Take control or be controlled by stuttering — it may be THE question facing anyone who stutters. Do you let stuttering control you, or do you take action to grab control of your speech? Neither is easy, but only one has the potential for a positive long-term outcome: To take control.
For decades, I sat by and let stuttering control me. Thoughts raced through my head, wondering whether I would stutter on this word, that sound. Should I say it or find a substitute? Or should I not even talk at all? There never seemed to be a good option.
I was at the mercy of stuttering, hoping that I could make it through a word, a sentence, a thought, a conversation, a day.
And then, I realized there’s another way. You can take control.
How You Can Take Control
But how? Aren’t you always going to be under the thumb of stuttering? Isn’t the threat of stuttering always going to plague you? When a stutter arises, isn’t it always going to happen? And once you’re knee-deep into a block, don’t you just have to hold on for dear life, try to push through and hope it will soon end?
No. Stuttering doesn’t have to control you. You don’t have to be a sitting duck. You have a choice: You can take control.
How do you take control? By grabbing the reins of your speech and impacting it. Any attempt to impact your speech is an exercise in taking control. You can impact your speech in a zillion different ways.
In my case, I relearned to speak by mimicking broadcasters. This led me to develop my Breathe, Emphasize, Phrase strategy (BEP). which is really just a simplified version of how good speakers speak. I use BEP all the time and it was my initial way of taking control and impacting my speech. Then I went further, much further, turning my speech into a laboratory in which I played around with ways of taking control.
Play Around to Take Control
Let’s get down to specifics. When you’re caught in a block, you have a choice: Continue to push through the stutter, or stop the stutter in its tracks and take control.
Here’s how: If you’re stuck in a block, stop talking in mid-block, give yourself time to take a deep breath, smile or even laugh, and start the phrase over again with a fresh breath, speaking on the exhale and keeping the phrase short so you get in another full breath with the next phrase. The more full breaths you get in, the more control you take.
Play around with your speech. This is another way in which you tell your brain that you’re taking control. Emphasize words, add extreme levels of intonation, vary the length of your phrases, take thoughtful pauses, add expressive gestures, barely touch your consonants, prolong your vowels, and so on. There’s no end to the ways you can take control.
The Psychology of Taking Control
Look what you just did by taking control. You changed the entire psychology of the situation. You said to your brain, “No, I don’t have to endure this. I can take control.” This may not have much of an impact the first time, you may struggle even worse. But if you interrupt your stutter again and again, and replace it with a completely different type of speech, you’re going to feel more empowered about your speech. Eventually, you’re going to feel like you’re taking control.
Of course, this isn’t easy. Interrupting a stutter is hard enough, but you’re doing more than that: You’re stopping your stuttering cold in its tracks, then shifting gears to change the character of your speech.
Can you do that even after getting stuck in a heavy block? Can you interrupt a stutter and give yourself the time needed to take a full breath, smile, then take another fresh breath and start speaking on the exhale?
Here’s another psychological game I played: With each breath, I would imagine that I became more and more calm, more and more in control. I would literally picture the breath rising from my diaphragm and flowing out of my mouth, with the words of my phrase riding on the breath like a waterfall. I spoke phrase to phrase, waterfall to waterfall.
Sure, it was a game I made up, pure imagery, but there may be some truth to it. With more full breathing from my diaphragm — not my chest — more oxygen was flowing up to my brain, potentially clearing my thinking and calming my nervous system. It’s certainly easier to speak when you’re calm rather than when your mind is racing.
It's Your Choice
You don’t have to let stuttering torture you. There is another way. You can take control.
Will this end your stuttering? Probably not, but it will give you a sense that you’re taking control over your speech. You’re taking responsibility. You’re not a sitting duck. Taking control enables you to break the rigidity that builds up when you feel stuck in a stuttering mode.
It’s your choice. Take control or be controlled by stuttering. For decades I was controlled by stuttering. For the last decade, I chose to take control, and those have been the best years of my life.
It’s up to you. Take control.
Comments