I Have a Voice

How to stop stuttering

Bob Bodenhamer

• Publisher: Crown House Publishing
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9781845907532
• Topic: Desarrollo personal
• Subtopic: Superación personal

Have you ever wondered why most people who block and stutter do not do so every time they speak? Now the puzzle has finally been solved by this outstanding new book which details a completely new approach to treating this debilitating condition. Bob Bodenhamer explains that this phenomenon results from the thinking (cognition) of the stutterer as he or she associates speaking with a lot of fear and anxiety about blocking. This book both explains the structure of blocking and provides the tools for gaining more fluency.

Chapter One

The Origins of Stuttering

How blocking begins

In every case I have worked with, the roots of the individual’s blocking are in childhood. Sometimes however, the actual blocking does not appear until adolescence or even adulthood. People who block usually refer to their non-fluency as blocking or stuttering (stammering in the UK). In itself, this is no problem. It is when they come to believe that blocking is something bad and to be feared that problems arise.

CASE STUDY 1

Susan was very angry with her parents because she believed that if they had not gotten all upset about her childhood problem of learning how to speak, then she would not have started blocking and stuttering. I encouraged Susan to speak with her mother about it. Here is Susan’s reply:

Well I did it! I spoke to my mom about my stuttering and it was not bad. I actually feel some peace. It is not complete, but better. I was afraid to talk to her but I did. We talked about stuttering openly but we didn’t talk about the touchy-feely stuff. I said I’d been very angry and explained how the work I do sometimes increases my feeling of anger because I think she could have behaved better. I was able to show empathy and to see it through her eyes. I think my parents did try a lot of things and I don’t think it was in the vengeful way that I always see. I think the way I chose to see things is definitely holding me back.

My mother was OK with this talk and actually supportive. I told her that I feel she still has feelings of embarrassment about my stuttering and she said, “I don’t worry about you, in my eyes you have made it, you are successful living a life and that’s all we wanted for you.” That was a shock to hear. Maybe I don’t get that I have already arrived in some ways in the work that I have done. I think I have refused to see that. I also realized that I don’t want to spend the rest of my life talking about my stuttering – there is more to life. I think I am too attached to my stuttering.

Sometimes I think it is a way to shield myself from my true feelings and relations to people. You are so busy thinking and being obsessed with stuttering that you don’t need to think about your feelings, it is a good feeling blocker. John Harrison said it is so much about feelings and not about stuttering. I never understood that before.

Susan’s story is typical of People Who Stutter (PWS). Her story illustrates the theme of this book: that stuttering is a learned behavior, and, as such, can be unlearned. However, much speech therapy in the United States addresses the symptoms rather than the cause, the physical components of blocking and stuttering and not the underlying meanings that the person has given to blocking and stuttering.

Childhood experiences

In that the origins of blocking and stuttering arise from emotional hurts experienced during childhood, the PWS is no different from the other people who seek my assistance. They all demonstrate a similar structure of learned negative associations which they are unable to control consciously. Although it is possible that a child has some kind of disfluency as a result of genetic defects, it ismore likely that their disfluency is just the normal stumbling with words as the child learns how to speak. However, should a parent or significant other adult think that the child has a speech problem, the child is told that they stutter and off to the speech pathologist they go. This confirms to the child that there is something unacceptable about their speech, and something wrong or unacceptable about them.

I have yet to find a person who fell in love with their stuttering. If every time they experience difficulty speaking they think of this as something bad, then over time this badness becomes a habit, and they generalize that badness to themselves. One question you could ask is “How do you know this is bad? Who told you?” The knowledge that their speech is abnormal usually comes from a parent or significant other person pointing out that there is something wrong with how they speak. (However, I have found a few people who block and stutter who placed the “bad” and “unacceptable” label on themselves without any knowledge of outside influences.)

Susan is a good example of this. She thinks that being dragged to a speech pathologist solidified her perception that she was flawed in some way, and that she had to be “perfect” in speech in order for her mother and father to like her.

Children who block describe non-fluency as something they wish to avoid or control. They may have reached their own conclusion on this, or based it on what adults or their peers have said. In addition, their blocking is connected to the negative emotions which accompanied some earlier painful experiences associated with not being fluent in speech. Many times the PWS will describe their experiences as being traumatic. Having friends mock you, or school teachers embarrassed because of how you speak can also “lock in the block.” Indeed, when a teacher stands a child up before a class and shouts “Spit it out!”, for the child who is trying to talk but can’t, it is trauma.

The precipitating event may not be something terrible or tragic; the child may have interpreted the divorce of the parents, the lack of affection from dad, the lack of emotional support from mom, or any emotional and physical abuse as being painful and threatening. The child does what all children tend to do – they personalize the external problems, assume some degree of responsibility, and then internalize and express the hurt in the muscles used for breathing/speaking. They begin to block.

Blocking is also connected with feelings of helplessness in not being able to speak when required to. This leads to feeling that you are different or strange – something children wish to avoid at all cost. From these childhood experiences the child learns that blocking and stuttering is unacceptable behavior, and grows up fearing that they will continue to block. The fear itself creates even more blocking and stuttering. Essentially, the PWS “becomes that which they fear most.”

This book is includes ways of identifying those painful emotions and suggests means of healing them.

The concept of self

Aperson’s concept of self grows and changes throughout their lifetime. It is first formalized by their caregivers who named them and began to relate to them as a separate individual. The child needs a firm foundation of how the world works. During their early years they do not critically filter incoming information because they have yet to develop the ability to think about, reflect on or question their experience. Instead, what they learn in childhood becomes their truth – and that proves both a blessing and a curse. Sometimes the child gets hold of the wrong end of the stick, as it were, when making meaning of their own behaviors, and that meaning may endure. The blocking then persists because the PWS continues to think in a “childish” way: the meaning of their behavior still relates to those early years experiences.

The same is true for practically all emotional problems that adults have. The issues I deal with therapeutically come from thinking patterns the clients learned in childhood. Allowing other people to determine your concept of self is appropriate when you are a young child, but not desirable as you mature. One solution to this problem is to get the PWS to grow up those parts of themselves which are stuck in childhood. The person first needs to practice mentally stepping back so that they may critically examine the beliefs they have carried with them since childhood. They use their adult mind to notice how they have constructed their model of the world, the beliefs that enable them to function, and then to update any which are obsolete.

One of the most debilitating beliefs of a PWS is their claim to know how other people perceive them. Yet they never check the truth or accuracy of such claims. I have discovered with people who block that the typical self-definition they received from others is based on mind-reading: they believe that other people view them as weird, dumb, different, mentally retarded, and so on. They take this on board, assume this information is accurate, and then live as if those self-descriptions are true. In their fear of being judged by others, they are in fact themselves unfairly judging others.

The Body-Mind connection

This connection is obvious in the most primitive of all mind-body functions, the fight/flight arousal pattern. You don’t have to be in actual danger to set it off. Simply remember or imagine something fearful and your body will respond by producing adrenalin. We find linguistic evidence of the connection in the expressions: gut feeling, pain in the neck, heartfelt, get things off your chest, and so on.

Those early negative influences concerning the child’s speech become grooved into the child’s muscles and are carried into adulthood. By “grooved into the muscles” I refer to someone’s ability to learn unconsciously; it is as though what we learn literally becomes embodied into our muscle tissue (referred to as muscle memory). For example, if you touch-type, and I ask you where the R key is, how will you locate it? Did your left index finger twitch and move up to the left? That would be an example of “in the muscle” learning.

Because people who stutter tend to feel the fears or anxieties that contribute to their blocking in the muscles that control breathing and speaking, I propose that blocking is similar in structure to panic and anxiety attacks. This means that the treatment could also be similar because emotions have become expressed in the body.

Over the years of doing therapy, I have asked hundreds of clients, “Where in your body do you feel that negative emotion?” Usually the PWS who feels a negative emotion can pinpoint the area of the body where they feel that emotion. There have been very few instances when the person was unable to tell me exactly where they felt it. Check this for yourself. Think of something you fear or recall a recent emotional hurt. Then notice where in your body that emotion finds expression.

For people who block, negative emotions are typically centered within the chest, neck and/or jaw. Ask a person who blocks:

• Which emotions have you associated with your blocking?
• Where in your body do you feel these emotions?
• Where in you body do you feel the fear and anxiety as you anticipate the possibility of blocking?
• What do you think about these feelings?

As these feelings diminish, the blocking and stuttering also lessen and the person becomes more fluent.

Not every client accepts that their emotions are created – a product of thought – rather than real. “But, Dr Bob, I ‘feel’ that anxiety in my body and if I feel it, it must be real!” That is the normal response: if I feel it, it is real. For the PWS, the emotions around blocking and stuttering are more real than that for they have the strong physiological response associated with blocking and stuttering. So no wonder many in the speech pathology profession believe that stuttering is a physical problem. It is so real: “Just look at my facial contortions when I block.”

CASE STUDY 2

John Harrison, a person who stuttered and who recove...