Basic Experiences for Intermediate Stutterers

From Barry Guitar - posted to SID4 mailing list, March 2, 2004 and copied below with permission.

(from Van Riper)

1. The therapist is competent and can be trusted.
2. The stutterer is responsible for his own behavior - including his stuttering.
3. Stuttering can be deliberately endured, touched, and maintained and studied.
4. Avoidance increases fear and therefore stuttering, and it must be reduced.
5. Struggling, hurried escape reactions and recoil make the stuttering worse than it needs to be, and tends to make it persist.
6. Attempts to utter the feared words should be as normal as possible.
7. It is possible to release oneself voluntarily from tremors, fixations, and oscillations.
8. When a moment of stuttering occurs, it should be studied, and its evil effects should be erased as much as possible.
9. Monitoring of normal speech reduces stuttering.
10. Self-suggestion of incoming stuttering can be resisted and the word can be spoken normally.
11. It is possible to build barriers to destructive listener reactions.
12. Ambivalence, anxiety, guilt, and hostility are to be decreased as much as possible.
13. Every effort should be made to build up one's ego strength, self-confidence, and self-respect.
14. Society in general rewards the person who obviously confronts and works with his stuttering.
15. It is more rewarding to speak normally than to stutter.

These are the crucial experiences which your therapy should provide for the person who stutters. Again and again you must seek to facilitate these basic experiences. These should be the goals which structure your therapy.

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added March 2, 2004