Office Hours: The Professor Is In

Generalized Anxiety and Stuttering?

From: Mike Lefko
Date: 05 Oct 2012
Time: 20:53:08 -0500
Remote Name: 71.28.89.104

Comments

I was diagnosed with generalized anxiety about 20 years ago and have been a PWS all my life. It has only been recently that I suspected a connection between the two, yet I have neither heard nor seen any research in this area. Perhaps I am just looking in the wrong places. I can't imagine no one has made the connections. I am at a point in my life where I no longer fear speak, and no longer fear stuttering. I owe that to my work with a very special therapist and professor in Western North Carolina. However, I still do stutter. It doesn't seem to be brought on by fear of speaking or fear of stuttering as it did in my younger years. Yet, I will be speaking good and strong one day, for weeks, even months, and then as was the case a few weeks ago, for no conscious reason, I began to experience more challenges, and difficulty maintaining the fluency. I don't want to say it ever controls me any more, but lately I haven't felt in complete control. There are none of the habits of my youth, such as having premonitions of failure, and fearing to speak. I have, however, been working very hard at work, and have had a lot on my mind. Now the stuttering feels more like the anxiety itself. It comes on, and I can't identify the exact cause, and can not necessarily immediately get back " on the wagon" so to speak, with my controls, and do what I know how to do. It feels like an anxiety attack of stuttering of sorts. I know it will pass. I know I have confidence I can and will speak fluently again. My "controls" aren't readily accessible. It's almost as if the train is out of control and has run the tracks. Has anyone done, or heard of specific research in the area of generalized anxiety and stuttering? I've got to think, at least for me, there is a connection.

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Last changed: 10/22/12