Accepting stuttering

Last week I came across a nice extra for new Skype (v3.00)  called ‘Lie Detector’ which is supposed to detect lies by monitoring voice stress levels. You can access it here.

Despite I don’t trust much of its accuracy, it could be nice to check whether it works as a feedback device for theraphy. However, it seems that it only works when there’s an incoming conversation. It would be great to have it available in a sort of ‘local loop’. In this scenario you could call to yourself and monitor your voice stress level during exercises or other situations.

Anyway….no much time now for testing. I hope I can come back to this in the near future…

Hope you like it!

During mobile phone conversations with people which don’t know I stutter, sometimes these people interpret blockages or speech lags with shortage of mobile coverage.

Despite this can be quite unpleasant, I’ve found it offers several opportunities:

• It can be used as a way of increasing awareness on your speech during the rest of conversation. Therefore, it is a signal to stop…relax….and take control.
• You can tell the other person you stutter, supporting acceptance of stuttering as something natural and a part of you.
• Other person feedback can be used as feedback for you performance. However, I plan not to confuse feedback with trying to hide I stutter as it can increase tension.

Hope you find these useful!

Time for reflection after week 1 in my attempts to talk slowly and trying to resist situations of time pressure or silence.

Upssss…I’m having difficulties creating situations in which I had to resist time pressure and silences. During the day I just forget it or don’t find the appropriate settings.

Today I’ll try to encourage this by changing my clock to the opposite wrist whenever I become aware I should do the exercise. The unpleasantful feeling of having my clock in the wrong wrist is likely to encourage my lazy-self on creating the situation.

Now it’s time to go from theory into practice!

I’ve planned to reinforce Fraser’s precepts by focusing a whole week on each one. Therefore, I’ll start with the issue of trying to talk slowly on purpose.

MF article suggested different activities to settle down appropriate habits. So, I’ll schedule different activities so that these can be put in place.

• Reading exercises: It will consist on reading sessions reinforcing the new style of talking. I’ll spend 5 min/day during this week in my evening study sessions. Recording my speech sessions with the computer so that I can listen to them afterwards can be a great source of feedback.
• Resist time-pressure feelings and fear to silence: These are two issues I have problems with. I tend to fight to talk on time and also tend to fill ’silences’ - I’m not sure why. I’ll structure activities on those two subjects with specific daily exercises. Particularly, I’ll have to register two situations per day in which I had pressure to talk and try to resist. Additionally, I’ll have to create two situations per day in which I forced a silence so that I can analyse what are my feelings and thoughts and loose fear to these.

Considering the issue of registering progress, I’ll use mindmaps templates in order to register progress. I recommend you Freemind as mindmapping tool as it’s simple but powerful. You can download it from here.

This is an screencapture of the template I will use.

Upssss…time to leave! I’ll post comments soon about results

During last years I’ve considerably improved my control over breathing and body muscles using relaxation techniques - as Jacobson’s progressive relaxation. In next posts I’ll introduce and explain the basics of Jacobson’s technique - for those impatient, google “jacobson relaxation technique”

Despite they may be ineffective to prevent stuttering to occur, I have found them very useful to overcome blockages and reduce stuttering frequency. For example, when you feel difficulties with a word or situation, relaxing and controlling breathing/muscles can avoid stress to raise up to levels you cannot manage it.

I will try to embed certain routines in my daily life to reduce the general stress level and reinforce correct breathing patterns. This is likely to avoid engaging situations from a high starting stress level. For example, I’ll try to start the day with 10 minutes of relaxation and breathing techniques.

The following could be an plausible agenda for starting the day:

- Relax deeply for 5-10 minutes (e.g. using Jacobson’s)

- Breathing exercises for 5 minutes

Considering I arrive to the office one hour earlier than work starting time, these routines can be put in practice easily.

During several days I’ve started reading about stuttering as a major part of initial action will be focused on understanding what’s happening with my speech.

I’ve found an interesting online post of a Malcolm Fraser book which exposes a stuttering self-therapy. You can access it here.

The article exposes a number of precepts as a bullet-point list, which focuses both on physical and cognitive aspects of stuttering. For example, slowing speech motion and relaxation to tackle physical aspects and self-acceptance or confrontation on the cognitive side. I have created a mindmap with all precepts and several potential related activities.

The author recommends tackling on a precept a time during a time so that you can plan activities and become proficient on it. This is what I’ll try for a some time.

I would say the book focus a large part of its approach on unlearning behavious, feelings and attitudes. Despite I feel this is part of the way to go, I’m quite uncertain about potential sustainability on the long term (motivation is THE great issue) and even physical feasibility - it seems that a recent research demostrates there’s a real speech system disorder. I wonder whether this disorder can be tackled by this sort of therapy or may require special treatment (e.g. drugs)

Anyway, great beginning!  I enjoyed the book and feel confortable knowing I’ve begun my way into accepting stuttering

This blog is intended to support me in the process of confronting and accepting my stuttering. Additionally, it may provide others insight on certain aspects of this complex and obscure speech disorder.

I use to stutter since I can remember and, despite some great advances after taking therapy ten years ago, it is an unsolved issue deeply affecting my self-steem and self-confidence.

I’ll try to use this blog to record experiences, organise useful resources, plan activities and, specially, force me reflect on what I’m attempting. I expect this will help me to learn faster and be more effective on my approch.