Are you one of the many people who suffer with the speech impediment known as stuttering or stammering? Does your stutter/stammer cause you to become very frustrated at times? Have you attended speech therapy in the past in the hope that it would help improve your speech? I have managed to successfully overcome my own stammer and as a career I now help other people to attain fluency. In this article, I write about the frustrations and emotions that people who stutter have to deal with.
When I had a stutter, it created many different forms of emotions within me. I was actually ashamed of having this speech impediment and did not want to discuss the problem with anybody. My family, especially my parents, even to this day are unaware of most of the difficulties that stuttering caused me, during my time at school and in my late teens. I rarely confided in my parents as to how bad things were for me. I was not the type of person that liked to talk about their problems; especially when it came to the stutter. I would instead just go to my bedroom and attempt to forget it.
I also felt quite sorry for myself. I always believed that I was a decent person and did not think that I deserved to have this horrible stutter. There were many people in my class who in my opinion deserved to have the stutter much more than I did, however in truth I would not wish a stutter on anybody.
I was a person who felt like a second class citizen due to the fact that I had this speech impediment. I was not able to socialise with the ease as what everybody else seemed to, and had many traumatic experiences in the classroom when attempting to read out of a book for example.
Even though I had a stuttering problem, I could at times talk quite well. I found it difficult to comprehend as to why I could speak fluently to some people but not to others. This caused me many frustrations.
When I was about sixteen, I started to drink alcohol. This had a major impact on my speech as I could talk perfectly well when I was drunk. This showed me that it was possible to “stop stuttring”.
Speech therapists and negative national associations, have for years attempted to convince me to accept my stutter and have told me that there is no cure for stuttering. How can this be right, if I was constantly drunk, I would be fluent, there is a cure in itself. Of course it is not right or healthy to be constantly drunk but I am sure you know what I mean.
I found certain tasks very hard to accomplish when I had the stutter. Making and answering telephone calls was especially hard for me. I look back now and can not believe that I coped with working in an office environment for six years, at a time when I had the stutter. I remember traveling to work feeling sick in my stomach through the stress and fear.
Ordering drinks and food at the bar, introducing people to each other, attending meetings and job interviews were other aspects of my life which were made all that more harder by my inability to talk fluently.
My advice to people who have a stuttering problem is to not give up, believe in yourself and your own ability to one day achieve fluency. Beware of those who spread negativity such as those people who attempt to convince you that there is not a cure for stammering/stuttering – they are wrong. Most of the people who say this to you will have never had a stutter and will have no idea how our brains work.