Advice For People Who Stutter
It is often difficult to know where to seek advice when you have a stutter. People who have this type of speech impediment often try speech and language therapy at the outset before searching alternative forms of specialist stuttering therapy.
Stuttering is quite a complex subject and as such only a person who has had to endure life with the impediment can really comprehend what it is like. People who stutter will fully understand what I mean when I write this.
What the majority of people who stutter dream of is to be able to speak in the same way as fluent people do. When they are taught to speak very slowly at traditional speech therapy this can some what frustrate and annoy them, it did me! I would think something along the lines of; my friends do not speak slowly and they do not stutter, therefore why should I have to?
When I had a stutter, I had to endure and listen to what I call demons in my head. These voices would try to make me think in a negative way, they would try to make me stress and worry and they would convince me that I was going to stutter. I so hated these demons. Try as I might, I just could not get them to shut up. The demons stopped me from falling to sleep at night and caused me constant trauma.
To cure the stutter I realised that I would need to wage war on these inner demons. If I could eliminate them from my mind then I would stand a chance. I once spoke to a speech therapist about these voices in my head and she looked at me as if I was crazy. I then knew that she was not the right stuttering therapist for me.
As well as defeating my demons I needed to work out where I was going wrong in the physical sense. I started to focus on people who I saw as very good talkers in an attempt to improve.
It was quite slow progress however after nearly a year I was victorious, I had achieved what I had always wanted to achieve, fluency.