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From: Russ Hicks
Date: 11 Oct 2006
Time: 15:40:18 -0500
Remote Name: 71.252.204.114
Hi Kristen, ..... The College of St. Rose is VERY well represented at this conference! Hooray! That's an excellent school for speech pathology. I need to get up there to do an NSA workshop sometime... ..... Thanks for your kind words! Words like yours make this all worthwhile! ..... In answer to your question about speech camp addressing attitudes and feeling, the direct answer is NO, not a word nor even a thought. In later years, I understand they began to address those issues, but when I was there in the 1950's (when the earth's crust was cooling <grin>) attitudes and feelings never entered the picture at all. Back in those times the speech "correctionists" (as they were called back then) had no clue about the stuttering iceberg. See my paper on the stuttering iceberg at http://www.mnsu.edu/comdis/isad6/papers/hicks6.html for details of this. The iceberg - one of the most fundamental breakthroughs in understanding stuttering in the last 50 years - wasn't even conceived until about 1970 and wasn't really publicized until nearly 2000. They were clueless on the emotional/psychological baggage beneath the waterline of the iceberg so they never even thought to treat it! No wonder my therapy failed. But it wasn't their fault. It wasn't anyone's fault really. They just didn't know. ..... What was it like having several weeks of fluency followed by severe disfluency? It was a mixture of frustration and total puzzlement. Everyone KNEW the therapy worked! Why couldn't I keep it up? Was I simply not trying hard enough? Was I lazy? Didn't I care? Was I stupid? Etc., etc... All those feelings and doubts were accumulating in the part of the iceberg beneath the waterline, but no one knew it! The overall problem was getting bigger and bigger and NO ONE had the slightest clue this was happening. ..... Ice floats because it's less dense than water. So if you blast off the top of an iceberg (and at the same time add even MORE ice to the bottom!), what happens? It rises up out of the water to compensate for the density difference. Simple laws of high school physics! When I finally realized that, I nearly fell out of my chair! When the stuttering iceberg rises, that's a relapse! It's nearly as inevitable at the physical iceberg rising! Talk about an "A-HA!" moment! That's EXACTLY what happened to me and I NEVER realized it until decades later! ..... Another way of looking at it, my therapy failed for me - and countless others - because I absolutely could NOT keep up the constant practice and work and effort to sustain my fluency. Even today, I can use those techniques but they only work for a short time. It's like holding a ten pound weight at arm's length. Sure you can do it for a minute or two, but for a lifetime? No way! Without the knowledge of the stuttering iceberg, and concentrating only on fluency, failure is almost a certainty. ..... I wish you the very best in school, Kristen. Who knows, our paths may cross before you know it... <smile> ..... Russ, email is russhicks@mail.com