I’ve had a stuttering problem for quite some. Thank goodness it isn’t very severe, but it is enough to make me want to keep my mouth shut. I believe my feelings manner, I believe my ideas are worth listening to, but it frustrates me that I have a hard time doing it.
My stuttering problem is probably an unusual one. I stuttered in elementary school (Perhaps 2nd to 4th grade) before I mysteriously stopped completely. Then, during eighth grade, I came to the realization that I was a homosexual. Coupled with the daily taunting, weekly beatings, and dealing with my own emotional trauma; I regressed so to speak and began stuttering again which was years behind me.
I read a website or two, which made it painfully clear that stuttering is something that can’t be overcome. Is this true?
Regards,
Sorry to hear about your problem, honesty. I’ve read the great orator Demosthenes put pebbles in his mouth and it seems to have worked, but it may not be everyone’s cup of tea…:).
Maybe this URL will provide you with some elements of solution. I sincerely wish you luck.
I don’t know much about the subject, but I can tell you that I have known two people in my life who had overcome stutters. One was a physiology lecturer I had in college. He would still sometimes pause to avoid a potential stutter, but he was fine as a lecturer. The other person was a draftsman I worked with; because I knew he had worked the problem, I noticed that he would repeat a phrase within a sentence sometimes, but I think most people never even noticed that.
I hope I’m not putting you off; the aforegoing is meant to be encouraging.
There was some work I remember … God what… 10-15 years ago where a therapist was teaching people how to overcome severe stuttering by having them train to “sing” the speeches (mentally at least) they were to give and approach public speaking as a parsed out song. Apparently there is some mechanism in vocal wiring for most people that you cannot stutter while singing and I think this was the premise of his approach. Not familar wiht latest approaches.
Beware of support groups that say “It’s forever… you can never overcome it so suck it up and deal with it.” I think mild, stress initiated stuttering can probably be overcome with training per the aforesaid post but more severe stuttering problems in adults are probably brain-speech center wiring issues and are probably less tractable to speech therapy.
I was watching a documentary on The Learning (or Discovery) Channel where people were competing in an invention contest to win a (as I remember it) small amount of money. One of the inventors came up with a way to prevent himself from stuttering. By using a headset and a mic he would relay what he was saying back to himself through the headset and hearing himself he would be able to control his stuttering. He also had two settings for his device; a slow setting to make the user sound more authoritative and I guess a faster setting to make the user sound upbeat and cheerful. I don’t know exactly how this would work (the technical stuff anyway) but I thought I should mention it. It might be something to look into, it really seemed to work for him. I know I wasn’t much help, but good luck! And by the way an electrical wrench won the contest. Hmm…
One more (obvious?) thought, honesty. Have you thought of seeing a therapist, who could help you to better deal with some of the problems you mentioned in your OP and thus perhaps help alleviate your stuttering? As you said, it already once stopped completely…
I’m not a stutterer myself, but a good friend of mine is. His stutter is pretty bad, too. From the sounds of it, much worse than yours.
I asked him one day if he knows why he stutters. This is what he told me, and it made sense to me at the time. When someone who doesn’t stutter speaks, they automatically vibrate their vocal chords. This is what his speech therapist told him he wasn’t doing. That’s why a stutter disappears when someone sings… when you sing, your vocal chords are in constant vibration, and the stutter disappears. His therapist gave him ways to stop the stutter, and when he concentrates, he doesn’t stutter at all. The problem is he tends to be lazy and doesn’t follow the advice of his therapist. As a result, he stutters, and badly at that. The interesting thing is that in high school, he played quarterback, so when he needed to control it, he did. If you would hear him speak now (when he’s stuttering), you wouldn’t believe that he could.
He also told me that his father stuttered as badly as he does. He was never told it was a genetic condition, but rather a learned speech pattern that he picked up from his father when he was learning to speak. A slight concern of his now, since he has a young son.
Perhaps a speech therapist could shed some light on this information. Like I said, it is a friend of mine, but I have no reason to doubt his explaination.
I sometimes have a slight stutter, usualy when I’m trying to interject somthing while somone else is talking. I find that I just can’t get that first sound to come out and be anything inteligable, if i say somthing to get them to stop talking for a second, “um…” I can spit out the rest. I think it stems from trying to listen and talk at once, sometimes it just doesn’t work.
A good friend of mine told me, after I’d known him for three years, that he had been a severe stutterer as a boy. I had no idea, for I had never heard him stutter. He overcame it, he says, by learning to imitate accents and other speech patterns. He explains that singing is stutter-proof because the voice you hear in your mind is that of Jewel, or Tom Petty, or whoever you heard sing the same song before. The same mental process takes over when you speak in an accent other than your own. The voice in your head is Michael Caine or James Carville. He has helped several stuttering children by playing games of “Let’s Talk Southern.” If I were a stutterer, I’d give it a try.
Not sure if this is true or not, but supposedly James Earl Jones was a horrible stutterer, and only overcame it by concentrating on talking slowly and carefully, but in the prcocess developed one of the coolest voices on earth.
I saw a news report years back that touted an instrument the opposite of Qeelocke’s. This instrument blocked out the sound of the stutterer’s voice, via earplugs. The theory behind it was that stuttering was psychologically-induced - the stutterer was so unconsciously concerned about the correctness what he was going to say, his stutter, etc., that the stuttering began. Blocking out the sound of the voice eliminated the opportunity to “self-criticize” and thus stopped the stutter.
In the real world, my friends with a stutter compensated through pausing, as Beatle’s physiology professor did. This technique had the added bonus of making my friends sound more thoughtful and authoritative.
Hey, even Samuel L. Jackson occasionally stutters. Would you want to mess with Shaft?
The point is, it can brought about by stressful situations, and (for both you and he, it would appear on the face of it) controllable. You say you didn’t stutter for a period of time, so I’d say it’s not a “brain-wiring” thing.
I never was sent to the speech therapist at school or anything, but I stutter occasionally. It seems to be when my brain is thinking faster than my mouth can talk and I get “stuck”. I don’t have any problem with it, except when I’m in situations where I have adrenaline flowing. I just have to think the whole sentence first before speaking it. Sometimes, in normal conversation I will repeat a phrase within in a sentence. Again, it’s like I got “stuck” and I have to back up and regroup. I also can be talking and all of a sudden the words get all jumbled up. For that I stop, start over, saying one word (clearly) at a time. It usually just makes me laugh. It’s terrible when I’m in an already unpleasant situation though.
I’m sorry I don’t know how this type of stuttering relates to constant stuttering or if it does at all. I don’t know anything about stuttering really. I try to boost my ego by saying that if people could only listen as fast as I think, I wouldn’t have this problem. Or until the day that the rest of world learns to read my superior mental thoughts, I’m just going to have to bring myself down to their level and try to use verbal speech the best that I can. Most importantly, I know that my thoughts are worth waiting for while I stumble at getting them out and I’m sure yours are too.
I have a stress-induced stutter that I developed in High School, stragely enough. If I notice it I can stop what I am saying, breath deep a few times, to reduce the stress, and will it away. But it takes concentration, and sometimes, I just have to stop talking for a minute to calm down. My stuttering seems almost exactly of the type described by SoMoMom. And don’t listen to anyone who tells you it can’t be controlled. It can.
He actually still struggles with his stutter. From my understanding it still requires some level of conscious effort for him to not stutter, and in a few movie roles, he has actually not supressed it to help bring out the character. For a decent example of this, check out the film ** A Family Thing ** where Jones plays Robert Duval’s half brother. A good flick, and Jones stutters throughout.