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.