Atro
07-08-2008, 10:07 PM
Ok guys I visited a therapist today to start a set of practices to overcome my stuttering problem. I will be constantly posting the summary of whole session and the key tips she gives me, hope you find it useful.
First Visit:
In the beginning she asked about the different situation I associate my stutter with. As she said, everyone is different. Some people repeat phrases and some repeat words or in some cases even sentences. She also said that the treatment for everyone is different, and sometimes requires a “cocktail” of many different treatments to overcome the problem. By overcoming the problem she meant minimizing it, so that it doesn’t turn into a phobia or a real life constant challenge.
She went on describing the problem and how it affects our lives. She mentioned that most of the stutterers choose computers or jobs related to IT, sometimes without even knowing it they become interested in it, because talking to a machine is much simpler than talking to real life people. It is very rare for us to become a sales person or a politician for example because we see ourselves incapable of doing such stuff.
In my case there are some situations which my stutter gets worse, usually when I’m talking on the phone, or to the strangers or when I’m talking to a group of people , for example when giving a presentation. It also gets worse when the situation is tense, in job interviews for instance.
There are also some body movements some of us associate with getting rid of the stammering and say the damn word. Some close their eyes, some move their head, and some hit their leg. In one case , a kid hit his leg repeatedly so hard that he had to go through a surgery to fix a skin problem caused by constant hitting.
There is also some hope to stop stutterers from being bullied in the schools. We won’t advantage from this because most of us finished the school already, but there will be some training sessions for teachers to understand this problem and stop children from being bullied. She described that being bullied for stammering is worse than other cases, because it gets worse if you get bullied. If you get bullied because you wear glasses, your eyesight doesn’t become weaker, But in our case it gets much worse, and children find themselves isolated which affects their lives forever.
Towards the end, she gave me some small tips about giving a presentation to a relatively big audience. I will be talking about a program I wrote in the next staff meeting. She told me that it is always better to start in the beginning. Like I should be the first one to talk. If that is not possible, I should listen very very carefully to what other people say and not only listen but think about what they say and fully understand it. This helps preventing the big damn monster we make out of our turn to talk. We should also associate our topic of speech with what others say, so maybe when we talk we can say like yeah as Robert said this part of the programs needs some more debugging. This helps us to kinda share the responsibility of speech with others. Funny but true.
The next thing was, act confident even if you don’t feel confident. This creates an environment around you which makes you more comfortable. People see you are confident and they give you this impression that you can do it. I haven’t tried this yet, but will surely update you on results.
Next one will be two weeks from now. I will post a summary of that to. Hope it was helpful and I ask you to share your therapies too maybe we can learn something from it.
First Visit:
In the beginning she asked about the different situation I associate my stutter with. As she said, everyone is different. Some people repeat phrases and some repeat words or in some cases even sentences. She also said that the treatment for everyone is different, and sometimes requires a “cocktail” of many different treatments to overcome the problem. By overcoming the problem she meant minimizing it, so that it doesn’t turn into a phobia or a real life constant challenge.
She went on describing the problem and how it affects our lives. She mentioned that most of the stutterers choose computers or jobs related to IT, sometimes without even knowing it they become interested in it, because talking to a machine is much simpler than talking to real life people. It is very rare for us to become a sales person or a politician for example because we see ourselves incapable of doing such stuff.
In my case there are some situations which my stutter gets worse, usually when I’m talking on the phone, or to the strangers or when I’m talking to a group of people , for example when giving a presentation. It also gets worse when the situation is tense, in job interviews for instance.
There are also some body movements some of us associate with getting rid of the stammering and say the damn word. Some close their eyes, some move their head, and some hit their leg. In one case , a kid hit his leg repeatedly so hard that he had to go through a surgery to fix a skin problem caused by constant hitting.
There is also some hope to stop stutterers from being bullied in the schools. We won’t advantage from this because most of us finished the school already, but there will be some training sessions for teachers to understand this problem and stop children from being bullied. She described that being bullied for stammering is worse than other cases, because it gets worse if you get bullied. If you get bullied because you wear glasses, your eyesight doesn’t become weaker, But in our case it gets much worse, and children find themselves isolated which affects their lives forever.
Towards the end, she gave me some small tips about giving a presentation to a relatively big audience. I will be talking about a program I wrote in the next staff meeting. She told me that it is always better to start in the beginning. Like I should be the first one to talk. If that is not possible, I should listen very very carefully to what other people say and not only listen but think about what they say and fully understand it. This helps preventing the big damn monster we make out of our turn to talk. We should also associate our topic of speech with what others say, so maybe when we talk we can say like yeah as Robert said this part of the programs needs some more debugging. This helps us to kinda share the responsibility of speech with others. Funny but true.
The next thing was, act confident even if you don’t feel confident. This creates an environment around you which makes you more comfortable. People see you are confident and they give you this impression that you can do it. I haven’t tried this yet, but will surely update you on results.
Next one will be two weeks from now. I will post a summary of that to. Hope it was helpful and I ask you to share your therapies too maybe we can learn something from it.