The Maize Maze
By Christine Hyde

On holiday, this summer, I went with my husband and my two daughters to visit one of those Maize Mazes. If you've never done it, imagine something big - very tall screens of maize stalks, miles of paths, and very carefully designed to confound all your best maze-solving strategies. Do visit one if you have the opportunity - you'll have great fun getting totally confused, frustrated, and exhausted! But you don't have to wait until then to have a very similar experience; you might recognise the same process as you live with your stammer.

We began cheerful, enthusiastic and confident that four reasonably intelligent people could solve the puzzle. They gave us a map when we went in, but it was labelled "Only to be used in an emergency!" so we didn't look at it, and we set off into the maze. Someone had a plan that sounded promising, so we followed it. After some time, we began to think we had passed this spot before. We made a plan to check this out - and demonstrated to ourselves that we were indeed walking around in circles.

Someone suggested a different strategy and we set off again, confident that this time we would succeed. But we just seemed to get more lost, and still had that feeling of walking round in circles. We got a bit cross: how could it happen that our excellent strategies could keep bringing us back to the same place? How come we weren't getting anywhere? No matter what we tried, nothing seemed to work. Two hours and several strategies later, we admitted defeat. Lost and frustrated, we turned to our map.

Now we could see clearly the layout of the maze. It wasn't immediately helpful, of course. First, we had to find a way to work out where we were on the map. We looked at the shape of the paths around us and compared them with the shapes on the map. You could have heard a pin drop. Suddenly, "I know where we are now!" shouted Lucy, seizing the map, "Follow me!" Five minutes later, we were out of the maze, eating ice-cream and reflecting about our experience.

The experience of stammering is like an unsolvable puzzle. When you are inside you can't see the wood for the trees. You can't get any sense of where you are or where you should be heading. Whatever you do, no matter how hard you try, you seem to arrive back where you started. You imagine a place somewhere, outside the puzzle, where it is possible to have a different, successful, satisfying experience of communication, but your best attempts to get there are confounded by the nature of the puzzle you live in. You can't work out how that happens. I think we need some kind of map; something to give us an overview of our experience, so that we can make sense of it, and understand where we are.

Two of my greatest heroes are Joseph Sheehan and, more recently, John Harrison. I think each succeeded in making a major contribution to our understanding of stammering and how to solve the puzzle, because they set out to make a model for themselves of their own experience. You can make a map for yourself.

I work with Transitional Analysis. TA has many models of human experience and interaction with which we can map our experience. You can adopt these models as your map, if you like. There are other ways, too. In a self-help group, for instance, you might try drawing or diagramming your own experience of stammering. You could share your models with each other, look for the similarities and suggest changes or additions to each others models. Certainly, it was helpful in that maze, to have companions to share the experience.

Happy maze-solving!

From the Autumn 2001 edition of Speaking Out

See also: Christine's article Approach - Avoidance Conflict Revisited