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From: Vasu Parameswaran
Date: 11 Oct 2006
Time: 16:22:08 -0500
Remote Name: 206.106.168.10
I couldn't resist jumping into this thread. I think that deep in our minds, we are incredibly skeptical: no matter how many "positive" thoughts you might give yourself, if you do not have a logical reason for the positivity, you will not believe it, and it WILL show. And for us stutterers, what you will DO when you get into a stutter becomes terribly important, because we ultimately do not have a choice on whether we will stutter. So we will always have a nagging worry about what might "happen" with our speaking - UNLESS we wholeheartedly believe that we can "handle" a stutter when it comes our way. It is an ongoing journey for me, but in my case, among a variety of therapy tools, pull-outs have helped a great deal - I have practiced them enough in easy and hard situations to help me truly believe that I can handle a stutter. Pull-out practice is aided by meticulous "debugging" where you compare the sound you are making by habit when you are stuck, against the sound you NEED to make to get the word out - not easy at first but very much possible. In a sense it is like training your "Self 2" (to use Gallwey's lingo) to handle such situations. Anyway the belief that I can pull-out, frees my mind to get into the content of what I am saying and that leads to more fluency by itself. It is almost like telling yourself to take it easy and not be ultra vigilant and paranoid about disruptions in speech (allowing "Self 2" to do its job. By the way, thanks to John Harrison for introducing me to Gallwey's book almost 10 years ago).