One reason stuttering is particularly difficult for
teenagers to cope with is that they are struggling to reconcile many different and
often conflicting self-images.
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 or every person, self-images acquired in early childhood and
reinforced through the course of life are the cause of much suffering because they
prevent access to our true nature. These self images (for example, "I'm an
introvert" or "I'm an avoider") perpetuate the notion that
the personality is the self, preventing people from realizing their full range of human
capabilities. For the person who stutters (PWS), the "veils of stuttering" tend to perpetuate the
disorder by reinforcing the illusion that the self and stuttering are the same thing.
These veils also shroud the true nature of stuttering in self-judgments, lack of self
acceptance, fear and threat anxiety, distorted projections, and the acquired opinions of
others -- all unhelpful activities of the super ego
or inner critic.
Ironically, the overt behaviors of developmental stuttering
are largely the result of attempts to preserve the identity and the self in the first place.
To the child who begins to experience difficulties with speech disruptions, the first threads of the
veils are woven in the instinctual attempt to control and hide abnormality.
What is "stuttering" to the person who stutters? In his
book Stuttering and Science (Singular Publishing Group, 1995)
Dr. William H. Perkins provides a good working definition -- "Stuttering
is the experience of losing control of the speech mechanism." I would add a bit to
that, but people who don't stutter can best understand the disorder by thinking about this
definition for a few moments and imagining what life would be like if this happened
regularly -- and realizing that untutored attempts to control stuttering usually make
it more severe.
Stuttering is a democratic affliction, affecting the talented and
the average, the wealthy and the poor. Well-known people who stutter include novelist,
poet and critic John Updike; actors James Earl Jones, Bruce Willis and Sam Neill; TV journalist John
Stossel; singers Carly Simon, Mel Tillis, Robert Merrill, and the late John
"Scatman" Larkin; U.S. Congressman Frank Wolf;
and sportsmen Bill Walton, Ken Venturi, Bo Jackson, Rosie Grier, Bob Love, and Lester
Hayes. Other well-known people who stuttered who've made valuable contributions to
humanity (some of whom are shown throughout the pages in this
site), include Lewis Carroll, Sir Isaac Newton, Aristotle, Winston Churchill, Charles
Darwin (and his grandfather Erasmus), novelist Henry James, noted speech pathologist
Charles Van Riper, and Marilyn Monroe.
But there are thousands upon thousands of
"regular folks" who
stutter who live active and involved lives with varying degrees of speech
impairment.
Many of these people stutter so mildly that they are capable of almost
completely ignoring or hiding their dysfluencies -- even from their spouses and children. Others
stutter so severely that they can only dream of hiding
their struggles, unless they stop
speaking entirely. Most people who stutter live somewhere in between these
poles, wishing that they didn't have this "extra" challenge to
deal with every day. One of the helpful insights that all of these people
can have is that the simple outward severity of stuttering is often not correlated
with the degree of internal suffering or handicap that can result.
The author is one of the
estimated 60 million people in the world who
stutter and one of the hundreds of people who stutter who have become
speech-language pathologists to assist others in their recovery
of fluency. The
information on this Web site may be revolutionary to some, disturbing to
others, and refreshing to a few. Some ideas found here are unconventional.
Some are common knowledge.
Other ideas will be disputed by many. That's good, because
stuttering cannot be understood if one relies only on the current state of
research or knowledge in the field.
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