Flipping the switch

From a BSA Conference Call with David Friedman, California:

I've been stuttering my whole life. I developed a covert stammering pattern - I was crafty at avoiding situations and words. It became clear to me I was a situational stutterer, for example it depended who I was talking to. So I thought it's not a speaking problem but something else in my mind.

I tried some NLP techniques on my own and I got some benefit from that, so I reached out to Bob Bodenhamer, who practises Neuro-Semantics. I've been working with him now for about a year and a half. Through conversations with Bob we identified what situations I was reacting to so that I was compelled to stutter. Most of the reactions were based in childhood.

Now. it's not that I'm fluent, but I can stutter and be OK with it, and because I'm OK with it I'm tending to stutter less because I have less anxiety about stuttering. For so long my goal was fluency. I realised that the more and more I "couldn't" stutter, the more and more I tended to stutter. There was a point - I can't exactly even place when it happened - when I said, wow, it's not that I need to be fluent, I need to not care if I stutter. It's probably that one thing alone flipped the switch for me.

Bob Bodenhamer's website: www.masteringstuttering.com

See also:
BSA's NLP page
BSA conference calls

From the Winter 2010 issue of Speaking Out, page 11