1. The stuttering Self-Empowerment Programme
Five key things you need to know about stuttering in order to start to gain control over it
Paul Brocklehurst PhD.
The stuttering Self-Empowerment Programme
December 2015
In this slideshow, I will briefly introduce some of the key beliefs / understandings that we need to arrive at in order to be able to control stuttering, and, as far as possible, I will try to explain why these beliefs /understandings are important.
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2. 1
The extent to which we stutter is strongly influenced by our understandings and beliefs about speech and stuttering.
Perhaps more than anything else, the extent to which we stutter is influenced by our understandings and beliefs about speech and about stuttering. This means that, in order to bring stuttering under control, the most sensible place to start is with our understandings and beliefs. Techniques and exercises can make a difference too. However, the extent to which techniques and exercises help is largely dependent on the extent to which we understand why we are doing them and how they are intended to help. If we just follow techniques and exercises without understanding how they are meant to work, the benefits we get from them will be minimal and quite likely will not last.

3. stuttering cannot be controlled by willpower alone2
stuttering cannot be controlled by willpower alone
Many people who stutter spend years trying (unsuccessfully) to use their willpower to consciously control their speech muscles when they get stuck. Despite their lack of success, they continue to think that if they could just try a little harder, that somehow they will eventually gain that level of control. The reality however, is that when we are stuttering it is simply not possible to use our willpower to consciously control the muscle movements necessary say the sound or word that we are stuck on, and it is unhelpful to try to do so.
Even if it were theoretically possible though years of practice and hard work to develop that ability, it’s just not worth the effort. Life is too short for that!

4. 3
stuttering occurs when we attempt to use specific sounds or words in order to communicate something to a listener.
Although there are a lot of factors that contribute to the occurrence of moments of stuttering, a key thing to understand about moments of stuttering is that they only happens at times when we are trying to make a particular sound. So, for example if it didn’t matter which sound we made, we wouldn’t stutter. It is only when we want to make a particular sound that we are likely to stutter. The more precise that sound has to be, the more we are likely to stutter when we try to make it. Of course, speaking involves making particular sounds (words) and we have to make them sufficiently well (accurately) in order for them to be understood and to have the desired effect on the people we are speaking to.
However, the harder we try to speak clearly and accurately in order to get our listeners to respond positively to us, the harder it is to get the words to come out. And if we try too hard, the sounds or words simply won’t come out at all.
The good news is that in most situations listeners will still understand us even if we don’t manage to say all of the sounds we want to say. This is because in conversational settings listeners use their powers of prediction to fill in the gaps. So in most speaking situations it is not all that important to say every word clearly and accurately.

5. 4
No matter how well we speak, there is no guarantee that our communication attempts will always be successful.
People who stutter frequently harbour unrealistic beliefs about how easy it is for people who don’t stutter to communicate successfully. Consequently, they also frequently have somewhat unrealistic hopes and expectations about how successful their own communication attempts would be if they themselves were able to speak without stuttering. The reality is that, even for non-stutterers, communication is a messy business. It frequently results in misunderstandings, and non-stuttering speakers also frequently fail to elicit the responses they hope for from the people they are talking to.
Certainly if we didn’t stutter, people would understand us better and we would be a bit more successful at eliciting desired responses from the people we talk to. But no matter how well we ultimately become able to speak, we will still frequently be misunderstood and elicit responses that are not the ones we hoped for.
Importantly, the more we can moderate our hopes and expectations with regard to verbal communication, and bring them into line with the reality of what is actually possible, the more we will be satisfied with our performance. And, the more we are satisfied with our performance, the easier it will be to get words out and the more likely it will be that we will be correctly understood. So, paradoxically, accepting communication failure as OK will often increase the likelihood that communication will be successful.

6. 5
Severe stuttering is traumatizing. It is better to avoid it if at all possible.
Mild stuttering – and by that I mean stuttering that does not hold us up for a long time and does not involve the production of any extreme secondary symptoms – is fine. If we want to learn to overcome our fear of stuttering and reduce the tendency for moments of stuttering to occur, it is important that we allow ourselves to stutter mildly. However, severe stuttering is not fine. Each time we allow ourselves to stutter severely, we traumatize ourselves, and we lay down traumatic memories which will then resurface each time we find ourselves in similar speaking situations. Such memories substantially increase the frequency with which stuttering moments will arise in the future. In order to be able to overcome our fear of stuttering and in order to reduce our tendency to get stuck we need to avoid severe stuttering as much as possible. If you find yourself getting stuck and unable to move forward more or less straight away, it is better to give up and to find a different means of communicating than to allow the block to last more than a second or so. And whatever the case it is never good to resort to the use of force.
Many therapists encourage their clients to resist time pressure and to keep trying to say words they are stuck on even if it takes several seconds to do so. In this regard our online course differs substantially from other courses. We believe that if a sound or word doesn’t come out more or less straight away, it is better to either skip it altogether or to immediately find a different way of communicating it.