The Why and the How of Voluntary Stuttering

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Re: Stuttering on purpose?

From: Peter Reitzes
Date: 10 Oct 2005
Time: 22:46:19 -0500
Remote Name: 69.22.238.4

Comments

Great questions Robert. A person uses voluntary stuttering to help gain control of stuttering. If stutterers were able to turn on and off their stuttering, we would not need speech strategies such as purposeful stuttering. Voluntary stuttering is used by different people for different reasons. In my experience, voluntary stuttering is most typically recognized as a strong desensitization tool. So you are correct, one of the main reasons to stutter on purpose is to stop avoiding. After entering into a speaking situation by stuttering on purpose, it really just begins to seem foolish and futile to go back to hiding stuttering. Voluntary stuttering can be about just letting yourself stutter openly without much concern for how your stutter. But it can also be about trying new ways of stuttering such as stuttering with eye contact or stuttering using a speech tool such as a “pull-out.” What I personally found most exciting about voluntary stuttering was that the more I used it, the more useful I found it. For example, after voluntarily stuttering on several feared sounds on a regular basis, I realized one day that I no longer feared those sounds and I no longer scanned ahead in my speech to “weed out” or remove those sounds.


Last changed: 10/24/05