Following is the tenth in a series of interviews that shaped the narrative of my next book: VoiceS Unearthed: The Impact of Early Intervention on Those Who Continue to Stutter. Names have been changes for reasons of confidentiality.
39-year-old Lane:
Lane tells us that “there was no doubt that I was supposed to stop stuttering. That was as clear as the direction you put your pants on in the morning. My efforts spiraled into a museum of tricks and avoidance behaviors.”
“I started to stutter between three and five years of age – the age when language starts to develop. I don’t remember a time when I didn’t stutter. My pediatrician told my parents the age-old wisdom, ‘he’s gonna grow out of it.’ He didn’t tell us that if I hadn’t grown out of it within two or three years, I was most likely to be one of the 20% who would not grow out of it.
I went well into my teens thinking I was either going to stop stuttering by working hard or I was going to grow out of it. Whatever it was, there was no doubt that I was supposed to stop stuttering. That was as clear as the direction you put your pants on in the morning. But it wasn’t working and I didn’t know what to ask for.
I was home schooled until sixth grade which meant I didn’t have the more typical experience as a school-age kid. I was in Cub Scouts and in religious school and my parents worked hard to make sure there was a social network. In sixth grade I was in a classroom setting for the first time. It was English class, and we were going around the room reading from our literature books. This is normal for everyone else, but it’s the first time I’ve ever experienced this. I was freaking out. I can see it to this day. It gets to my turn, and I hadn’t yet learned any of the tricks to avoid these situations. Nothing comes out of my mouth – a total silent struggle – complete shutdown for what felt like an hour. It was maybe a minute, maybe less, and then the teacher moves on.
This nice kid comes up to me afterwards and offers to help me learn how to read because he thinks I don’t know how, which was a reasonable conclusion because when it was my turn, I couldn’t do it. He was being kind and I was heartbroken with no ability to process what had happened and why it was happening, I didn’t know how to talk about it, so I just didn’t.
I was referred to the public-school speech therapy and given a speech book for practicing my sounds. We would practice my b b b b and then we get to two-syllable sounds. It turns out I was really good at it but of course it didn’t help me with my stuttering.
My efforts to not struggle were spiraling into a museum of tricks and avoidance behaviors. For instance, I had this thing I did with my left knee that helped me get out of blocks. I was flailing through while being told that everything was fine and I’d grow out of it.
In middle and high school, I went to speech therapy in public school for a half hour each week. The speech therapists were lovely and well-meaning, but they didn’t know how to help me. My family wasn’t engaged and there was no broader conversation or discussion. It was all about how do we get the stuttering to stop? I learned how to do prolongations and bouncing, and I could do all of these things pretty well in the therapy room.
When I started college, I was a 19-year-old young man white knuckling it all the way. No one was gonna tell me anything. I was angry and hellbent to prove to the world that I didn’t need therapy. Are you kidding me? I’m fine! By the end of the first semester, I crashed pretty hard.
A turning point:
My speech therapist in high school had told me there was a great speech clinic at my college and maybe I should check it out. I hesitated, but when I finally connected with the speech pathology department, I connected with an awesome and amazing therapist who worked with me to “de-awfulize stuttering.” He was also the first person I ever met who stuttered.
During the seven years I attended under-grad and graduate school at this college, the therapist worked with me one-on-one and started an adult stuttering group focused on helping us shift from defining success as fluency to not valuing fluency at all. We now had the language to express what we really wanted and needed – to work on effective communication that would be joyful and lead to confidence and success. There was something incredibly magical about being together with all of us working in the same direction, struggling with the same things, and having the same goals.
After college, I moved to Baltimore and connected with the National Stuttering Association (NSA) chapter. The expectation in the working world I was in now was so much higher than graduate school. This is when I was introduced to therapy focused on avoidance reduction. At first, I thought it was crazy stuff because they wanted me to do the most ugly, uncontrolled stuttering I’d ever done in front of people. The only reason I came back after the first session was that this therapist had been recommended by people I highly respected including my college therapist.
In group therapy, I watched these people stutter just like I wanted to stutter. They were communicating so well. They were smiling and not struggling even though they still stuttered. They seemed to be in a better place than I was. I was getting there.
I continued to struggle as I went through life transitions. I moved across the country another three times since my days in Baltimore and I changed jobs several times. It would be nice to have stuttering just disappear and never have to deal with the challenging situation when a co-worker is hearing my struggle in my speech. I see the confusion and feel the need to explain a bit so they understand. I don’t know that I’ll ever be all the way there and fully comfortable as a person who stutters.
At work I know I’m a good communicator and yes, I stutter. I have times where I struggle a lot more because that’s how things work, but I don’t think I can lose the belief I hold now that it’s not the stuttering that hurts and it’s not the fluency that helps. Ccommunication is about so much more. We can have joyful communication while being people who stutter, and we can say what we want to say when we want to say it and express ourselves with confidence. Knowing that and living that is a total gamechanger.
One of the things we sometimes struggle with in the speech and language community is early onset when kids are three. We still try to fix the stuttering we really do a disserve to these kids and their families when we have a narrative that first says we need to fix it, and then, well gee, it sounds like you’re gonna stutter all your life so let’s talk about acceptance instead. Even when we’re three and starting to stutter, working on not avoiding rather than fixing is still more productive. The message does not change, and if the stuttering goes away, cool and if it doesn’t, ok.
These days we talk about client driven therapy and working on what the client wants. In hindsight, I can say I understand I wanted to work on effective communication that would be joyful and lead to confidence and success. That’s what I really meant when I said, ‘I want to stop stuttering’ but I didn’t have the language to say what I really needed and neither did the people who were trying to help me.”