Just did my first week of Intensive Therapy... Wow.

Just did my first week of Intensive Therapy... Wow. This has been the most challenging and rewarding week of my life. Six days ago I started a two week intensive program at the American Institute of Stuttering in NYC. The course runs 6 hours a day for 12 (Monday through Saturday) days in total. I was the quintessential ‘covert stutterer.’ A covert stutter does everything he or she can do to not stutter. We substitute words, employ an array of tricks (body movements/twitches) to help us get words out, answers questions with “I don’t know”. We avoid our feared speaking situations like the plague, instead preferring to text message instead of call, order food through GrubHub, point at what we want on a menu at a restaurant or order something easy to say. For me, having a speech block in front of people was the end of the world. I would look away and feel a deep sense of shame. I refused to stutter in front of people and when I inevitably did my day was ruined. Stuttering was unacceptable and I did everything I could to appear fluent. On Monday morning as I took the train in from Long Island my anxiety level was high – as it usually was when a speaking situation was approaching. I had no idea what to expect – I just knew I was in for some deep inner work. I kept rehearsing my usual feared line over in my head: “Hello, my name is AaaaaaAnnndrew.” I have had terrible speech blocks on my name and it was one of my ‘feared’ words. Day 1 begins and there are 13 of us in the room – 9 people who stutter, 3 speech pathologist interns and one of the three certified speech pathologists who would rotate running the daily activities. Day one for me was all about blocking. And I blocked a lot! Most people in the room stuttered, the others understand stuttering. In a way this was a sacred place where stuttering was not only understood, it was welcomed, even encouraged. We were told to say exactly what we wanted to say, keep eye contact, use no tricks – just stutter and block as easily as possible. After my first few blocks my anxiety level began to drastically decrease. The worst case scenario had happened, and I was still here! I was Ok. As the week progressed we began to work on a number of desensitization exercises. The idea is to slowly acclimate yourself to your true identity as a stutterer – and not fear it as much. To repeatedly expose yourself to the feared scenario, and repeatedly give less fucks. I made more phone calls this week than I had in maybe the prior 6 months. I went from being terrified of talking on the phone to calling stores and self advertising as a stutterer. I ordered food from places like Chipotle and guess what – I stuttered – but I got what I wanted and I didn’t have anxiety. It’s liberating. There are so many important things I’ve learned– such as eye contact. Being able to look someone in the eyes during conversation, to feel the fire of a block and be Ok. I would have really long blocks where I would get stuck on the first syllable of a word. I was taught this concept of stuttering forward… For example, if I am blocking on the ‘An’ in Andrew, I would shift my block to the next syllable. Annnndrrrreewww. This concept of stuttering forward has been very useful to me. My blocks are getting easier because my anxiety level has been reduced and I am more mindful of what is happening during a block, and what I can consciously do to get through it. My whole world is no longer getting sucked into a speech block where I couldn’t think anything but “People must think I’m a freak!” I see opening up to family and friends as a difficult (for some) yet necessary step in working towards fluency. Your stuttering will never get better if you are afraid to stutter around the people in your life. In the first few days of the program I opened up to my immediate family, a few close friends, and a ton of strangers! I told my parents about the anxiety that had been in my life before and how I had to employ all these tricks to not block, often did not speak my mind, and was always living on edge waiting for the question that would out me as a stutterer. I told them that me stuttering more openly is a sign of progress, and I would even be stuttering voluntarily at times to desensitize and practice working through blocks. Everyone’s family might not be as open minded as mine, but opening up is making this transformation so much easier for me. Having people understand that I do stutter, but I am working to correct it, is like a weight lifted off my shoulder. Just being open is making me feel much closer to the people in my life. In just one week I found myself in a park giving people surveys about stuttering, calling my family and giving them stuttering surveys, self advertising and voluntarily stuttering to store clerks. To be real, I still stutter. I still find myself doing some avoidance behaviors. But I finally feel like I have a foundation to better live with my stutter – a platform to both accept and defeat it. I finally feel like I have a path I can travel. A week ago I would have never had believed any of this was possible for me. If you are like me before I started this program, wishing for some miracle for better speech, you must go out and do something about it. I’d say the best first step you can take is joining a stuttering friendly environment, whether that is talking with a speech pathologist, StutterSocial, a local NSA chapter, or intensive program. The first step is to go out there and stutter – to stop running from your true self. Only when you make this step can you work towards fluency.