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From: Joseph Dewey
Date: 22 Oct 2005
Time: 19:08:48 -0500
Remote Name: 24.10.194.97
Hi Nikki. Thanks for your interesting question. Most of my realizations about cluttering and what I was going through happened after I was diagnosed, so before I really didn't know enough to even think about it on a conscious level. I did a lot of things that were subconscious, and Weiss calls these "self-correction." He said that self-correction is generally very ineffective, which I would agree with. Something things that I did were 1) pausing. I would have very inappropriately long pauses (up to 30 seconds) in the middle of conversations, waiting for my head to calm down , 2) Trying to understand and map out how people think, and this turned out to be very ineffective because communication is generally based on how people feel, rather than on their thought processes. While developing this, I totally missed the empathy and feeling part of communication, 3) developed the ability to ask questions. This was probably the most effective of the self corrections. The time that clutterers will clutter the most is when they tell stories and the time that clutterers will clutter the least is when they ask questions. These self corrections in cluttering are really similar to secondary behaviors in stuttering. And, I used the DAF machine in therapy. The biggest benefit was that it showed me what slow speech was. After I used the DAF machine, I asked the therapist...."Do people really talk this slowly? Do people really talk this slowly?" I now realize that the answer to that question is that sometimes it’s appropriate to talk that slowly and sometimes it’s appropriate to talk faster. I think that every clutterer should use the DAF machine for an hour or two so that they know how slow speech sounds, but I think that it would have pretty minimal effectiveness for long term cluttering therapy. I did find a DAF program that turns your computer into a DAF machine if you have headphones and a microphone. It's on the internet and you can install for free for 10 days and it only costs about $30 for the full version. The link to it is on the yahoo cluttering group: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/cluttering/ I would also ask the clutterer if they like using the DAF machine, and what they want to do with the therapy and what they want to get out of it. I know that a lot of people have found the DAF machine more helpful than I have. Thanks for your questions. Joseph