In the previous Speaking Out, David Yates described how he rebuilt his confidence after being bullied at school. Here, he talks about life after school.

Having a stammer has made me the person I am today. I know more about communication and possibly am more accepting of other people and their own problems because of my experiences, but it certainly does not dictate my life; a stammer is part of what I am, but nothing to do with who I am.

To get to the stage where I'm comfortable meeting new people and talking to them in pubs and most other situations, I had to do a lot of soul searching around the age of 17 and 18. My own stammer was never severe, but severe enough so that it was extremely difficult to communicate effectively at some points in my life.

Communication skills do not always come easy to a person who stammers. As a child I would automatically look away from the person I was talking to - a habit that became second nature. Because of this, other communication skills failed to develop as I couldn't see what helped communication and what did not. I was about twelve, when I first remember trying to be taught about good communications skills, at least when it first started to sink in. I remember having to be taught to look up at people and hold their eye contact. This made speech easier for me, as did non verbal communication and body language, such as useful gestures to get a point across. It took quite a few years to learn these skills and even longer to apply in everyday speech but I did become a fairly good communicator, even when my stammer was worse than normal.

Surprise relapse

During my gap year before university I was in France, working on a campsite. My team were running a get-together for our customers. I had no problems with my speech at that time, and hardly anyone I was working with even realised I stammered.

My duties there were to give out drinks and generally mingle and talk to customers.

I had never been good with large social situations with people I don't know, so here I was, circling this group of people, many of which I had spoken to individually or as a family group. Suddenly, negative thoughts leaped up at me for the first time in a couple of years. It was completely unexpected as I was so confident with my speech. I could not bring myself to say anything beyond polite 'hellos' and 'are you having a good time?', 'enjoying your holiday?'

It got to the stage that I felt extremely vulnerable and almost scared. These feelings did not pass for a few days and I felt more and more alienated from my colleagues as I felt vulnerable around them because of these 'junk thoughts' I had about my speech.

I talked things through with my team leader after those few days. It helped, but it meant going deep into past experiences and emotions I did not want to think about, let alone say aloud to someone I barely knew. I knew she was very down to earth and found out she knew a little about speech and language therapy and was very interested in learning about stammering which really helped me to open up.

Getting to know myself

By getting to know, and eventually understand who I was and how I came across to other people, I had to accept and become comfortable with these things. Eventually I became content and in some ways happy with who and what I was. This gave me the confidence I needed to fully be myself, to be relaxed in public and with new people so that I could do things like give presentations, have a good time watching bands, go to clubs and, most importantly for me, meet new people.

Breaking the cycle of 'junk thoughts' can be very difficult. When you start to stammer during a conversation, especially badly, then thoughts along the lines of 'that was useless' or 'you could not have done that any worse, you're a joke' start to creep into your mind. These make you feel really bad and you get even more nervous next time you start to talk, so of course you stammer again and these thoughts creep back in and make you even more nervous. Controlling physical aspects was a lot easier for me than breaking this cycle and the stammer only improved a lot when the cycle was broken.

I suppose I have always had a fairly quiet personality. I never really thought about whether that was because of my stammer or if it was just me. Through talking with other stammerers, I am starting to think that maybe this was just my personality. People with more natural outgoing personalities I suppose are more inclined to just get on with things, from finding new friends to laughing and joking about their stammer; something I have never really been able to do.

The point I am trying to make here is that every person with a stammer is different, just as every person is different, from being shy or outgoing, or whether you let things affect you emotionally - or not. This is something that seems obvious, but there are people I have met who assume that a stammer rules that person's personality, determining who and what they are.

The future

What I learned from these experiences is that my stammer is always going to be with me, no matter how confident I am and how fluent I normally appear. I am always going to have to keep on top of my speech techniques as I never know when I may need them and, probably more importantly for me, keep in touch with and reasonably in control of my emotions and thoughts, not allow depressive junk thoughts to creep back into my life and drag me down and my speech with it. The real confidence I have now is from continually putting myself in difficult speaking situations and doing the best I can.

From the Summer 2007 issue of 'Speaking Out', pages 4-5

Previous article by David Yates: Bully boys get trapped below the belt