We're All in This Together

I’d like to start off by saying how honored I am to be here. Annie Bradberry approached me last fall at the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association convention and asked if I would consider being a keynote speaker at this convention. Initially, I though she was talking to someone standing in back of me. Me? You want me to keynote at NSP? Are you sure? Don’t you have me confused with someone else? Annie was serious, and I truly want to thank her and everyone else who was involved in my being here. This is a very meaningful and humbling experience for me.

Since that invitation from Annie, I have been thinking frequently about what I would say. In fact, I’ve probably thought about this talk every day since Annie invited me to speak. I kept thinking about different topics that I could talk about and it was difficult to come up with one good idea. A number of more negative thoughts crossed my mind. For one thing, I worried about my fluency during this talk. Would I stutter enough? Too much? I had heard that some keynote speakers at earlier NSP conventions had been told that they didn’t "give good stutter" during their talks. On the stutt-l email list on April 14, 1998 Russ Hicks said: "If stuttering is part of your message, you darn well better stutter." Gee, I’m generally pretty fluent when I talk to groups. Would being fluent be offensive? I worried about offending people with my comments. Would I be too preachy? Would I bore people with a lot of personal anecdotes? What if my experiences didn’t resonate with the members of the audience? What have I gotten myself into?? I guess what I’m pointing out here is that I’m pretty paranoid.

To set the stage for what I’m going to talk about, I wanted to share a story that many of you may have already read or heard.

The point is, I don’t think we’ll ever reach a consensus about what stuttering is, what causes it, why some people are helped by therapy and others are not. Based on that, I will simply tell my story, realizing that we are all different, even though we have many things in common. Even though we may be different in many ways, and even though we may not always agree, my feeling is that we’re all in this together, and everyone in this room has something to offer to everyone else, and everyone in this room can take something from everyone else. That’s why groups like the National Stuttering Project are so important and why gatherings like this are so important.

I’d like to stress the role that others who stutter have played in my life, and how important interaction with other stutterers has been for me. That’s not to suggest that people who don’t stutter have not helped me, but I’ve received a different kind of help from fellow stutterers. For the first fourteen or fifteen years of my life, I really didn’t know any other people who stuttered. I’d had therapy in the public schools (which didn’t help a whole lot), but my stuttering was just some sort of "it" that I didn’t have a lot of control over. I had one classmate in junior high and high school who stuttered, but his pattern of stuttering and mine were quite different, and we never talked about stuttering with each other. Nobody else said much about it either, except for the occasional "take your time," "think of what you’re going to say," "take a deep breath" —you know, all those helpful things that other people like to tell us.

The first "real" stutterer I met was a doctoral student at Indiana University, who was conducting a study as part of his doctoral program. I met him and took part in his study when I was about 14 years old or so. He was the most severe stutterer I had ever met up to that point in my life. He actually managed his stuttering quite well, but he was definitely using a "stutter more fluently" way of talking. I remember getting a sort of sinking feeling in my stomach when I heard him speak, and thinking "Oh my god." Up to that point, I believed that one morning I was going to wake up a fluent speaker. This experience was the first time at which I started to think that perhaps I was not going to outgrow my stuttering. I also had spent most of my life trying to hide my stuttering, something he definitely did not do. More important, perhaps, was that this man, in spite of his stuttering, was going to graduate school. It seemed that his choice of speech pathology as a major fit in quite well with his stuttering. I suppose at that time a seed had been planted in my mind.

I didn’t follow through on that seed initially. When it came time to choose a major in college, I saw that speech-language pathology was a Master’s-level profession. At that time in my life, I didn’t think I could handle 300-level classes, much less a Master’s program. So, I entered a pre-optometry curriculum at Indiana University and spent two relatively unproductive years in college. During that time, I spent a lot of time hiding (or trying to hide) my stuttering. I was pretty unfriendly and didn’t interact with others very much. I spent a lot of time alone. My grades were pretty bad. After my sophomore year, I decided to quit school. I had worked summers at Otis Elevator Company in Bloomington and I was able to stay on and got a job driving a forklift at Otis.

It didn’t take too many days of going to work at 7 a.m. and spending all day actually working for a living for me to decide that perhaps my decision to leave college may have been a bit hasty. I worked at Otis until January of 1973 and then moved to Dallas, Texas where I lived with a friend who was attending Southern Methodist University. I had saved enough money while working at Otis so that I didn’t have to work while in Dallas, so I spent most of my time pondering my future.

During that time, I saw an ad in Reader’s Digest for a book called "To the Stutterer" which was published by the Stuttering Foundation of America (then known as the Speech Foundation of America). The book was very inexpensive or free, so I sent away for a copy. That book was the first real "support" I received. As I read that book, it was amazing to me that there were 24 stutterers who had actually accomplished something in their lives. So much of what they had to say was so similar to what I had been going through. Their optimism about their stuttering was something I had never experienced. They spoke optimistically about therapy for stuttering. And again, most had chosen speech-language pathology as a career. After reading that book I decided to get therapy for my speech and return to college and change my major to speech-language pathology. During later years, I would meet many of the authors from that book and would read other things they had written. But I have to say that it was those people who helped me to begin to change my life. I didn’t agree with everything that everyone in the book had to say, but overall I was impressed with the perspectives expressed.

When I got into therapy at Indiana University, the therapy I received was quite different from what I had received in public school. I was challenged to think about my beliefs about my stuttering and began to see how much my attitudes about my speech and myself as a speaker interacted with my not-so-great fluency skills. I realized that I often avoided situations and other people for fear that I might stutter. I would then tell myself that I had "failed" in those situations. What I came to realize is that all I had failed to do was try. While I spent a lot of time in therapy working on my speech, I also spent a lot of time outside of the therapy room, talking and seeing what the consequences were. In most cases I didn’t stutter nearly as severely as I believed I would, and the reactions from my listeners were rarely if ever what I expected. In therapy I had a chance to see myself on videotape and realized that the impression I gave as a speaker was nothing like what I felt inside. I began to realize that when I felt uncomfortable, I thought my listener did, too; when I felt embarrassed, I thought my listener did, too; when I felt sorry for myself, I thought my listener did, too. But I came to realize that I had no idea what my listener was thinking. As I talked more, both in therapy sessions and away from therapy, I had more success. Before therapy my energies were devoted to "not stuttering." As I spent time in therapy, I learned a lot about being a better communicator—using better phrasing and emphasis when I spoke, using more inflection in my voice, etc., as well as learning skills to manage my stuttering.

Another important experience at Indiana was getting involved with a stuttering group. For two or three of the semesters I was in therapy at Indiana, we had a group of the adult stuttering clients get together once a week. I had a chance to meet a number of other stutterers and began to see our commonalties and differences. It was interesting to share experiences and suggestions. Certainly what we had to say to each other was often quite different from what our therapists told us. Those experiences, however, helped me to further realize that there were many other people that I could relate to as far as speech was concerned.

While the therapy that I had at Indiana was the last formal therapy I received, I don’t think that I was "cured" at the end of that therapy. My fluency was certainly better than when I entered therapy, and I was a better communicator. However, I’ve continued to learn, and grow, and change my speech. I’ve been lucky, I suppose, in that my chosen profession has enabled me (in some cases forced me) to learn about speech in a more "scientific" way. In my doctoral program at the University of Iowa, I took a number of classes devoted to speech science, speech physiology, and biomechanics of speech. I took a number of classes in social psychology, as well. The speech physiology classes enabled me to develop a much deeper appreciation for the complexity of speech. I’ve often said that the question should not be "why do we stutter," but "why do so few people stutter?" People who can talk easily seem to take their fluency for granted. I liken this to some mathematics instructors I have had, who couldn’t understand why math was difficult for their students when it was so easy for them. Or, perhaps, like professional athletes who take their skills for granted. I think some speech-language pathologists are guilty of this, as well. A lot of SLPs who don’t stutter seem to take the approach that talking shouldn’t be difficult for the stutterer, and can’t understand why we just can’t talk fluently. I would wager that nearly everyone in this room who has had an unsatisfactory experience with therapy has been disappointed by therapy delivered by a nonstutterer. This is not to imply that all nonstuttering professionals do not understand the disorder. A lot of my colleagues like Woody Starkweather, Steve Hood, Tony Caruso, Connie Dugan, and Nina Reardon, and many others don’t stutter, but truly do understand the complexity of stuttering. I must admit, however, that at least some of my nonstuttering colleagues (who shall remain nameless, but who are not in this room) just don’t get it. I’ll talk a bit more about this in a minute.

One of the real benefits of attending Iowa for my Ph.D. was that I was able to study with Dean Williams. Many of you in this room knew Dr. Williams, and he was just a wonderful person. He helped me to be a better thinker, and he taught me a lot about stuttering and stuttering therapy. When I graduated from Indiana, I don’t think I was a particularly good therapist—most of what I "knew" was based upon my experiences as a client more than on things I had been taught in classes. I learned a lot more about therapy at Iowa, and the approach I learned from Dean was a very complete one. One of the benefits of the Iowa approach is that it involves a lot of problem solving. While I was learning about the approach and supervising students at the Wendell Johnson Speech and Hearing Clinic, I had an opportunity to continue to study my own speech and stuttering. I would try different things with my own speech and continued to be more aware of what I did when I stuttered as well as when I was fluent. My experiences suggest to me that therapy alone is not the answer to overcoming our stuttering problems. We need to continue to keep working, to experiment, and to make learning about our speech an ongoing process. This may not be true for all stutterers, but I think I’m among a group who will always have to work at talking well. And to be honest, there are times when I just don’t feel like working hard at talking. And there are times when in spite of my best efforts my speech is not as fluent as I’d like it to be. But I do think that it is critical that we look at our speech and stuttering as tangible things—things that can be changed, modified, played with. If stuttering is a mysterious "it" I don’t think we can ever do much about it. If we obsess about fluency, that can be counterproductive. If we get down on ourselves for not being more fluent, that’s not very helpful. If we can cut ourselves some slack, accept that we are doing the best we can, accept stuttering as a part of ourselves (like our height or some other characteristic), I think that can be helpful. If we are working at getting better and realize that there is always room for improvement, that can be helpful, as well. But there are no panaceas. What works for me won’t work for everybody.

After I graduated from Iowa, I worked at the University of North Dakota for three years and the State University of New York at Plattsburgh for five. Dean Engel at UND introduced me to the NSP, and I joined the NSP when I arrived at Plattsburgh. During my years at UND and Plattsburgh, I was pretty isolated from other stutterers and professionals in the area of stuttering. I tried to get a stuttering group going at Plattsburgh, but didn’t have a whole lot of success. We had a small group of about 4 or 5 and we met regularly for a short time, but then attendance and interest waned, and the group just sort of stopped meeting. I enjoyed going to the annual NY State Speech-Language-Hearing Association convention and met a number of people there, including Phil Schneider and others. Most of the time, however, I sat up in Plattsburgh, feeling isolated.

I moved to Western Illinois University in 1991. Macomb, IL is also a pretty isolated place. In Illinois I’ve also met a lot of great folks who are associated with the NSP—Judy Eckardt, Connie Dugan, Jim McClure, Nina Reardon, and others I’ve probably forgotten to mention. They helped to put a "face" on the NSP for me. The biggest difference between WIU and the other two universities I worked at was access to the Internet. Electronic mail and the "stuttlists" have really made a difference in my professional and personal life. The interaction on these lists has certainly helped me to grow. In retrospect, I look back at myself in the early ‘90s and before and sort of see an "angry young stutterer." I think that the Internet was a very freeing experience because I could say what I wanted and fluency wasn’t an issue. I also think I may have viewed myself as "all stutterers." Of course stuttering was what I experienced. Of course my experiences were like those of others who stutter. Of course what I said was right and what others said was wrong. My initial forays into the stutt-l list were often pretty nasty. (I think Woody Starkweather and a number of other "stutt-l veterans" can attest to that.) If someone said something that I didn’t agree with, I felt a need to go after them, put them in their place, whatever. And it was so easy to do because I could type so fluently. But usually after I sent off one of those nasty posts, I felt bad about it. Also, I started reading similar posts from other people, and I really didn’t like the tone of those posts. I started to see how different people’s experiences were. How their views of stuttering were often quite dissimilar. How the things that bothered them were so different. How their perspectives on stuttering were, in many cases, quite different from mine. And I started to try to soften things a bit. I posted less frequently. I chose my battles. I knew when to give up. I spent more time going "off-list" to have one-to-one interactions with listmembers.

What was most troubling to me about a lot of what I read on the stuttlists was the negative attitude that at least some people held toward speech-language pathologists. A lot of people had very bad feelings about the therapy that they had received. When they would write about their bad therapy experiences, they often blamed the entire profession of speech-language pathology for those experiences. Geez, I had decided to become a speech-language pathologist because I wanted to make a difference and to help people, and here I was being lumped in with those "bad" SLPs. It caused a bit of cognitive dissonance, too, because I was both a stutterer and a speech pathologist (or PWS and SLP, if we use stuttlist parlance). I frequently agreed with the concerns expressed, but still didn’t like the broad brush that many people were painting with in their posts. In many cases the anger came about because of one or two bad experiences. "I had a bad therapy experience so all SLPs are terrible people." As most of you know, there are a lot of very competent, caring SLPs out there. There are a lot of incompetent ones, as well. But we’re all in this together. We as stutterers have an obligation to make sure we get good therapy. SLPs have an obligation to admit when they are in over their heads. Perhaps we don’t do this enough. One way to determine if you are working with a competent SLP is to ask if they know about the NSP. If they don’t, you might want to look elsewhere.

I still don’t agree with a lot of what I read on the stuttlists. However, I still find them a very interesting source of information. My perspectives on stuttering are constantly being "nudged" by different things I read. I’ve met a lot of great people through the Internet. Many of those people I had never seen face-to-face until this meeting. I’d estimate that about 2/3 of the people I know in the area of stuttering, either professionals or fellow stutterers, I first met on the Internet.

Things are a lot different today than they were 25 years ago when I first read "To the Stutterer." If I may be allowed a shameless plug, there is now a new edition of that book called "Advice to Those Who Stutter" to which I have contributed a chapter. Never in my wildest dreams 25 years ago did I ever think that I would be asked to contribute a chapter to a book such as this. But Steve Hood, who I first met through the Internet and have since gotten to know quite well, recommended me as a contributor. You could say my life has come full circle. We have a lot more information and support available today than we did in 1973. We have the Internet with its LISTSERVs and web pages. We have groups like the National Stuttering Project. We have great meetings like this one, where we can meet other stutterers and find out more about them. Speech therapy is better today than it was then, as well. I wonder if my life would have been different if I’d had access to all of this when I was 20 years old or younger. But I’m too old to be second-guessing myself now. I feel very lucky to be where I am, and I wouldn’t make a whole lot of changes in my life even if I had the opportunity. The point is that whether it’s on the stuttlists, at meetings like this, at NSP group meetings, or wherever, everybody can and does have something to contribute. We’re all great people who happen to stutter. We have a lot of good insights. My words of wisdom, for what they’re worth, would be to take advantage of what others have to offer. Focus on the things that unite us, rather than the things that separate us. We’re not going to agree on everything, but even those we disagree with can provide food for thought. We should take satisfaction and happiness and strength from all the others we know, from those we have met at this convention, and from those we will meet in the future. Because we’re all in this together, and we can and do help each other in so many ways.