About the presenter: Louise Heite resides in Seydisfjord, Iceland. She holds a doctorate in history and an Icelandic teaching certificate. She is presently also enrolled as a graduate student in the Communication Sciences department at Temple University. She has presented papers on stuttering at the NSP conference in New York and the ELSA conference in Ireland. She is the webmaster for Málbjörg, the Icelandic Stuttering Association and ELSA, the European League of Stuttering Associations. Her interest in stuttering is personal.

Stages of Coping

A Stutterer's Journey from Denial to Integration

by Louise Heite
Iceland

Foreword

This article is the product of very much introspection and, unfortunately, rather little truly rigorous research. I offer it in this open forum with an invitation to those who have the skills and opportunities to test my ideas to do so. I also hope that others who are not inclined to research will nevertheless find reflections of themselves somewhere in this text. If my musings are anywhere near accurate, this article should be able to help at least some stutterers to orient themselves to a process of recovery that seems to me to be somewhat predictable, though far from inevitable.

The article contains hypertext links to footnotes and to illustrative material. I hope that readers more used to the linearity of the printed page will allow themseves the privelege of exploring the illustrative material or not, as is their choice. The article itself is complete (along with the footnotes of course) without the more iterative illustrations, but the illustrations have other, humanizing qualities that may make the subject more accessible to many readers.

Links to footnotes are digits in parentheses, in bright blue: (1). Links to illustrative material are also in bright blue: (full text), or (illustrative example), or something more descriptive, as the text requires. Footnotes and illustrative material prepared for this installation and maintained as part of this website will have links (return to main text) directly back to the link you used to get there. However, you will have to use your browser's "back" button to return to the text from an illustration maintained on another site.

Please feel free to download and print the article proper following the rules and conventions of "fair use." If you download the article, please also download the citations page. If you quote from this article in a later exploration of your own, please cite my name, the title, the URL location of the article, and the date of its posting. However, if you quote from linked illustrative material, for instance, from any of the several illustrations which are to be found on The Stuttering Homepage, please credit the correct author and the correct URL address and posting date of the illustration.

Proceed to main text .

September 25, 1998