Getting past my Stammer (25 or so years on)

Getting past my Stammer (25 or so years on) **Note there are references to medications in this: they are certainly not an endorsement, far from it.** Ok so I joined this sub and spent a few days reading through and wanted to share my experience. I'm mid 50s now and stammered really strongly up in to my mid to late 20s. I now work in an IT field and spend all day every day on the phone using very exact words to mass audiences of the great and the good suited etc and hardly ever think about my stammer. I still have it, that is worth noting but now I manage it. It comes out, I cope. Most of the time it is people who 'don't' stammer who have more issues with public speaking than I do. I've been through all the experiences I see repeated in your posts, all the life limiting and shame inducing events, the limited opportunities, the kooky cures, the poor advice, the loneliness of public speaking, the saying idiotic things that you didn't want to say because its the only thing that will come out, etc, etc, and survived them. Not in any way unscathed of course but still survived. I think it is worth sharing that there is survival and although the light and the end of the tunnel is almost always a train it generally takes you somewhere new when it hits you. Being plastered across the front of it is one way to get onboard. I became aware that I stammered thanks to other children around the age of seven, before that I hadn't known. Kids are cruel, I was an academic boy with what would now be recognised as a mild case of ASD growing up in a struggling working class area. I was also good at sports and the combination of stammer, environment and the late 70s meant I spent quite a lot of my childhood fighting either other kids or an establishment that wasn't prepared for the challenges someone like me presented. There was definitely a full on rebellion phase. For a while I was the poster child for black sheep of the family, full of issues and rage brought on by not being able to achieve an exit from the boundaries of speech difficulties. A lot of it was classic avoidance. I'll credit all the academics who blather on about that in stammerers with being accurate about that aspect of stammering. We often avoid and so desensitization does play a part in recovery but in my opinion and more about this later basing a therapy on desensitization is like getting over the trauma of a rape by being gangbanged on stage at a political rally. The mental side of stammering is important but it is usually a byproduct of the stammer not the cause. It only becomes that after we've learnt from others that we stammer and experienced the reactions of those others. Anyway, with that said how did I get from a crushing, can't say my name stammer to a guy who spends all day most days on tech conf calls with a need to talk all the time? There were two things and whilst they are related the second is more important than the supposed and dubious magic bullet of the first. 1) At about 26 I had reached an absolute low point of dead end jobs, poor pay and an inability to change anything because of speech. I'd been in and out of speech therapy all the way up to this point and it was having more negative outcomes than positive ones. I was anyway clinically depressed although I wouldn't have initially known it if you'd asked me, but it was dawning on me. I watched a documentary on phobias and recognised that all my learned sensitivities and avoidances related to speech were essentially now phobia driven but not the root cause of stammering itself. They were just like adding heat to a weather system. Note to the desensitization therapists you seem to never have got this fact properly or if you had then you'd ignored it because you didn't understand the medical reality and were really just English majors in a care industry. I also saw that there was some treatment of phobias with SSRIs. Lucky me I had both Phobias and depression. Jackpot. I went to a doctor, got him to prescribe paroxetine ostensively for the depression and about 3 weeks later was chemically finding it very hard to stammer in the way I previously had. Not that I didn't stammer I just lost the anticipatory and shame based aspects of my stammer. Now I'm aware that this is widely reported and that it doesn't work for all people, has awful side effects, and frankly it was a fucking horrible drug however it opened the gateway for me to look at the fact that all children seem to have proto stammers when young (listen to them going round and round) but stammering that carries on is often based on the reaction we have ourselves when our ability to voice the sounds of language don't gel as quickly as our peer groups which is why stammering becomes a fixed problem at around that 6-7 age. Pretty sure there is little that most of us don't know there and I'm not trying to say it's a revelation, but at the time it was to me. 2) I talked to my doctor about this and how I could see my stammer as two distinct things, a learned phobic reaction and a physical failure to create correct shapes and positions for sounds. Lucky for me he engaged with this and paired me up with a speech therapist who did not deal with your average stammerer but instead rebuilt speech for stroke victims. And this is where it all changes. Here I was, chemically unable to be bothered by pretty much anything, you could have dropped a bomb on me and I'd have shrugged at this point whilst learning for the first time in my life how to consciously make the sounds that constitute speech that everyone else had no issue with after preschool. It took about 6 months and then I started weaning myself off the horrid drug and in to normal life. I stammered. But when I did for the first time in my life I knew why and how to work around it. From that point to this I've been working my way slowly and carefully through every speech problem from that standpoint. I stammered because not only was I unaware subconciously of how sounds were made but also conciously so I couldn't pull myself out of the issue and panic/shame etc etc was eventually a learned response. So back to now: sometimes its tough, waiting on a conference call for your turn to say your name and role when there are 20 other people to speak before you and you are going alphabetically with the cliff of needing to turn your mic on and respond at exactly the correct moment is still an anticipatory touch point. But I get through it and more importantly a couple of decades on I have been able to use that new found ability to speak to get in to the kind of role where I am surrounded by people that are clever enough to respect other people for their skills and I am acknowledged for mine. I don't hide that I might stammer and people will wait when they need your input. Another thing to note is that quite a few countries I've visited have very difficult sounds in their languages and many, many children struggle to make them when they are young. There is a fairly large amount of speech therapists in some places that are dedicated to teaching children to make these sounds before they enter school because the standardization of speech is important to their language. Food for thought because if I had seen this type of therapist at the age of 6 or 7 I may have never had the negative experiences as a long term stammer that I did. I would have got all the way through without the need for the drug related phase 1 of this story to deaL with the depressive aftermath of what often passes for speech therapy. If I was doing it today with what I now know I would definitely not believe that was a required aspect, it's really a negative accidently leading to a positive for one individual not a path for others. It's not necessary or advised to repeat that part of my story to tread the same path for fluency. Anyway I hope that helps some people who are feeling like it is hopeless especially if you are well in to adulthood as I was. It isn't. It really isn't. Attack the cause, not the symptom.