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From: Russ Hicks
Date: 03 Oct 2006
Time: 01:40:19 -0500
Remote Name: 71.252.204.114
Hi Amanda, ..... Thank you for your kind words! ..... Bearing in mind that my "therapy" was in the 1950's - when the earth's crust was still cooling - I found that I could "fake" fluency using the primitive fluency shaping techniques which they called "speech controls." The only problem was that that lasted only about a month after each camp session. The people up in camp were really wonderful, caring people. They simply did not KNOW what we know today. The fundamental principles of the stuttering iceberg (see my paper on this subject at http://www.mnsu.edu/comdis/isad6/papers/hicks6.html for details on this) were simply not known back then. It wasn't until later years - starting in the late 80's and 90's - that I began to see some of the values of those speech controls, but ONLY as a PART of an overall therapy involving the entire iceberg, including the emotional/psychological components beneath the waterline of the iceberg. I never had any formal therapy on that new iceberg approach because I began to be surrounded by people who were experts in the stuttering community. Therapy by osmosis, I guess you could call it. <grin> ..... My stuttering became worse and worse after each camp session (a month or so after) because I simply could NOT sustain the level of effort required to maintain my fluency. As a result of all the negative feedback I received after each relapse (You're not TRYING hard enough! You need to WORK more! You need to PRACTICE more! Don't you CARE enough? Aren't you SMART enough? etc., etc.) the emotional baggage beneath the waterline of the stuttering iceberg began to grow and grow increasing the overall size of the iceberg from year to year. In those days, no one had the foggiest idea that iceberg was even THERE, much less that it was causing more and more problems. ..... Your job as a future SLP working with children will be to keep that iceberg from growing and reduce it if you can! If you can do that, you'll be a success. Making a person fluent is really not that hard. Fluency shaping does that fairly well. But KEEPING him or her fluent in the long term is the real challenge. You need to learn to work beneath the waterline of the iceberg, not just attack the easy stuff on top. I really urge you to read that iceberg paper. Once you can see the entire picture of stuttering, you can see the magnitude of the problems - and the challenges - you face. ..... Thanks for reading my paper, Amanda, and for posting such a good question. Good luck in the future! And enjoy the rest of the papers in this conference! ..... My best to you, ..... Russ