Stuttering

Stuttering can of course dramatically affect your life but it does not have to keep you from doing what you want! I believe that understanding your stuttering and looking at it objectively are important aspects of addressing it. Though there are many unanswered questions about why and how stuttering happens in the body, there are physical descriptions and strategies that can be useful in modifying it. These strategies involve speech techniques and mental reminders to handle disruptions as they occur. My speech therapy approach aims to help you manage your stuttering as well as you can while also managing your feelings about it, so that you can feel more control over it rather than it controlling you. Therapy activities may include the following:

• Learning about (your) stuttering

• Fluency shaping (fluency techniques)

• Reducing the strength of the stuttering moment

• Modifying the stuttering moment as it happens

• Manual therapy (in a chair or on a massage table) to reduce tension and/or calm the nervous system

• Discussing thoughts and feelings about stuttering

• Discovering your strengths as a communicator

• Using mental strategies when a stuttering moment happens

• Applying techniques and strategies in different real-life situations

• Clinical hypnosis to desensitize the stuttering or prepare you for a particular speaking situation (like counseling with your eyes closed), often done for public speakers and performers as well

Some of these activities can also be utilized to treat cluttering (short and uneven rushes of speech) and other fluency disorders, which are similar to stuttering in that they involve regularly occurring disruptions in the flow of speech.

I also am a provider of the SpeechEasy fluency device. Some people who stutter experience more fluency when wearing it. For those people, the device can serve as one of many tools to address stuttering; it is not considered to be a substitute for therapy. If you are considering the device, I provide testing to determine whether it is appropriate for you. I help you through the process of ordering, checking, using, adjusting, and maintaining the device. This device is often integrated into speech therapy sessions to maximize its effects and to coordinate with speech techniques and strategies.