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Secondary Behaviors of Stuttering: How to Eliminate These Escape Behaviors. Your stutter is multifaceted. It encompasses those stereotypical stuttering behaviors: the sound repetitions, prolongations, speech blocks.   It also encompasses thoughts and feelings, like shame, guilt, and anxiety.   And it likely includes secondary behaviors or secondary characteristics of stuttering, the: Eye blinking  Jaw jerking  Tapping  Fist clenching  Loss of eye contact.  The list goes on.   Though it might feel like these behaviors help you get words out, they really make your stuttering pattern tense, cumbersome, painful, and full of struggle.   In this post, I will describe secondary behaviors and offer suggestions about how…

Anxiety and Stuttering I think most people who stutter agree:  We don’t stutter because we are anxious or nervous ...but stuttering may make us anxious!  In this post, I’ll outline some research about the connection between anxiety and stuttering. I’ll also share opinions of people who stutter and researchers in the field of speech language pathology.  The relationship between stuttering and anxiety  Some research suggests people who stutter have a higher rate of social anxiety (Blumgart, Tran, Craig, 2010; Kraaimaat, Vanryckeghem, Van Dam-Baggen et., al 2002) and are more likely to meet the DSM-V diagnosis of social anxiety than matched controls (Ivarich, O’brian, Jones, Block,…

Overcoming Stuttering Blocks Oh, the dreaded stuttering block.   You try so hard to get that word out, but the harder you push, the more the word gets stuck.   How do you get out of that block?   The surprising answer:  You stay in it.   In this post I will teach you how to move forward through those painful stuttering blocks, those silent stutters. What is a stuttering block? There are three main types of overt stuttering behaviors: repetitions, prolongations, and blocks.  Re-re-repetitions are, perhaps the most common. Proooooolongations, not as much. And blocks, where we push and push and push and no sound or air comes…

Finding a speech therapist to facilitate stuttering-related change. You may be trying to make stuttering-related change on your own, with internet resources as your guide. But after a while, you may seek out a professional guide to help illuminate the way, at least for a little while. Finding the right speech therapist is an important decision. How do you pick the right clinician, a clinician who understands your experience as a person who stutters, who is competent, warm, caring? In this post, I’ll first provide tips about finding local speech language pathologists who specialize in stuttering. Then, I'll list therapist…

For most of our lives, we have been trying to hide stuttering.  But what if I told you self-disclosure — or telling people that you stutter –- could make you feel more comfortable and confident?   In this post I’ll describe how to talk about stuttering and why disclosing this aspect of your personality is so powerful.  Why self-disclose stuttering? You might be wondering:  Why should I tell people I stutter? They already know; they hear me doing it!   This is why I self-disclose, or advertise, my stuttering. Early on in my stuttering journey, talking about my stuttering eased my mind about what…

Mindfulness and Stuttering. Most of us do not stutter mindfully.   When we are caught in a moment of stuttering, we hide out, escape within ourselves. What if I told you that getting to know what you do while you stutter could help you manage stuttering more effectively? In this post, I will draw parallels between mindfulness and stuttering therapy and suggest how principles of this ancient practice could help you change how you stutter.  I will also outline preliminary research about a stuttering therapy approach that explicitly incorporates mindfulness training. What is mindfulness?  Mindfulness is moment-to-moment non-judgmental awareness, cultivated by…

I think we can agree: Human beings are social creatures. Most anything, from traveling to eating out, is more enjoyable in good company.   Experiencing life as a stutterer is no different!  Enter the stuttering self-help or support group. (The terms self-help group and support group are used interchangeably in the stuttering world (Boyle, 2014).) Joining one will likely change your life!  In this post, I outline four ways support groups for stuttering have been linked to increased quality of life. Types of Stuttering Support Groups If you are an adult or teen living in the US, check out the National Stuttering Association (NSA). You…