Chapter 1

Chapter 1

Stuttering: One Person's Perception

I once heard a statistic that 1 in 10 people have some form of speech impediment. Of all of these the most debilitating is stuttering. Non-stutterers have no idea what a blessing it is to be able to communicate smoothly and easily. They have no idea what it is like to know what you want to say, to want nothing more in the world to say it, to get your mouth and tongue in the position to make the sounds - and hit the Wall, literally a mental wall that locks up the speaking mechanism as tight as a rusted bolt.

The Stairs

For the loved ones of stutterers and those who try to help them let me give you an analogy that might give you a hint of what stutterers experience. Look at speech as you would a long flight of steps. Each word is a step. Now, as a non-stutterer, or as one not handicapped in any way, you just flow up the steps, you slow and quicken as the conversation takes you. You see the steps as they approach but you don't give the physical act of lifting one leg after another a second thought any more you do the forming of your mouth into words. You are more concerned with how you will scale the steps, what inflection, impact, finesse. How you will climb the stairs with the audience watching (listening) is all that concerns you.

Now, imagine that you are scaling the stairs and all the sudden, as you go to take the next step your leg won't raise. Just as simple as that. You look at the stair, look at your leg, concentrate on raising your leg and taking the next step and it WON'T raise. It moves a little bit. It acts like it is going to do what you tell it but only gets about an inch off the step and stops there, vibrating with the strain of trying to follow your brain's electrical command. It is as if an invisible hand has reached up through the step and has grabbed hold of your foot and you are struggling to break its grip. This continues until you either break the grip or just give up and put your foot down and try the other leg and pray that it will actually do what you tell it to this time. Maybe it will or maybe the same thing will occur with that foot as well.

Now imagine that this happens all the time. You look at every set of stairs as a certain challenge and opportunity for embarrassment and the waking world is one flight of stairs after another.

With a stutterer, what is more important is will you be able to climb stairs not how will you do it best. Don't forget, you are never alone on the steps. There is always at least one other person climbing the steps with you and they don't have any invisible hands grabbing their feet. They have to stop with you and watch you wrestle with an invisible force that they can't see or understand.

The Wall

I call that invisible grip on our speech mechanism the Wall and all stutterers battle against the Wall in one way or another. While our face turns red with embarrassment and we want nothing more than a hole to open in the earth and swallow us up, we sputter, strain, try the first letter or syllable of the word over and over again and then either finally succeed and gasp out the rest of the word or quit and try a different approach that we hope will succeed without hitting another wall. An example of this that most people will recognize is when Warner Brothers' famous Porky Pig character tries to say "Bye" at the end of their cartoons and after struggling for time finally gets out "That's all folks."

Meanwhile the embarrassment is not only ours. While this horrific pause in the continuum of the conversation lengthens, the listener(s) either politely wait with their expressions frozen on their faces or, even worse, try to complete the words for us. If you do this, stop. The stutterer is not playing speech impediment charades with you. At least give them the consideration of breaking the invisible grip themselves. We are already forced to publicly humiliate ourselves, don't smack us in the face with how natural and easy it is for you.

Society's Perception of the Stutterer

To compound the injury, thanks to the television and cinema mediums, the stutterer is perceived as mentally challenged. The opposite could be not be more true, but the sadistic tendency for humans to find any weakness a source for merriment has added to our burden immeasurably.

The truth of the matter is that intelligence has no bearing on stuttering. As a matter of fact, stutterers have better than average vocabularies due to developing a variety of ways to communicate the same concept in order to try to avoid or circumvent the Wall.

Triggers

Part of what makes stuttering so frustrating is when it happens. When you are comfortable; with your friends, family or spouse, the stuttering is far less pronounced than when you are in a situation that causes tension. Stress is a trigger, even the slightest amount. When you are on the phone, talking to strangers, speaking to authority figures or people whose opinion you value like your teachers or your boss and God forbid speaking in front of groups of people. The times when you most want to speak fluidly are the very ones where you stutter the worst. The tragic thing is that wanting to not stutter causes the very stress that exacerbates it.