you're really smart, and I think that your career will really be helped by working on your speech." I had always had a goal of being a very good public speaker, but I had never done anything to work toward that goal. I thought in my head, "Well, I don't know if I need any help with anything speech related, but maybe I can work toward my goal of being a public speaker with this." And, my family had different reactions to it. I didn't tell them about it when I was going to therapy, and didn't tell them until a few years ago. They were all accepting. When I told my mom, I asked if she'd ever noticed anything with my speech. She said that she took me to the speech therapist when I was younger, but that the speech therapist said that if my mom didn't make a big deal of it, then I might outgrow it. In ways that's good advice, but I think that’s only good advice because they didn't have any cluttering therapies available. I kind of think that my family just felt that "that's the way Joseph speaks" and didn't have a name for it, so didn't really look at it as a speech disorder. So, I didn't have any big reactions from any of my family when I told them about it. And, with your question of other people in my family who clutter. I think that both my mom and my dad speak mostly in fluent cluttering mazes almost all of the time. This is a concept that I haven't talked much about, but basically it is that the fluency issues of cluttering are a side effect, and the real problem is the underlying organization. I believe it is possible to be cluttering to an extreme degree even if you have no disfluencies in your speech, and the way you do that is by speaking in fluent cluttering mazes. So, basically my parents are fluent, but they maze all of the time. I've got six siblings, and only one brother who seems to be a clutterer, but he's not nearly as bad as I was at my worst. Something else that's interesting is that my other brother, who has almost the same personality as me, has very fluent speech. The only difference that I can see between our personalities is that he studied dance in college, and I studied math. That's where I started thinking about the connection between dance and fluency, because I think that something about him studying dance was able to develop him into a non-clutterer. Thanks for the interesting questions. Joseph