The Protagonists -

Bill Phillips, a Master Practitioner in NLP, became intrigued by the possibility. His field of work as a Management Consultant is improvement in team communication in business, and at times, consultancy on a one-to-one basis to provide a relaxed, yet "clinical" arena for people to explore their own potential and thus make informed career choices. It might have been difficult for Bill to investigate his theories in the first instance with a child, and fortunately friends put him in touch with a suitable candidate for a preliminary investigation. Falmai Binns is a Research Chemist in her early fifties, and their partnership produced some fascinating findings which this article documents.

Falmai Binn, Falmai had stammered since very early childhood. Until she was twenty, her speech was so poor, she found difficulty in many everyday tasks such as answering the telephone, asking for fares etc. Her life was severely limited. She determined to choose a career requiring little human interaction. She loved chemistry, and hiding away in a laboratory seemed a godsend. However, whilst at University in London, aged 18, she was asked to join a research team at the Middlesex Hospital investigating stammering. Dr. Meyer of the Psychiatric Unit had identified the fact that stammerers did not always stammer, and had noticed that most stammerers sang perfectly well. He wondered if, by producing rhythmic speech, stammering would be stopped. Falmai turned out to be his star success. By wearing a hearing aid type apparatus which emitted a metronome-like beat, she was able to produce fluent speech, a bit Dalek-like at first, but ultimately, quite normal. A massive improvement in the quality of her life followed.

Sadly, although she could now teach etc., there was always the knowledge that under certain circumstances, particularly when reading aloud, the phenomenon could reappear and cause considerable distress and embarrassment. Gradually, she accepted her limitations, tailoring her life to match. Rather late on, she began to wonder if being a premature baby had induced some brain glitch, and she came to consider her condition as a true disability. The converse idea of a psychological defect was much more difficult to come to terms with, since it contained an aspect of personal failure.

She continued to be fascinated about the true nature of the impediment. Another curious characteristic she noted with the advent of answer phones, as when she accidentally re-heard a message she had recorded, she could hear that her pattern of stammering was far more severe than she had been aware, and she wondered if her own auditory monitoring was therefore faulty. This was a worrying aspect, since it meant that when she thought her speech was OK, others might be suffering!

Stammering as a Skill

Bill Phillips came to their meetings with some very clear strategies. Most important was the fundamental principle, quite contrary to generally held views, that stammering was neither a dysfunction nor a handicap. He considered that Falmai (and possibly other stammerers) had spent a great deal of her life mastering a very complex set of speaking skills. As he pointed out, even an actor would require very advanced speech skills to consistently produce a stammer. He further believed that, to change stammerers' speech towards a more "normal" pattern, further skills or beliefs might need to be added, rather than the original skills discarded. His observations as to the on/off nature of the phenomenon said to him that stammering is not necessarily a mechanical defect, and that therefore, fundamental speech education, or even speech therapy was not necessarily required. Further, the concept of a genetic fault or a brain dysfunction did not tie in, for him, with the ability of many stammerers to talk with fluency on occasions.

Applying NLP To Falmai's Changes

Bill saw the way to a possible improvement in a structured fashion. He appreciated that, since Falmai had spent many years mastering and putting on "automatic pilot" her complex art, there was little likelihood of any instant cure, despite the fact that a number of NLP procedures are capable of producing very rapid results. Furthermore, he considered that, though the onset of Falmai's stammering might have resulted from a single incident in her childhood, subsequent experiences would have produced a cumulative reinforcement, and some of these too would need investigation. Bill also recognised that each individual's stammer is unique to them, and that therefore, the discovery of a general cure was unlikely.

One important criterion to be acknowledged was that of secondary gain. This refers to underlying needs, which oblige us to maintain unwanted behaviours and habits, but which are not noticed because they are generally buried deep in our unconscious. One question was, did Falmai derive some hidden benefit from her stammer, either conscious or unconscious, which might make it difficult for her to let it go? This needed to be sourced and identified to enable her to make a true choice as to whether she really did want to lose her stammer.

There was also the question of possible limiting beliefs, and we draw parallels here with Andrew Bell's article A "New Cure" For Stammering Vol. 127 No. 2 (Summer '96) of Speaking Out. There is a growing understanding of the powerful controlling effects of beliefs on health and well being, illness and disability. Falmai needed to be confident in the real possibility of losing her stammer before any success in that direction might be gained. Basic to Bill's approach was true respect for the mastery of skills already in place, and the genuine desire to enable Falmai to change her speech if she so chose. This aspect of choice and control was a significant thread which underpinned his investigations, and which empowered them.

What Happened From Falmai's Viewpoint

The two met for 12-16 hours in total over a period of 5 months in 2 hour sessions. With hindsight, it seems the timing and length of the sessions was important. Each meeting, although stimulating, was demanding and emotionally draining for Falmai. Bill worked through the many different strands of his theory in a systematic way. Early on, he looked into the secondary gain area. Falmai discovered that the stammer provided her with the perfect excuse to limit personal interaction and gained her with the solitude she needed without causing obvious offence to others. She came to realise that she was entitled to periods of isolation without having to stammer as an excuse! Bill also comfortingly showed her that one of the commonly believed reasons given for stammering, attention seeking, was really quite alien to her nature.

Bill also focused on the fact that Falmai's stammering became worse in certain specific, often stressful, conditions. He taught her techniques to reduce her feelings of stress by focusing on what others were doing at those times. This is based on the understanding that, to feel anxiety, our conscious attention needs to be turned inward on ourselves. We cannot pay attention to our inner thoughts and feelings, and to our surroundings or other people all at the same time. Therefore, one way to not get drawn into our feelings is to skilfully pay great attention to other people. In practicing this, Falmai noticed the impossibility of achieving her inner state of anxiety which would normally have triggered her stammer. She also noticed things about other people that she had never perceived before, both finding them less threatening, and in one case, dramatically changing a relationship for the better. One key feature of the meetings was Bill's strategy of always leaving with an instruction to observe changes in a particular area, and to report on progress at the next meeting. Such positive commands created an expectation of positive results, and, pleasingly, this was always the case.

A crucial step was the real identification of the onset of stammering, and here, Bill used sophisticated NLP techniques to pinpoint the timing accurately, delving into both the conscious and the unconscious mind. A time of age 4 seemed to emerge, and this coincided with the time when reading aloud was being learned. Bill used a powerful regression technique to give Falmai an option to return to the moments prior to the onset of her stammering, and re-write the script, as it were, so that she no longer had to be uncontrollably directed down the path of being a stammerer.

A Final Breakthrough

Last of all, the two explored the odd difficulty Falmai still had with reading aloud, and here the most exciting findings came to light. She has an almost perfect visual memory, and yet had great difficulty in remembering certain number combinations, e.g. her car number plate. She also had difficulty in reading out combinations of numbers, such as a credit card number on the telephone, or even her telephone number itself. In these circumstances, she would still revert to the really bad days of her early stammer. Bill realised that memory loss was not the explanation, and in asking her to recall her car registration, noticed she looked up and to her right as she thought of it. Because people look in certain predictable directions as they either accurately remember or create images in their mind's eye, he realised she might be creating the image of her number plate in order to recall it, rather than looking in the appropriate direction for visual memory. They then discovered that for some reason, a kind of automatic reflex was being activated which created anxiety about the number, perhaps due to unconscious doubt about its accuracy, and that this anxiety probably led to the continuing stammer.

At this stage, Bill asked Falmai to hold her credit card in her left hand, and in the upper left of her field of vision, and to her astonishment, she was able to read it faultlessly out loud. One possible explanation is that he had obliged her to anchor the image in the normal location of her visual memory, and that this confirmed for her the correctness of the number and feelings of confidence about that. With this confidence, she was able to swap fluent speech for her earlier response. They speculated that somehow, at the time of learning to read, anxiety about her fluency had started a pattern of faulty use of her brain, and from then on, every experience of difficulty in reading reinforced the pattern until it was impossible to change. After this revelation, Falmai practised reading aloud, imagining the page high on her left hand side.

Epilog

Now, six months later, her speech remains amazingly improved, and a very important bonus is that, she can stammer if she feels tired, etc., but is not obliged to, because she is in control! Naturally, Falmai remains excited, and sees potential for other sufferers to benefit. Particularly, she valued gaining a thorough knowledge of the deep seated reasons for her stammer. By deconstructing the architecture supporting the stammer, it was disabled. NLP, a talking therapy perhaps, but one that is, and needs to be, tailored to each specific case, and which needs a highly skilled practitioner. It goes without saying that Falmai is indebted to Bill, and the two remain friends.


[Bill Phillips is a Management Consultant specialising in assisting people at work to improve performance through skilled co-operation, raised self esteem and developed sense of common purpose.]

© The authors.

From the Spring 1997 edition of Speaking Out

See also: NLP index page.