Chapter Meeting – August 21, 2018

We talked about the difference between fluency shaping and stuttering modification approaches to speech therapy. This led into talking about the Precision Fluency Shaping program. A few of our attendees have participated in that program in the past and one new member was considering it. We shared a lot of valuable feedback and very interesting information. Overall, we all agreed that the program’s usefulness decreases overtime and not a lot people are able to follow the techniques long-term.

We shared several administrative updates: We continue to meet at the Bala Cynwyd Library for the second meeting of the month. We are still looking for a second venue and we have good candidates. One of them is Temple University. They have an SLP program and a clinic from which we could get referrals. We’ll let you know more in the coming weeks.

We are also working with the national organization to organize a one-day conference in our area later in November, stay tuned for details about that. We are planning a Happy Hour as our next social event at the end of September. More details on all this soon!

Chapter Meeting – August 2, 2018

We had a new attendee who is a family member of a person that stutters that has never come to a meeting. This person is not comfortable coming to a meeting yet but his family is very supportive and they want to help as much as they can.

We talked about our reasons to come to our first meeting and most of them were related to an experience we had at our workplace. We then talked about how stuttering affects what we do at work and how we feel. It was interesting to hear that when we stutter introducing someone we feel like we failed that person, as if we did them a disservice. When we stutter during a meeting, many times we stop contributing to the meeting (unless called upon) because we don’t want to slow down the rest of the meeting or we just don’t feel comfortable talking anymore.

We talked about the recent annual conference and other opportunities to interact with people who stutter such as Stutter Social, regional conferences, social events, etc. Stay tuned for more information about some of these.