My Struggles......cont

My desire to speak normal.

At the age of 11, I felt a desperate need to recover from stuttering in order to live a normal life and that to me was to be able to speak confidently without stuttering. My family was too poor to send me to a speech therapist and perhaps there were even no speech therapist in those days. I made up my mind to conquer this disabling disorder of stuttering, for I reasoned with myself that the stuttering would become worse to a point of no return to normal speech.

 My journey to normalcy.

I began to reason to myself that since it was fear that caused me to stutter, then if I could tame that fear, my problem would be solved. I checked out in my mind of the times I did not stutter and it turned out there were times, I did not stutter or stuttered less - when I read to myself, spoke to friends and people who are younger.

I assumed that since if I did not stutter when speaking to my friends and younger people, then if I would adopt an attitude of treating those whom I feared to speak with similar to those whom I find comfortable to speak with, then my stuttering would be more controlled. In order to remove the fear of people I feared, I decided to treat them without fear by looking at them into their eyes and to rehearse my speech in my head before I uttered. I had self-learned the technique of reframing my mental picture. When I was to speak to some people who I normally would, I would change the picture in my mind. Instead of seeing the person as threatening or to be feared, I told myself to look straight into his eyes, slow down my speech and project my voice. There were a number of words I struggled to pronounce without stuttering. So I substituted with easier words. Sometimes, I managed to speak normal, but sometimes in the midst of the conversation, I would verbally trip and stumble into stuttering again. And then I discovered something else about my stuttering, was that nearly all the time, I was conscious that I was a stutterer. Those times when I was not conscious, I performed better and nearly never stuttered. Overall, it had been a daily stage fright experience.