Saturday, March 14, 2015

Stuttering Hexagon: 6 Factors that affect your Stuttering

People who have recovered from stuttering all know that their “speech problem” is actually a constellation of problems. True they did things with their lips, tongue, vocal cords, and chest that were counterproductive to fluent speech, but that was not the main culprit. Most said they lacked self-assertiveness, they were for the most part, perfectionists. They were overly concerned about pleasing others. They saw their life, as most of us do, as a performance. They believed things about themselves that weren't true, and blocked out the many wonderful things that were true about themselves. What makes stuttering so hard to treat is that most people view it as a speech problem but stuttering is much more accurately called a system problem involving the entire person.

Stuttering Hexagon


Stuttering is really an interactive system comprised of at least six components:

  1. Physiological responses (how your body reacts to situations, tight abs, chest, tongue, lips, vocal cords.)
  2. Behaviors, 
  3. Emotions, 
  4. Perceptions, 
  5. Beliefs, 
  6. Intentions 

It’s a moment by moment interaction between these six components that will determine the severity of our stuttering blocks. As a stutterer I know this personally. Speech therapies generally focus on one or two aspects of the six components. They mostly focus on the physiological side of stuttering, trying to relax the tight muscles with breathing techniques or easy onsets. But many of the other six components go unchanged which describes why after therapy, many of us have relapses and forget the techniques that got us temporarily relief.

Until we see all six components as the gauge that determines how much or how little we stutter, we will almost always fall back to what’s comfortable, what we're used to. We are unaware that if we changed all the components of our system to positive, we wouldn't have blocks anymore. We need to constantly gauge whether we are having a plus or a minus on all six components. Picture each component as either in Red (positive) or Black(negative). The more components you envision or feel in red, or positive, the more you will speak out of your heart effortlessly without having to think about how you’re saying it or being self conscious about saying it, it will just automatically come out like how everyone else talks. Example: For myself, I know that when my emotions are negative, I have a much harder time speaking fluently and I have many more blocks, sometimes very severe. Everyone has a different type of personality. I’m an emotionally charged person at times, some call it passionate about life, so not having emotional balance sets me off. If I’m feeling positive in most of the six components I am an excellent speaker and people would never know I stutter. The more pluses we have on our six components the more fluent we will be. When we can consistently achieve and maintain pluses on all six components, we will achieve and maintain fluency. Remember too, negative thoughts or feelings on the six components (Behaviors, emotions, perceptions, beliefs, intentions, and physiological responses) causes a self-maintaining disfluency system too. So, if we are to keep the components in positive states, we need to know how to gauge whether our components are positive or negative to make sure we keep it positive, let’s look at the six points.

1. Physiological Responses


Some people have a predisposition to being overweight. They were born with a greater concentration of cellulite, or and/or a slower metabolism, a problematic thyroid. Similarly people who stutter, usually react differently to stress then people who don’t stutter. Some people jump when a car backfires and some people barely blink an eye, some people see someone getting cut in a movie and feel the other person’s pain and grimace, and other people have no such physiological reaction at all. People who stutter feel stress when they’re worried about a word, words, or situation they are about to speak in. If we could consistently keep the stress down to low levels, that would be the best single component for fluent speech. We who stutter tend to be on the “feeling other people’s pain list”, or a little more anxious about things then other’s list. Stress interrupts our fine- motor speech performance. So, the more stress we have, the more disfluency we have. Do things to reduce stress like exercise more, do stress reducing activities, doing things that build confidence in other area’s in our life so that we can keep that #1 component in red or positive.

2. Behaviors


Like in losing weight, some things are counterproductive like eating sweets, over eating, not exercising, etc. We who stutter know there are certain behaviors we do that are counterproductive to fluent speech, such as, holding our breath by tightening our abs and chest, pursing our lips, and locking the vocal cords. Focus on keeping these things at bay and you will have your second component in the positive and achieve even greater fluency.

3. Emotions


Just as in the comparison of losing weight, some people eat when they’re uncomfortable or anxious… another example how emotions drive behavior(overeating) which leads to obesity which leads to more emotion ( self-hate, embarrassment, humiliation, poor self image, etc.) which leads to more eating. This closed loop demonstrates how certain behaviors become self- perpetuating. Similarly, in the early development of chronic stuttering, most of us who stuttered as children “ bobulated”, or prolonged their vowels while trying to formulate words. I heard a recording of myself at 4 years old and in no way, shape or form did I block, but I did think about my choice of words carefully and elongated the vowel sounds as I thought my way through what I was trying to say, but I did not block. If we were told we “stuttered” and viewed ourselves as being different or less-than other kids, (as one example, in my case), being a sensitive child, the stress of that new knowledge triggered full blown blocks especially when I started speech therapy in Kindergarten . When we’re stressed about speaking in front of someone, like my speech therapist who all she did was hand me a list of words to say. I don’t remember her giving me any advice. Stress like that causes our body’s reaction to feel like it has to “force something out of our body”, the dreaded word… by building up air pressure and tightening abs, chest, and slam shut our vocal cords to build up air pressure to “expel” the word we desperate want out of our body. We view the word as a “thing” we’re forcing out instead of a simple sequence of movements and airflow. This activates the Valsalva maneuver and tricks our brain in trying to “push” our speech through a brick wall of blocked air and tight muscles used for speaking. That is what a stuttering block actually consists of, forcing feared words through a valsalva maneuver. This in turn gives us feelings that we can’t speak at the appropriate moment, in turn, this causes emotional upsets such as frustration, fear, embarrassment, helplessness, hopelessness, and dejection, which in turn can trigger more struggle which leads to more speech blocks. So we must leave negative emotions at bay when speaking, as hard as that task will be. If we are to gain yet another positive on mastering all six components to consistent and easy fluent speech, we must control our negative emotions to best extent possible.

4. Perceptions


Perceptions are what we experience in the moment and shaped by our beliefs, expectations and state of mind. For example an anorexic woman might view herself as needing to lose weight, when in fact she is as thin as a rail, but when she looks in the mirror she sees an overweight person who needs to starve herself even more. If we perceive we’re an oddity because of our sometimes dis-fluency then our self worth will diminish and we won’t see the real us in the mirror, just like the anorexic woman, we need to see the real us, perfectly able to say anything we want, for most of us there is not physical cause of our blocks, so we need to get past the idea that we can’t speak perfectly and focus on the person we will be and are already inside. We need to develop confidence in ourselves. Start reading aloud at home alone. Record yourself when you speak fluently. Keep playing it back to yourself and reminding yourself that you can speak fluently, you are hearing it with your own ears every day when you play the recording back to yourself. We get so caught up focusing on the times we do stutter, we don’t focus on the times we’re perfectly fluent ( I’m sorry to those who block hard even while speaking to themselves alone, although this is a rare occurrence, but I do believe with whispering to yourself as you read at first, then adding voice to your reading, even you can work your way out of the situation!), however, most people who stutter, do not stutter while speaking alone or reading out loud, maybe in the very beginning you may have some hesitations and some low stress blocks, but those who keep reading out loud gain much confidence and can end up reading pages fluently after a short period of time. Keep doing it until you don’t even think about stuttering anymore, the words just flow out on their own and you are relaxed. I play the piano, so I know muscle memory is extremely important when you are training your fingers to just know what to do on their own after awhile, and the muscle memories of how something feels. After time I don’t think about the keys I’m playing, my mind just plays the melody straight from my head without too much thinking about it. That is the same with stuttering. If we program our brains with exercise(reading out loud alone, or if you can’t read out loud without stuttering, whisper what you are reading, then slowly add a soft voice to it. Then, record yourself talking that way and keep hearing it over and over, especially when you speak very fluently and confidently while alone. Make sure you listen to those recordings daily.

5. Beliefs


Unlike perceptions, which can be easily modified by how we feel at the time, beliefs remain relatively constant from moment to moment. Beliefs may be deep, like you may never think you deserve to be with a good looking girl or guy for whatever reason, even if that reason is completely flawed. Some may believe that they may never be thin, or fit. We may believe that it’s wrong for us to be assertive. We may believe since we are different from other people that we don’t deserve the same things that they do. Beliefs are what we were taught to believe, and built by experiences that have repeatedly turned out a specific way. For instance a job seeker may have been turned down ten different times for a job and he then starts to believe that he is unemployable. Once we start thinking these dis-empowering thoughts, our perceptions of the world start being seen through those tinted glasses, they color the way we see the world. If we can change our beliefs about ourselves and the kind of person we are and what we truly deserve in life, that will go a long way in keeping that component positive for even greater fluency.

6. Intentions


We as humans develop behavioral programs to help us manage our daily encounters with life. These “games” we play can end up working for us or against us. For example, if we are rebellious toward authority, we may perceive their friendly request(s) as a demand, which gives us negative emotions and we find ways to undermine the person’s authority by doing things deliberately to sabotage their request. Like if the request was for a person to lose weight, they might bee-line for the refrigerator. If the request is to go to speech therapy, and if we are harboring hidden anger and rebellion, it may lead us to initiate strategies to the therapy and cause it to fail, thereby proving the authority wrong and us right! Similarly, in a speech block, our “apparent intention” is to say the word, but a powerfully equal but hidden attempt is to hold back out of fear of revealing ourselves, our imperfections, to others. When our intentions pull us in opposite directions, we experience ourselves as blocked and unable to move.

We must have positive thoughts about ourselves as people who stutter and not worry about revealing our imperfections, but to focus on all six of these components and make sure they are in a positive state will enhance our fluency rate dramatically. I’ll share more later, I hope this kind of helped someone realize the components of stuttering and that it’s not just a “speech problem”, but a whole system of six parts at least. The most important ones I addressed…

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