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Monday was wonderful. We had 17 members present, with 5 first timers (welcome Dashawn, Sara, John Paul, Ihno and Emanuel!) and 2 graduate students. A few highlights from the meeting…

1) Danny spoke about how challenging it can be to maintain eye contact with his listener while stuttering. Many other members share this experience, and discussed the ways they have worked on improving their eye contact by speaking on the phone while looking in the mirror, or by watching themselves on video.Though turning inward or away while struggling to speak is often habitual, we concluded that working to improve our eye contact while stuttering is a way to let our listeners that we think stuttering is OK, so they should too. We all deserve to feel comfortable and confident while speaking.

2) The leaders raised the possibility of having “expert” speech therapists or researchers come into group for short presentations about different “schools” of stuttering treatment. We had a lively debate about the pros and cons of doing this. On one hand, it is important for people who stutter to become educated consumers and informed advocates – we should be the experts. Also, the opportunity to question and/or challenge therapists about their treatment philosophy is a valuable one, for PWS and therapists alike. One the other hand, we don’t want to “advertise” any particular type of treatment. More discussion on this to come…

3) To close the meeting, we made some phone callllllls (everyone’s favorite moment). After watching everyone suddenly sit up straight and open their eyes wide when we mentioned it, 4 members stepped up and called Chipotle via speakerphone and openly stuttered over the phone. Two of us “fake” stuttered enough to get hung up on. This is kind of fun, but also can reduce our “worse case scenario” fears by creating them in a safe place like group.

Then we all headed to Sara M’s new apartment (welcome to Brooklyn!!), which is deliciously close, to chill in her enormous backyard.

(exciting) ANNOUNCEMENT

Stavros, Marc, Michael and Carl H. are starting a new Manhattan NSA Chapter! The first meeting will be this Monday, September 16th. A lot of us will now be members of both the BK and Manhattan chapters – we’re expanding and this will make us a stronger NYC stuttering community. I’m not sure of a definitive location, so I’ll let them respond to this email and confirm

See you in October!!