[ Contents | Next | Previous | Up ]
From: Chris Roach
Date: 10/5/01
Time: 5:43:28 PM
Remote Name: 152.163.197.67
Lieven, thanks so much for posting. Your previous work, both in this ISAD forum as well as other posting contributions you've made to the listservs, has been an inspiration to me. You've spoken so eloquently of your challenge with covert stuttering many times. I paid close attention to your words and thoughts. They really helped me.
You're so right about the difficulty of associating one's self in the stuttering community when, in fact, we've spent so many years and so much effort in trying to hide it! Because we've been seen as fluent (or perhaps more as "not really a stutterer") by so many AND we've experienced consequences and perhaps ridicule by some who did criticize our stuttering, it's a struggle to voluntarily associate ourselves suddenly in public as a stutterer.
Your very important point of the normalcy of stutterers is one of my most important missions --to educate others that other than our chopped speech patterns, odd pronunciations, and unconventional physical habits, we're normal, regular folks in every sense of the word. We're as capable, competent, ambitious, creative, intelligent, nurturing, etc. as anyone else. We just talk kind of funny -- that's all....
Regarding covert stuttering, it would be so important to educate those who treat our youth to be alert to the symptons of interiorized stuttering and its residual habits driven by fear. Identifying it early would prevent years of agony and internal conflict in so many, many adults. Don't you think that you, as I think I would have, would have lived a more honest and accepting life, as a PWS, into your adulthood, if you'd had the support and encouragement in your youth to understand and manage more calmly your stuttering traits? Great idea.
Again, Lieven, thanks for your support as well as the influence you've provided in the past.
Chris