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From: Brian Humphrey
Date: 06 Oct 2005
Time: 21:40:10 -0500
Remote Name: 71.57.148.38
Hello Prakhar, You raise some interesting questions. I am not a person who stutters, so I cannot offer personal experiences and feelings related to fluency and stuttering, but I will do my best to offer some initial ideas. Being fluent or non-fluent in the same context is often noted. There may be considerable variability in fluency for a given person who stutters. Phil Schneider offered his thoughts about “Riding the Fluency Instability Roller Coaster in the 2004 ISAD online conference: http://www.mnsu.edu/comdis/isad7/papers/schneider7.html . You may be interested in his paper. Some clinicians may define the desired outcome for a particular client as “improved fluency control ”. That is different from setting our outcome as “fluency”, or a “feeling of fluency”. Would you say that your “feeling of fluency” is equivalent to a “feeling of control”? People who stutter have reported experiencing a feeling of loss of control associated with dysfluency. You may be interested in Louise Heite’s paper, “La Petit Mort: Dissociation and the Subjective Experience of Stuttering”, in the 2001 ISAD Online Conference: www.mnsu.edu/comdis/isad4/papers/heite4.html . You asked, “…where did this “feeling” of being fluent or non-fluent stem from? It must have a driving cause. What could that be?” Determining a cause, or a set of causes, for a feeling of fluency is likely to be a complicated problem. It may be that a “driving cause”, or a set of causes, for a “feeling of fluency” or a “feeling of dysfluency” could arise from several sources, as varied as the proposed etiological factors underlying stuttering. Affective, behavioral, and cognitive factors could contribute to such feelings. No matter what the causes may be for feelings of fluency or dysfluency, people who stutter often develop their own combination of control strategies during the treatment process. It seems reasonable that increasing someone’s experience of fluency control may increase his/her feelings of fluency control. Others may be able to tell us if research has been done to address that exact question. I can only say that several people I have worked with have indicated that they would agree; and some have told me that they learned to do things like using the telephone even though the old negative feelings still may arise. We need to know more.