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From: Ken St. Louis
Date: 20 Oct 2006
Time: 11:02:00 -0500
Remote Name: 157.182.15.42
Dear Bianca, I appreciate your post. I must confess that I don't completely comprehend your questions. When you say, "did something to his confidence level," do you mean increased his level of confidence or decreased its level? Assuming the former, using the term "stutterer," over time, can have the effect of helping the stutterer "claim" or "own" what he truly is. He stutters, and he learns to calmly regard himself as a stutterer. Joseph Sheehan wrote eloquently about this over many, many years before his death. Sheehan believed that whenever a stutterer played a false role, he was not doing what was best to acknowledge and treat his stuttering. Assuming the former, i.e., that your client felt less confident when addressed as a "stutterer," I would imagine that it was due to his negative experience with stuttering, e.g., from teasing or failed communication attempts. Anything that poignantly reminds us of bad experiences in the past often has the temporary effect of weakening our confidence. But I would say that one of the major reasons for speech therapy is to learn to accept the past and change the future. I have often found, as Van Riper and others have reported, that stutterers have to feel the negative feelings about various stuttering events before they can put them away just like any other difficult experiences. I hope you can see that I don't agree that we should attempt to change to "person who stutters." I'm quite sure it would not make a bit of difference as long as you are the same caring, empathetic, concerned therapist. Ken