Chapter 5

Chapter 5

The Payoff

You may be thinking, "So I'm trading a stutter for a slur. Rather than stalling I'm sounding like I'm mentally challenged by putting nonsensical letters in front of what I'm really to say." Nope. What makes this "work-around" so useful is that after a while you no longer even have to use the soft consonants, the ramps. The results will no doubt vary, but eventually your brain gets conditioned to the point where you no longer put the "n" or "m" in front of your sharp consonants. Your brain gets conditioned to you laying down the ramp to vault over the wall and what began as a physical action on your part becomes a subconscious action.

Now, when I talk I have many pauses in my speech. It actually serves to be perceived that I am placing emphasis at certain points in the conversation where, in reality, my brain is performing the mental gymnastics of laying down the ramp, vaulting the wall and moving on in a microsecond. Now when I run into a wall it appears as a delay, a pause. But I don't worry about it, and that is the key. The stress that you will stutter causes you to stutter. Once you take that away the amount that you stutter decreases dramatically. It is the self-propagating solution to a self propagating problem.

Now don't get me wrong. This is not a silver bullet that will cure your impediment instantly. Like picking up the guitar for the first time and trying to make your fingers form the chords or running at a line of hurdles for the first time the start is ungainly. You have to stretch your fingers in a most unnatural way to make the chords and at first you hike a leg and climb over a hurdle, but after a while the chords form without thinking and you jump the hurdles without breaking stride. It takes that sort of stick-to-itedness to make this system work.

Just to put this into perspective, I figured out the "ramp" over the "wall" at age 13, in 8th grade. By my freshman year in high school I was still stuttering but at a much reduced intensity. By college, 4 years later, I only stuttered in highly tense situations or at random times that were, for some reason, unpredictable. People could still tell I was a stutterer but it was so slight they only took note when I inquired. By the end of graduate school, ten years later, people only knew I stuttered if I pointed out the symptoms. Now, twenty years later, I stalled today, to no small amount of consternation on my part. You will always be a stutterer. It is a physical condition that cannot be cured. But you can speak. And that is heaven.