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Effective Strategies to Help People Who Stutter
“I bet you can’t stutter better than me!”
It’s hard to imagine what it would be like to have your communication skills halted. I don’t want to, but I can imagine a physical injury that prevented me from moving the way that I do, but imagining the fluent flow of words out of my mouth is really hard to do.
When you study to become a speech and language therapist, you are asked to go into a situation and stutter purposefully. The point being that you can have a sliver of the experience that a person who stutters would have on a regular basis. My experience was to try and stutter while making a purchase in the cafeteria of the college where I studied.
The anxiety of the situation is still palpable to me.
What will I say? What will happen when I stutter?
Of course, there were some inverse thoughts too- what will happen if I don’t stutter “right?” I might seem inauthentic- imagine if the cashier thinks I am trying to make fun of people who stutter- that would be terrible!
