Wilgje.net

Speech therapy

It’s been a bit quiet here, but no worries: two book reviews are on their way. I just need to refine them somewhat. In the mean time life has been a bit chaotic for me. My former speech therapist, whom I’d been seeing since I was eleven, referred me to another therapist. She’s not just a general speech therapist, since she deals with stutterers only. The change in therapy, after only two sessions, is rather huge.

Some of the things I’ve learned so far:

• Even though I stutter myself, I seem to have issues with hearing other stuttering people talk. I can’t explain why this is and I think I’m a hypocrite for it, but it’s a fact. I found out when I arrived at my therapist early yesterday and heard her talk to one of the worst stutterers she treats. I just couldn’t bear to listen to it. The weirdest part of it is, she told me that the guy doesn’t really seem to mind… and I think my level of stuttering is horrible already…
• The former point has done two things for me: first of all, I realised that I don’t know any other stutterers than my dad, whose stuttering I don’t even hear anymore, at all. All of this has led me to believe that meeting other stutterers would be an excellent idea. So I’m going to do just that, in a couple of weeks.
• I avert my eyes when I stutter, which makes any communicative situation I’m in worse (except phonecalls, I can look wherever I want then). If I keep facing the people I talk to while I stutter, they’ll experience it as much less of an issue than when I cast my eyes down while I do it.
• Stuttering is all the things a stutterer does in order to avoid stuttering. Meaning, if a stutterer wasn’t so incredibly busy thinking “it’s going to go wrong” or “I can’t stutter now!”, much of the stress would be relieved. All the things stutterers come up with, like choosing different words or saying “uhm”, just make the situation more stressful.
• My voice does not sound like that of an eight year old, in contrast to what I always think when I hear my own voice. Although I must say this has been said to me before.
• There are other problems in my life that are way more serious and need attention, such as the current home situation I live in.
• It’s not a bad thing to have someone else finish your sentence every once in a while. In fact, normal speaking people do it to each other all the time, so it would in fact be more normal to finish that sentence. Of course, it’s still annoying when the sentence gets finished in a way that the speaker didn’t intend.

This therapist has much more to teach me, like how to stutter on purpose, which is bloody difficult (and that strikes me as really weird). I think she can help me quite a lot and I must say that I’m looking forward to the next session.