Ha! It may have worked for a rare few, but it certainly did NOT work for me. "Control" your stuttering and you will be fluent. That was exactly my teenage therapy in the 1950's. To be fair, not ALL SLPs believed that, but very few of them really knew how to work below the waterline anyway, so they continued to work on the stuttering that they could actually hear.Īnd I can certainly vouch for that. The theory was that if you could "control" the stuttering, the emotional baggage would go away by itself. In 1970 Joe Sheehan made a statement in a book he wrote * which said, "Stuttering is like an iceberg, with only a small part above the waterline and a much bigger part below." Up to that time, most mainline speech-language pathologists, SLPs, were treating only the part above the waterline, the actual stuttering that you can hear, and pretty much ignoring the massive amounts of emotional baggage below the waterline. And only recently (say we confidently) have we begun to grasp some of the "real truths" about stuttering. Slow him down!" (We're making progress, but that's still not good enough.) For an analogy to work, it's got to decently represent the truth in the complex situation. Cut it off!" (Still wow!) "He thinks faster than he can talk. "The gods cursed him! Kill him!" (Wow!) "His tongue is too long. And every civilization since that time has had its own analogy of stuttering. There is even an Egyptian hieroglyphic for stuttering. Stuttering has been with us since ancient times. Simple problems require only simple solutions. If you run out of gas in your car, go fill it up! If you stutter, take this pink pill. If you have a cold, drink plenty of fluids and get some rest. Is stuttering complicated? You bet! If it was simple, we wouldn't even be talking about it now. So understanding something really complicated can often start with a good analogy. If you understand the basic concept, you can get a decent grasp of the real issue. "The brain is like a computer." "A billion dollars is like a stack of one hundred dollar bills 58 miles high." Jesus' parable of The Good Samaritan is also like an analogy. Done right, they make complicated things more understandable. Russ was the NSA national Member of the Year in 2000 and has a personal home page at The Iceberg Analogy of Stuttering He is immediate past president of the Dallas Chapter of the NSA. He has had great success in Toastmasters, winning the Southwestern United States Regional Humorous Speech Contest in 1996, and recently attaining the rank of DTM, a Distinguished Toastmaster, the highest rank in Toastmasters International. He lives in Dallas, Texas, and joined the National Stuttering Project (now the National Stuttering Association) in 1985 and Toastmasters in 1988. About the presenters: Russ Hicks has stuttered significantly all his life.
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