commentr/StutterJune 29, 2018

Content

I'm very receptive to speech therapy, but I know it's difficult to integrate strategies learned in speech therapy into real life conversations. There's good speech therapists and bad ones, like the ones who just teach you to speak incredibly slowly and monotone. Regardless, I think speech therapy is the best option. At the very least, practicing strategies, finding techniques that help you produce more fluent speech. I don't think using technology to do things for us will help. That just gives us more tools to avoid situations, lowering our confidence in those areas, building even more anxiety when we can't rely on the robot to do it for us. For me, depending on technology to perform basic tasks just because they intimidate me would seriously damage my self-esteem. Speech therapy teaches you the tools to use to produce the most fluent speech possible, and in order to get better at speaking, and get better in certain areas, you have to do things that intimidate you. Instead of having a robot make a phone call for you, do it yourself and try your best. In any case, avoidance won't help, it'll just do more damage. Accepting that you stutter, getting help for it, and getting out there and practicing strategies and/or not letting your stutter hold you back is the best thing for us to do.

Themes

Therapy & ProfessionalAnticipation & AvoidanceEmotional Experience

Subthemes

Therapy ExperiencesAvoidance & SubstitutionAnxiety & Social Judgment