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From: Ken St. Louis
Date: 10/16/00
Time: 10:08:49 AM
Remote Name: 157.182.12.51
Dear Jimmy,
I grew up in a very rural part of northwestern Colorado on a cattle and sheep ranch and attended a one-room country school through the seventh grade. Then I went to Steamboat Springs to the eighth grade through high school, 50 miles away. No one ever mentioned speech therapy to me, probably because nobody had heard of it. During my junior year of high school, I asked my mother about getting some help. She checked around and found that they had a summer speech therapy program in Laramie at the University of Wyoming.
I attended the 8-week session along with all sorts of other speech disorders, such as articulation disorders, cleft palate, etc. I made dramatic progress and decided then and there to become a speech-language pathologist. I did relapse a few times, but after two more years of therapy at Colorado State University in the middle 1960s where I did my undergraduate work in speech-language pathology, I made lasting improvement.
I have worked to help those who stutter ever since. (You can read my bio in the "Professor Is In" discussion which is part of this conference.) I wish I had had the opportunity to deal with my stuttering when I was younger. If so, I believe that I would have gained control much earlier and perhaps avoided lots of the social problems I encountered later.
I would encourage you to "hang in there" and be courageous. Speech therapy can help! So can certain kinds of counseling such as that which Gunars mentioned. But I would suggest you give speech therapy a good chance first. My advice to you is follow the speech therapy program but DON'T USE THE TECHNIQUES TO TRY NOT TO STUTTER. Instead, learn to accept the stuttering you experience but use the techniques to TRY TO TALK IN A NEW WAY. This change in attitude alone can sometimes make all the difference.
If you want to order some things to read or some fine videos to watch, take a look at the Stuttering Foundation of America website www.stutteringhelp.org.
Good luck.
Ken