Last night the Dallas Chapter of the National Stuttering Association held it’s February meeting and here’s a quick recap of what happened.
With 23 people in attendance including 5 new people and 2 former chapter leaders that had not attended in a while, we were set for a great start. Welcome to the family Deven, Adnan, Najeeb, Miller and Robert!
As usual we started with introductions and to get to know each other better we asked the question “What is something positive that happened to you this past month?” and the responses, which included starting yoga, getting a job promotion, finding a new job, getting out of debt, applying for graduation and going back home to New Orleans (happy Fat Tuesday!), made us feel proud of how accomplished our chapter is!
We followed that with some announcements:
- Congratulations to our Spotlight of the Month- Tricia Krauss Lehrman.
- Keep you eyes open for other stuttering panels you can participate in (the UNT panel was a success this morning).
- Conference workshop proposals are due tonight, March 1st at midnight.
With that out of the way we jumped right to our main topic of the night: Stuttering and relationships: Will I Ever Find Love?
With Valentine’s day just a couple weeks ago and with such a big and varied group we had all the necessary ingredients for a great discussion and it didn’t disappoint!
Members shared personal stories about meeting current or past significant others, important moments in the relationship, first date advice and a whole lot of general “relationship building” tips.
Turns out that, contrary to what we often times believe, disclosing our stuttering with somebody new is far from a negative, and in fact can be immensely positive because it shows that we are willing to be vulnerable (very important to create intimacy), comfortable in our own skin and something that immediately separates us from the rest– in a good way!
In the end it was a great topic with some food for thought for everybody.
After our lively discussion we had to say good bye, but not before reading the closing words all together as a group.
Thank you to everybody that attended (if you didn’t we missed you!) and we will see you in a couple weeks for our March Chat and Chew event, look for details in your inbox soon!
We love you,
Dallas NSA