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From: Steve Hood
Date: 10/15/00
Time: 8:19:21 PM
Remote Name: 152.163.207.177
Hi, Mike--
Thank you for your thoughtful response. I am glad to have asked the kinds of questions, and made the kinds of comments, that sparked such an enthusiastic response. And indeed, you strike me as a positive person for whom the glass will always be half filled, and not half empty.
Yes -- stuttering is more than broken words. Stuttering is about life, and stuttering can in most cases, go a long way toward determining the life-choices the person who stutters ultimately makes. (I'll not go off on a complete tangent here, but this is one of the reasons that mere frequency counts are actually terrible measures of therapy outcomes. Simply reducing the frequency of stuttering down to 0.39934881443 stuttered words per minute tells little of how the person is doing in terms of living a full and productive live.)
I try hard to listen to the pain of stuttering, and I try hard to respond to it. My quandry is more in situations where I think there is pain, and I am trying to respond to it, but there is reluctance on the child's part to want to admit to it and deal with it. Maybe this is denial, maybe the issue is too filled with pain and hurt to deal with.... AND, sometimes in the cases I referred to, the pain and hurt may be still mild, and not yet a major life-event which causes the child such distress as others feel, or as may develop later.
Sometimes, I think that the child is not "ready" to deal with it, and sometimes this takes time. Maybe this is what you refered to when you wrote that "it takes the passage of time to get to the point where you are comfortable with yourself."
Your message about the PAIN, and not the WORDS, is a superb and powerful statement. I am glad you shared your experiences.
Thanks for singling me out. I am glad I made the kinds of comments or asked the kinds of questions that provided you with the right springboard.
I've know of you for some time. I hope we will me at some future CAPS or NSA event.
Thanks for your thought provoking contribution to this ISAD Conference......
Best regards, Mike.
Steve