How I Overcame Stammering for Good

The Worst Nightmare of My Life

30 years ago, on a cold Monday morning, I was facing the worst nightmare of my life.

It was the first day of my engineering undergraduate course. Surrounded by the group of 18-year-olds, I was meant to be studying with, I was struggling to tell them my name.

I still remember that dread, the knot of fear that gnawed deep within me.

I tried to say “N” but it wouldn’t come out. And to my huge embarrassment, all I could manage was “Shankar”. They knew my name wasn’t Shankar. But I didn’t have a problem saying “S” and it was the best I could manage.

I ended that day feeling the lowest I’ve felt. I was meant to be going to college to study engineering. How could I possibly think of that when my stammer was so bad, I couldn’t say my own name?

I was not born with stammering nor I have a family history of this problem. It all started when I was a toddler and by the age of six it became painfully aware that I spoke “differently”.

Stammering Is a Serious Communication Problem

Stammering, however, is not simply a speech difficulty, it is a serious communication problem. It can undermine a person’s self-esteem, affect their interactions with others, impede their education and seriously hamper their employment potential.

Stammering can be unpredictable, stressful and hard to deal with. This can lead to self-doubt, anxiety, feeling of helplessness and ultimately push to the extreme feeling that their life is no longer worth living.

And what people don’t talk about when they talk about stammering is confidence or the lack of it.

Standing up in front of a room of people, a circle of friends, or even in front of a mirror and talking out loud is nerve-racking. That single moment can turn into a nightmare. A stutter can stretch a second to what feels like an hour or an interminable sum of time that can be relived over and over again days and weeks later.

And adding to the problem, no two stammerers stammer alike. Everyone stammers differently from each other. Every stammerer is unique in his own respect. This makes treatments very difficult to generalize and options become limited.

Only Self-Help Therapies Can Cure Stammering

Every stammerer is unique and this is why only self-help therapies work best to cure stammering.

And ultimately it all boils down to relentless practice till you achieve more than 95% cure. Yes, 100% cure from stammering is not possible and if you start practicing with 100% in mind, you are putting unnecessary stress on yourself.

And the first lesson is to inculcate this middle path mindset. Choose the most optimum “middle path” whenever you start the journey to eliminate stammering. It will give you guaranteed results. Never expect 100% but strive to be above 95%.

Coming back to my story, the self-help therapy which worked for me is the “Block modification” technique.

It is based mainly on the work of Charles Van Riper, a famous American speech therapist who stammered himself. He believed it was helpful to accept your stammering and learn to stammer in an easier manner with less tension and struggle. This approach is also known as ‘Stammer more fluently’.

Van Riper defines 4 steps in his therapy.

1. Finding out what you do when you stammer (Identification).

2. Reducing your negative feelings about stammering (Desensitization).

3. Changing how you stammer (Modification)

4. Maintaining the progress, you have made (Stabilization).

1.Identification

The 1st step is to find out the trigger points. Who or what triggers stammering?

And this is acceptance, making peace with yourself and acknowledging that you have a problem and you can no longer push it under the carpet.

Some of the questions you need to ask yourself can be.

· Do you repeat sounds (‘s-s-s-supper’) or syllables (‘sup-sup-sup-supper’)?

· Do you prolong sounds (‘ssssssupper’)?

· Do you get blocked in speech so that you are unable to make any sound ‘. . . supper’)?

· Do you close your eyes or rush through speech?

· Do you try to avoid the word by changing it for another that is easier to say?

· Do you feel annoyed, embarrassed or frustrated when you stammer?

· Do you get inwardly angry when people make fun of your stammer?

· Do you stammer in pressure situations?

Once you identify the conditions and the scenarios in which your speech gets disrupted, you can accordingly identify patterns and work towards finding a solution.

2.Desensitization

This is the step in which you start working on the patterns identified in the previous step and get a clear understanding of how they affect you mentally and psychologically.

Remember this is the step of emotional acceptance and making yourself less sensitive towards stammering. You can never eliminate stammering unless you eliminate the emotional stigma attached to it.

Some of the ways in which this can be done can be.

Talking Openly

Talking to one or two selected people about your stammer can help you to deal with it more openly. Talking to people you like and feel close to may make you feel less anxious about stammering.

You may find that people are not really bothered about your stammering as you might be thinking. This is a psychological booster you can capitalize on.

Maintaining eye contact

When you stammer, you either look down or start fiddling with your fingers until the words come out. You are basically embarrassed.

Maintaining eye contact will not stop you from stammering, but it may reduce the embarrassment all round. It can put your listener much more at ease. If, while your mouth is struggling to produce the words, your eyes are expressing friendly messages, the listener will pick up on those messages and wait calmly for you to finish.

And remember to make the eye contact warm and friendly. An aggressive, frightened eye contact further aggravates the problem.

Reduce Avoidance

One of the worst effects of stammering is avoidance. You avoid certain words. You avoid picking up that phone. You avoid ordering that pizza .and so on……

In his book Self-therapy for the Stutterer, published by the Stuttering Foundation of America and available from the BSA, Malcolm Fraser makes this point.

“While temporarily affording relief, avoidances will actually increase your fears and cause you more trouble in the long run. Stuttering will be perpetuated by successful avoidances.”

So how do you change the habit of a lifetime? First, become aware of your avoidance tactics. Armed with your diary or a pocket notebook, spend the next week or so watching yourself and listening to what you say.

And then tackle one situation at a time. Overcome that fear. If you fail it is ok. If they can’t understand you, it is ok. The key is to keep on working towards those avoidance situations until they become second nature to you.

Voluntary stammering

This provides a lot of relief. You voluntarily repeat a word or a sentence to give more time to yourself. Make it perfectly natural and blend it seamlessly in your speech routine. Voluntary stammering can help eliminate some of your shame and embarrassment. The more you practice, the easier it will become.

Remember your aim in this stage is to be willing to stammer without getting emotionally involved.

3.Modification

This is the stage where you make concrete efforts to alter your speech. Some of the techniques that can be used can be.

Cancellation

Here you go back and correct the stammer. Here is the sequence of actions that can be followed.

· Finish the word on which you stammered. Completely halt.

· Take a deep breath. Forget that people are around you, watching you.

· Now repeat the word again in a smooth prolonged manner.

Although this may seem a long and involved process, it should only take a few seconds and it will get quicker with practice.

Pullouts

Here you correct the stammering while in the middle of stammering. Here don’t stop but continue stammering till you smoothly slow down your speech and you take absolute control of yourself. The key here is to gradually slow down until you become smooth.

Preblock

Here you prepare yourself to move smoothly through a stammer that you can anticipate. When you anticipate stammering on a word, pause just before saying the word in order to plan how to approach it. Don’t speak until you have worked out how you usually stammer on the sound and what you can now do to improve your fluency.

Always remember the key to modification is slowing down. Most stammerers tend to speak fast and think fast. This is a very important characteristic of stammering.

The slow prolonged manner of keeping the sounds flowing is one of the best ways to deal with stammering.

4.Stabilization

Stammering has no one-time cure. It can recur. It can also worsen. Your old fears can come back too.

The key is to keep on practicing that improved fluency until it becomes your way of speaking and thinking. This is the stabilization that I am talking about.

As time passes you continue to gain confidence in your improved, modified way of speaking. You start preparing and anticipating stammer situations and prepare well in advance to tackle them. You also react to pressure situations in a cool pragmatic way which keeps you several notches above normal people who may tend to get bogged down under similar situations.

The more confidence you have, the more freedom from fear you will experience and the more opportunities you will start gathering in life. And above all, never forget that what you have achieved is no mean feat. Give yourself treats and praise when you have made an improvement. Remind yourself that it was not easy, but you managed it.

As David Mithall has rightly said.

“I have come to realize that, even if you stammer, you have a voice. So, you should USE IT.”