It seems to me that negative comments and experiences have a deeper impact than positive ones. One of the ideas on the McGuire course for people who stammer is the idea of cancellation, if you have a bad experience you try and do a similar activity but with a positive outcome to override the bad one. However, I think I would need 1000 positive experiences to over ride each bad one.
Recently with my speech therapist we have done some work looking at how my speech affects how I see things. This has made me see that some fairly small negative events from the past are still affecting me today. I was teased by a few kids at school, to this day I am still terrified of talking to teenagers. The teacher in charge of special needs told me that I shouldn't take performing arts GCSE as I would fail it because of my stammer. I took it anyway and got a C, but despite having proved him wrong I still have days when I feel my stammer means I will fail at something. Someone told me people won't want to talk to you because you stammer, I still struggle to start conversations because what if I stammer and the other person then doesn't want to talk to me?
My speech therapist set me the task of finding evidence to support these assumptions. How much evidence did I find to support these assumptions? None, not a thing, I stammered people still talked to me, teenagers didn't tease me, people know that I stammer and still have casual small talk conversations with me and don't run away screaming.
Despite this I still struggle with the thought that my speech has to be perfect and if I let even one stammer get in that will be all anyone will notice. The other week I was leading the intercessions at church, I stammered a little bit not much, but I still sat down thinking that I had messed it up. Then someone came up to me after the service and said thank you, your prayers were really good. To at least one person in that congregation the words that I had said had been more important than the way that I said them.
Sometimes when I speak I will get stuck and stammer, whilst therapy and techniques might help reduce it, it will always be there. However, I need to remember that that is not the defining thing about what I am saying. It is the words that I say that are important and should be listened to, not the way that I say it.
from my LiveJournal, Jane Williams - The Wombling World of Madness
