Hello everyone!
Here’s a quick recap of our meeting of the Dallas NSA Chapter on Tuesday. We had 26 people in attendance including 3 new faces, all PWS. These meetings keep getting bigger and we couldn’t be happier!
We started our meeting as usual, with introductions and a question. This time we asked “How did you feel the first time you met another person who stuttered?”. The responses were as unique and varied as you can imagine, starting from WHEN that encounter happened. Some people grew up with other people that stuttered (even though few of them ever discussed it openly) and some people had to wait 30 years to finally meet another one. We talked about the recognition factor (“oh, another one like me!) and how meeting other people that stutter helps put your own experiences under a new light. It was a great starting point and we learned quite a bit about each other.
After introductions we ceded the floor to Russ Hicks, the one and only, who helped facilitate a discussion on “How to talk to people about stuttering?” He started telling us that he was putting together a panel to go talk to undergraduate students about stuttering from Texas Christian University (TCU) and wanted to know what we, the stuttering experts, considered the most important things to let other people know, as well as how to approach the situation and the usefulness of doing it.
Russ passed around some handouts with questions and in order to come up with some answers and allow everybody to talk, we broke into smaller groups. Some of the questions were Why do we want to tell people we stutter? (“because it helps put myself and the listener at ease”, “if you don’t talk about it you leave up to them to imagine what’s happening”) and How does our attitude affect what we are saying? (“If you talk about your stutter with confidence instead of embarrassment or nervousness people won’t think twice about it”).
These group discussions always help us find out new ways of thinking by comparing ideas and experiences with others, and this wasn’t the exception.
In the end it’s fair to say that we all had a great time, another successful meeting!
See you in a couple weeks for our September Chat and Chew. Expect an announcement next week!
Keep talking,
Dallas NSA