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From: Russ Hicks
Date: 21 Oct 2006
Time: 23:15:01 -0500
Remote Name: 71.123.208.188
Hi Heather, ..... Thanks for your kind words. They mean a lot to me. ..... You asked, "... did you ever figure out WHY your stuttering got worse when you went to summer camp therapy??" Oh yes, definitely. It was simply incomplete therapy. I went to camp in the 1950's - when the earth's crust was just cooling - and the speech "correctionists" as we called them back then simply didn't KNOW what we know today, especially 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. We just didn't know. ..... And what happened right after camp and after my yearly relapses, the recriminations (You're not working hard enough! You're not smart enough! Don't you care? Etc., etc.) was only adding to the ice on the invisible underside of the iceberg. If you don't understand the iceberg (which no one did in those days), relapse and failure was nearly inevitable. 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. ..... Thanks for reading my paper. ..... I wish you the best, Heather. ..... Russ, my email is russhicks@mail.com