June 7, 2014


The following explanation about stammering is my personal opinion based on my experience and the results from the speech therapy which I have learned. Though, I could not give any scientific explanation but I will give some acceptable &  logical reasoning. 

When we are alone, we are speaking well. We are also speaking well with kids and pet animals. (I hope, normal persons also stammers while speaking with wild animals).

The reason may be, we don't have any fear while we were alone or with pet animals. In those situations, there was no secondary symptoms, our speech mechanism functioning properly and we were able to speak well.

Contrary to the belief of majority of pws that there was no problem in our speaking mechanism but only in our mind.  But I feel that our speech mechanism was able to function normally in the above situations only. But while speaking with authoritative persons, with strangers and with opposite sex, our speaking mechanism not functioning normally, but differently AT THOSE TIMES and thus we started stammering.

Due to some mild neurological problem, we were stammering from the childhood onwards. When we were kids, we were not given much importance to our stammering, because we were KIDS only, not bothering about anything else except playing, chit chatting, playing games etc. But, when we starts growing up, because of fun made by our fellow students at school, indifferent attitudes shown towards by the teachers and sometimes even our parents, brothers and sisters made us so depressed stammering fear phobia started growing gradually.

Because of this, we  were experiencing fear & shame and we were feeding this fear & shame slowly into our subconscious mind through conscious mind over the years and made believe the subconscious mind that we could not speak without stammering. When we becomes adult, this fear & shame grown to the maximum extent.

After reaching adulthood, this fear & shame immediately comes up to our minds automatically (without our awareness) whenever we want to speak, which makes our speaking mechanism not to function properly and hence we are stammering.

Though the speech mechanism is physically intact, I  believe that  the signal sent by brain may interrupt due to fear  which makes the speech mechanism not  functioning properly in those situations. Also over the years of not fully utilising our speech mechanism, its muscles became very tight and could not be able to use it easily & properly.
 It became just like a RUSTED IRON which was not used over the years.

Moreover, pws are generally shallow breathers. Whether our shallow breathing was due to faulty default system by birth itself or we MADE it as faulty one because of stammering over the years. While stammering, we were neither inhaling nor exhaling air. Instead, we stopped the breathing process completely and MADE our breathing pattern as shallow one. From the above explanation, it's obvious that before we entering into adulthood, fear and shame entered into our mind due to stammering. Because of under use of speech mechanism, the muscles got toughened. And breathing pattern became a shallow one.

Apart from the above defects, pws seldom uses head movements which is one of the important body languages, which completely relax our all parts of our body. It is not at all possible to stress or strain any part of our body while making head movements when speaking.

So, to speak well we have to address all the above faults/defect and rectify it.
 To my opinion, getting rid of fear alone would not help a pws to speak well. This we can be very well noticed, though all pws would speak fluently sometimes, but their speech may not be clear and sharp in comparison with normal speaking persons.

The speech therapy which I learned from Mr. BALASUBRAMANIAN (who went to Scotland in the year 1989 and learned from Mr. Andrew Bell) addressed all the above issues like breathing control, head movements and relaxing of speech mechanism.

I learned from a few pws that they were taught of Prolongation technique only by speech therapist which they call it as  SPEECH THERAPY, which addresses none of the above issues.

This is my opinion only. But I hope, I have given logical reasoning for the cause of our stammering. And if we are able to address all the above said issues and overcome it, we can speak well.
Those who are not interested or not believing in speech therapy, may try something else which will address all the above issues and overcome their stammering .

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