Our April meeting was our largest yet. There were 38 of us in total, including six newcomers who stutter, many familiar faces, and several SLPs and SLP students. It was lovely to reconnect with everyone and to meet the many people who joined us for the first time. We look forward to speaking more with each of you soon!

We split up into three groups for conversation. Here is some of what we talked about.

Creating a comfier environment to stutter in

Much of the conversation this month focused on how we can change the social dynamic with our listener when we feel uncomfortable or when we feel our listener is unsympathetic to how we speak. As it often does, “advertising”, or telling our listener that we stutter, came up. A newcomer talked about how she was nervous about advertising to her unsupportive coworkers. Advertising seemed foreign to her, and she worried that it would make her an easy target for malicious gossip. In response, some of us suggested that advertising, especially when confident and unapologetic, might instead be met with sympathy and respect.

We discussed how maintaining eye contact with our listener is another way to comfort ourselves while speaking. Like advertising, it can be powerful, but also scary and difficult to do sometimes. A few people spoke about how the variability of their speech—stuttering more as a conversation progresses, or stuttering a lot during one conversation while hardly at all in another—can make matters confusing. Some of us worry that this variability will lead our listener to assume we are drunk or high or just weird. We talked about how these concerns might be lessened by maintaining eye contact, which keeps us and our listener emotionally connected to each other and more present. One woman spoke about how she has felt a loss of dignity when looking away from her listener while speaking. Sometimes her listener has looked away from her too in response, perhaps sensing her embarrassment and feeling like he wasn’t supposed to have seen her in that vulnerable moment. But maintaining eye contact can preserve our dignity in our own mind and in our listener’s mind and establish us as a coequal partner in a conversation.

We also did some role-playing to explore ways we can handle or educate rude or ignorant cashiers when we’re buying food. And we talked about the “I Stutter Card” and about whether we would like to use it ourselves to advertise.

And more

We talked about labeling ourselves. Many of us prefer to say simply, “I stutter”. When forced to choose between “stutterer” and “person who stutters”, we were about evenly split. But one man shared that he has found it helpful to think of himself as neither. He feels that disfluency is not binary, but instead a matter of degree. Since all people have disfluencies in their speech, he sees no need to label himself as different just because he has more disfluencies than most people. This attitude has helped him challenge his habit of reflexively thinking that stuttering is bad and has solidified his actual belief that it is ok to stutter.

Someone shared her frustration with SLPs who teach that stuttering originates in the vocal folds and articulators. She mentioned research suggesting that stuttering actually originates in the brain, particularly in the basal ganglia. Given the role of the brain, she feels that heroic attempts to control the muscles in the mouth and throat often miss the point, and that SLPs who pressure children who stutter to make such attempts can do a lot of damage. We also talked about the frustrations of not being able to pinpoint the reasons for an occasional increase in stuttering, or consequently to do anything about it. And we talked about the pleasures of being connected to the NSA community. There are so many thoughtful, talented, and accepting people to make friends with and to reach out to whenever we want advice or support from someone who understands the part of us that is shaped by stuttering.