I had my long awaited job promotion interview yesterday before a panel of 5 top hospital executive and medical directors. I did well, generically speaking, and had the distinct advantage going in of being the only internal applicant and having significant recognized achievements, making me a very natural choice. I will find out if I am to be offered the position on Monday afternoon.

The issue for me is beyond those realities and the outcome of the interview. It is about my stuttering and how I experienced it yesterday... I stuttered a bit more than my usual in the beginning of the interview, as I might expect in a such an anxiety producing situation. I was very well acquainted with 4 out of the 5 on the panel, who I have worked with, some closely, in the past year and a half... I followed my instincts, as well as the advice of my fellow Stutt-L'ers in bringing my stuttering up for discussion, and asking if there were any questions I could answer for them regarding it. That went very well, especially with the medically minded questions presented to me which served to clear up any possible misconceptions about stuttering that there may have been. The consensus was that no one felt my speech had ever interfered with my job performance. The opportunity had been seized by me to be open, and to feel empowered in doing so. (It also put the issue and their response to it on record, which is probably a wise thing to do in a competitive job market.) After leaving the interview room, and even after receiving personal positive feedback from my immediate boss who was one of the panelists, I found myself in a contemplative state, and sort of at the edge of emotional lability.

The closest understanding I had of my emotions at the time was the discomfort of being seen openly as a PWS (both by my demonstration of dysfluency, and by my candid discussion of it) by 3 people who had not known I was a PWS until then (or so I perceive.) Now, a day later, the sadness is less pervasive, and I am able to place it a bit more clearly. It feels like I am grieving a loss... perhaps a loss of a perceived ideal of self? (like I blew my cover... one that I have with only a few people.) (Emphasis added -- LH)

I don't have a handle on the details of my feelings beyond this right now, but I feel as if I am getting close to something I need to grasp. It seems to be at the root of a powerful emotional reaction that grips me every so often, and can often send me into tears instantanteously.

Anxious to hear some feedback and suggestions as to how to move through this "emotional quandry" I am in at the moment, from anyone who is kind enough to share.....

Thanks. Just want everyone to know that before Stutt-L and discovering NSP, I never had the insights into myself that I have now..and the thirst to understand more and more.

R...

Return to main text

The act of denial produces strong avoidance, which often requires intense mental effort and which carries its own social and emotional consequences. This journal entry explores that aspect of denial. In childhood I metaphorically thought of silence as a place rather than a condition:

You have learned to live in isolation. Not physical but mental isolation: you carefully construct a wall around your self, around the silences. It isn't a solid wall, there are gates and windows, and inside the wall the silences are a garden of peace, wordless and sensory, and you are the gatekeeper and the guardian and the gardener, and nobody may enter without your express permission. You foray out, you visit the other world a lot, you send bits and peices of yourself as messengers into reality to collect new experiences and bring them back to the silences. But the core self, the self that matters, stays in its cloister...

You reserve emotion, except the emotion of sheer frustration from the inability to make yourself heard above the din of the babies and the violin and Daddy's temper and Mother's iron guidance...

You are very careful not to spend too much obvious time in the silences. When you do you are reprimanded and called dreamy or stupid...

In the alone times, at night, you fantasize being a mute, on the lam from a wicked guardian, wise in the ways of the woods and the animals but avoiding contact with other people until you are captured, and then adopted, by a kindly gardener who gives you flowers and dancing lessons, and does not expect you to speak.

Return to main text

My sudden confrontation with a classmate who stuttered, which came upon the heels of some other serious personal upheavals, was an intense experience that has stayed with me for decades.

One of your classmates is a sweet-faced pudgy girl who stutters. You have never met anyone who does this before, and the first time you talk with her you are swept by an epiphany of recognition that pierces your conscousness and floods and swirls across your mind like water from a burst dam. You realize at once and without thought, how dangerously, dangerously close you are to doing that yourself, and you thank your guardian angel that you have always had the sense to keep your mouth shut when words won´t come. How much more yet might you have to face if you should show such grotesquery to Mother and Daddy! Quickly you thrust this new self-awareness from you, forcing it deep, deep into your subconscious, as far away from daily life as you can. Even in recognition you dare not acknowledge: you put this behind the wall, into the back garden of the silences, and at once, and at last, and to your horror, it gives form to the bramble patch of things of which you cannot speak.

Return to main text

CASE STUDY #7, one of several case studies found onThe Stuttering Homepage.

Click here for access to this material. Use the BACK button on your browser to return to this location, and click on the link belowto return to your place in the main text.

The following are snips of letters which Charles Lamb wrote to his very close friend and schoolmate, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, in the spring of 1798. Lamb was about twenty at the time. To return to your place in Stages of Coping, click here.

"Coleridge, I know not what suffering scenes you have gone through at Bristol. My life has been somewhat diversified of late. The six weeks that finished last year and began this, your very humble servant spent very agreeably in a madhouse at Hoxton. I am got somewhat rational now, and don't bite anyone. But mad I was, and many a vagary my imagination played with me, enough to make a volume, if all were told..". (May 27, 1798)

"Thank you for your frequent letters: you are the only correspondent, and I might add, the only friend I have in the world. I go nowhere, and have no acquaintance. Slow of speech, and reserved of manners, no one seeks or cares for my society and I am left alone. Allen calls very occasionally, as though it were a duty rather, and seldom stays ten minutes..." (June 10, 1798)

Return to main text

The full text of John Harrison's essay can be found on The Stuttering Homepage.

Click here for access to this material. Use the BACK button on your browser to return to this location, and click on the link belowto return to your place in the main text.

Return to main text

Van Riper´s message to stutterers is part of the folklore of the community of people who stutter. It is found on The Stuttering Homepage.

Click here for access to this material. Use the BACK button on your browser to return to this location, and click on the link belowto return to your place in the main text.

Return to main text

I had to come to terms with my own mild stutter in order to reach a very isolated student. Here is the story as it appeared in the December 1996 issue of Letting Go, the newsletter of the American National Stuttering Project (http://www.nspstutter.org/index.html).

Click here for access to this material. Use the BACK button on your browser to return to this location, and click on the link belowto return to your place in the main text.

Return to main text

Marty Jezer describes his initial experience with Toastmasters..

Click here for access to this material. Use the BACK button on your browser to return to this location, and click on the link belowto return to your place in the main text.

Return to main text

Eric Bourland´s home page is both kind and straightforward, and offers very good advice to others who stutter.

Click on the link below to return to your place in the main text.

Return to main text