The faces of stuttering

Kabhi na kabhi hum sab haklate hain! (Hindi: we all stammer some time or the other!)

(Make a statement. Send me your picture at tom dot weidig at gmail dot com! A picture and sentence on how you relate to stuttering!)

Quantum disabled

A reader is having a titanic battle with the BSA (British Stammering Association) heavyweights on whether the BSA should press for stuttering to be recognized as a disability. Here is some food for thought.

First of all, we must avoid the false dichotomy fallacy: either you are this or you are that. Disabilities come in different forms and shapes, and must importantly they continuously vary from no-one to complete. You can be 100% deaf or you can be 5% deaf. You might hear well but only a certain frequency range. You might be able to hear but not analyse sounds. So you might say that deafness is a disability IN GENERAL, and to various degrees for different people. The same with stuttering. If you just stutter slightly, your disability is minimal at best, maybe more of a handicap, a nuisance, or just a part of your speech pattern. But for a severe stutterer struggling to get out words for seconds, it must certainly be a disability for he or she cannot communicate properly and they need assistance by society if requested.

Now, we could have the case where someone stutters slightly but this slight stutter has a significant impact on life quality. Here it is not clear to me that he is disabled. He is just marginally disabled and his psychological set-up will make him as if he is significantly disabled. So the physical difficulty to produce fluent speech is critical for the extent of disability, in my opinion. This must be true because take the example of a scar in your face. For some people a big big issue, but that person is not disabled as such, but has a psychological set-up that blows the issue up.

This distinction leads me to the fluctuation in stuttering. We always look and often behave normally. Sometimes we are fluent, sometimes more fluent, and sometimes we are not. Or some very mild stutterers sometimes have severe blocks. So it feels a bit like we have a quantum leg. A disabled person might lack a leg, but we lack a leg sometimes and sometimes not! So when we have physical difficulty to speak we are disabled when we have none we are not.

Another issue is to distinguish between what I believe and how others see me. The girl at the bakery must consider me disabled as I always struggle to talk to her. People who have just heard me on a fluent day might consider me not disabled. And people who know me might consider me not disabled as such but probably with a clear handicap and are happy not to have such a handicap. Even if you think you are not disabled, others might consider you disabled and treat you accordingly!

Another aspect is the impact of the label. Yes some people or children who stutter might feel worse of when they are considered as disabled. And having the attitude of being disabled can prevent you from seeking out the best opportunities. But the doctor has to weight someone, she cannot write down a feel-good weight but the real one.

So how do I consider myself? I clearly feel disabled at times when I cannot say what I want to say and when people treat me differently. But at times I just don't feel this when I am pretty fluent or when I might stumble but I can say what I want to say. So I am quantum disabled.

(Please note that the use of quantum is a joke. I do not want anyone to take it up! :-)

Swimming crawl and stuttering

Are you a good front crawl swimmer? My crawl was so lousy when I was at school. My major difficulty was breathing, especially alternating breathing from one side to the other. I constantly choked, and my movements were terrible. Even if I tried to concentrate hard on not choking and relaxing, I would still have this instinctive reaction, which made me gasp for air and in turn would completely get me out of control. But on the other hand, my breast and back stroke and diving longer distances were fine.

Only slowly did I learn to control my breathing. It took me months, but now I do not have this chocking instinctive reaction. And I even joined the swimming club, and train twice a week. My crawl technique is still far from perfect, but my breathing is perfectly fine now. No more gasps, no more struggle. And most importantly, I am more in control to focus on my techniques.

There is absolutely nothing wrong with my brain with respect to breathing while swimming crawl, but I learned to associate breathing in crawl with the sensation of running out of air and drowning. The more I tried to control my breathing, the worse it got. I got rid of this association by de-conditioning my body. It had to learn: No, you are not going to drown if you have no air for 2-3 seconds. The process took so long because I did not do it systematically, it was deeply ingrained, and I had to focus on swimming.

So why I am telling you this? Stuttering might well be similar with one big difference: there is something wrong with my brain. The moment the brain realizes a block in speech flow, it kicks off instinctive reactions as it has learnt to associate those moments with panic, fear, embarrassment, and so on. And we loose control. Unlike with swimming, those moments are not only learned by association, but can also be due to a low-capacity speech system which delays speech initiation. As I wrote before, we stutter because our brain or we expect to stutter or because the speech system can momentarily not cope due to a higher demand to capacity.

That's why unlike with swimming, we cannot easily unlearn because our brain is constantly creating mini-blocks. Think of the recovering alcoholic been given a glass of beer each week or the overweight person having to eat chocolate every week in order to test their resistance. Or, just imagine I had to unlearn the association breathing-in-crawl to choking if something from time to time creates chocking randomly in me.