Shaun's Page

Thanks for stopping by my page. My main message is that stuttering is not a speech problem but simply the symptom of an underlying problem.

I started stuttering when I was a little kid and I stuttered for over forty years. So at least on that score I am an experienced expert! I've been to more speech therapists than I care to remember and I've read a ton of books on stuttering. Many of the speech therapists and books helped me understand my stutter better but, at best, all they ever did was help me to cope with my stutter not solve it.

In my teenage years, I got so desperate that I even considered cutting out my tongue so that I had a 'real' reason not to speak properly, if at all. Now I am glad I didn't but I did seriously think about taking a vow of silence and never speaking again. Boarding school was hell, especially morning roll call in a private school where the response was "Sum", the Latin for "I am" so you can imagine my daily battle getting out Sssssssssssum! And the army was also a downer because the response always had to be "Sargent!" I still can remember the fear as each name was called and mine came closer ... every day dammit!

Thankfully we all eventually seem to get over our teenage hang ups and start handling life. Things happen, you get over it! Most things anyway.

By the time I was twenty I had started to develop fairly effective techniques that worked more than they didn't. And then when I was forty I discovered 'flow control' which I considered a lifesaver because it helped me get around 90% of my stutter. But 90% wasn't good enough, I wanted to be 100% fluent and not worry about it.

But here's the real bummer, that remaining 10% of stuttering was so unpredictable, it could strike at any moment, and because it was so unpredictable it defined my life. It defined so many of my choices even down to the meal I would order in a restaurant to avoid the embarrassment of stuttering. In my mind I was a stutterer whether I was stuttering or not. And I was afraid of some situations 100% of the time even if I didn't stutter ... I just never knew when the next time would happen and I'd feel like such an idiot.

All that changed when I discovered that I was focusing on the symptom not the cause. And the cause had nothing to do with speech. I didn't stutter all the time. I never stuttered when I thought, or in my dreams, or singing. In fact there were many situations when I never stuttered at all ... it was just when I was around people in certain situations that I had a problem.

My underlying issue was low self-esteem and a lack of congruency between my values and my lifestyle ... one fed the other in a vicious cycle. My stutter was also aggravated by tiredness and alcohol.

I believe that we have the solution within ourselves and that it is just a matter of digging deep.