I Have a Voice Read online

  I Have a Voice

  How to Stop Stuttering

  Bob G. Bodenhamer, DMin

  Edited by Peter Young

  Foreword to the paperback edition by

  L. Michael Hall

  Foreword by John C. Harrison

  Contents

  Title Page

  Foreword to the paperback edition by Bob G. Bodenhamer and L. Michael Hall

  Foreword by John C. Harrison

  Introduction

  Chapter One The Origins of Stuttering

  Chapter Two Learning to Think Differently

  Chapter Three Changing Points of View

  Chapter Four Stories about Stuttering

  Chapter Five Working with Stress

  Chapter Six Techniques of Change

  Appendix A Pioneers

  Appendix B A case study by Linda Rounds with Bob G. Bodenhamer

  How to contact the author

  Acknowledgments

  Bibliography

  Index

  Copyright

  Foreword to the paperback edition

  by Bob G. Bodenhamer and L. Michael Hall

  Stuttering is in the shadows of public awareness and has been for years. But no more! Now there is a movie that is bringing it forth front and center. Sure, no one dies from stuttering, and it is not pervasive: only one percent of people stutter. Yet it is a malady that has not received a great deal of attention.

  But no longer is it in the shadows. In November 2010, a movie brought stuttering to the world’s attention. The King’s Speech, a British historical drama directed by Tom Hooper and written by David Seidler made stuttering part of the public conversation. Moviegoers learned of the embarrassing pain that most People Who Stutter (PWS) suffer. But, even more than that, Lionel Logue, the speech trainer in the movie, brings into focus this shocking fact: stuttering is not about speech! It is about the “thinking” that is mostly unconscious and in “the back of the mind” of the PWS.

  Positioned in the 1930s, the movie is about the young man who became the King of England just prior to the Second World War. It reveals the painful experiences that stuttering created for him. Logue, an Australian, who became the King’s speech trainer, used techniques to enable the King to gain more control of his stuttering in ways that were quite advanced for that time. Many things in this movie give support to the theories that you will find in the pages of this book.

  So what did Logue do? Mainly and primarily he challenged the mental frames that created the stuttering. He knew that stuttering was not a problem of flawed neurology or genetics. He knew that it was a problem of the person’s attitudes and beliefs (mental frames) about stuttering. To create a good case of stuttering, there are certain belief frames a person has to adopt. The person has to believe such things as:

  Mis-speaking is a terrible, horrible, and awful experience.

  Mis-speaking means “I’m inadequate as a person.”

  Mis-speaking means “No one will like me, want to be around me, value me, love me. They will laugh at me and reject me.”

  Mis-speaking means “I have to stop myself from stuttering and pay attention to each and every word that comes out of my mouth.”

  Mis-speaking means “It’s impossible. I can’t stop it. Trying to stop it only makes it worse. I must indeed be inadequate as a human being.”

  Mis-speaking means “I cannot have a career nor can I ever marry – who would want to marry me?”

  Mis-speaking is terrifying because of the meanings given to it. It is the meanings given to stuttering that this book addresses. The King’s Speech serves as a support for the radical views contained within this work. Indeed, we believe that stuttering is a phobia of mis-speaking, with the painful feelings being located in the throat and other muscles that are involved in speaking. If you do not believe this, look up the diagnosis of a panic attack in the DSM-IV1. Does the description of a panic attack not describe exactly what you experience when you are having a speech block?

  Logue knew this as he so passionately tries to get the King to understand that stuttering is about a specific behavior, speaking, and not about who he is. Logue as much says, “Bertie, your brain isn’t broken. It is doing exactly what you instruct it to do. The problem is your mental frames about stuttering!” The mental frames listed above are the frames that create the problem. And that is why when you change those frames, the stuttering behavior changes.

  In the movie, The King’s Speech, you see Logue’s actions as he assists Bertie, the King, in changing his mental frames. We have identified six key mental frames that were driving Bertie’s stuttering:

  1. Demanding-ness – Logue challenges his frames about demanding-ness. “Bertie, call me Lionel; here we are equals.” This changes the context (which changes meaning). Later he says, “Say it to me as a friend.”

  2. Exceptions – We have found out that most every PWS has exceptions – places, times, and people – with whom and where they do not stutter. When do you not stutter? Do you stutter with your dog? Do you stutter when you are alone? Do you stutter when among trusted friends? In the movie, Logue asks, “Do you stutter when you think?” “No, of course not.” Ah, so here’s an exception! So you do know how to think or pray or talk to your dog without stuttering! So if there’s an exception, what is the difference that makes a difference in that exception? If you develop that, you’ll have developed a powerful first step to a resolution.

  3. Singing – In the movie, Logue asks Bertie to sing it. Find a tune that you know well and whatever it is that you are trying to say, sing it. “Let the sounds flow,” Logue explains. This accepts the experience and changes one element in it. The King thinks it silly, ridiculous, and refuses to do it at first, but then he finds that he can move through the blocking by using a tune and putting the words to the tune. Singing creates both rhythm and air flow, both of which aid the PWS in speaking fluently.

  4. Judgmentalism – It takes Logue a long time, but eventually the King talks about being mercilessly teased about his mis-speaking as a young boy. He was teased by his brother who put him down and who judged him because he stuttered. Important to the creation of negative meaning frames, Bertie’s father also judged him harshly without showing any mercy. This is deadly to the PWS. Logue comments:

  “You don’t need to be afraid of the things you were afraid of at five. You are your own man now.”

  What great frames! The past-is-the-past and what you feared as a five-year-old doesn’t need to be fearful now as a man. You once were controlled by others, now you are your own person. Breaking these judgment frames is critical. PWS have to master the childish fear that others will judge them for failing to be fluent.

  And yet, even more important, is that they will have to master their own self-judgments.

  The movie portrays this in a fascinating way. It occurs when Logue invites the King to read a famous text. When he does so, because he can hear himself, he is simultaneously judging himself. But when Logue turns up some music and plays it so loudly the King cannot hear himself reading, he reads the literature fluently, only he does not recognize it. And because he is so impatient, so self-critical, so non-accepting of the process, he storms out. However, he takes with him the recording that Logue has made and at a later time, late at night, he puts on the record and listens. He is amazed! The recording only recorded his voice and not the loud music – and he was reading fluently. Why? What was the difference? When he could not hear himself, he was unable to judge himself.

  5. True to your own emotions – The movie portrays another process when Logue provokes the King to anger. He notices that when the King gets angry enough to curse, at that point he does not stutter. “Do you know the ‘F’word?” he asks. At another time he “reproves” and
“commands” him regarding sitting in a chair, “You can’t sit there!” It frustrates and angers the King to be talked to that way by a commoner! Logue thus brings his ability to be fluent-while-cursing to his attention.

  What’s going on here? Bertie is frustrated and angry enough to curse – and when he curses, he is fluent! When he curses, he moves beyond the frame of caring what people may think should he stutter. Bertie is true to his emotions – to himself. This leads to fluency, because, generally speaking, PWS dismiss their emotions. Indeed, they believe that to give themselves permission to feel their emotions will result somehow in their being hurt. This belief is rooted in Bertie’s childhood experiences with his brother and his father.

  6. Focusing elsewhere – Finally there is the scene where Logue brings Bertie into his home. There is a model plane on the table in the process of being put together. When the King was a child he was not allowed to play with model planes, so Logue encourages him to play with it. As he becomes preoccupied and focuses on the plane, his speech gets more and more fluent. Ah, again, this is an experience that moves him outside of his usual frames of judgment, of disapproval, and of over-consciousness of speaking.

  Due to his lack of knowledge of the yet-to-be-discovered field of cognitive psychology, Logue was limited in what he could do to help the King. The book you now have in your hand is filled with suggestions and patterns that will assist you in changing those negative meanings that have been driving your stuttering. Remember, as with the King, when you change the meanings about stuttering, the speaking changes. And that’s the potential we wish for you to unleash!

  Notes:

  1 Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fourth Edition (DSM-IV). (2000). Washington, DC: American Psychological Association.

  Our first article on stuttering was based on basic general semantic ideas. You can find it at: http://www.masteringstuttering.com/articles/how-to-create-a-good-dose-of-stuttering/.

  Foreword

  by John C. Harrison

  One evening a while ago I received an email from my friend Professor Judith Kuster, who is webmaster for the Stuttering Home Page at Mankato State University.

  “I have a challenging little puzzle for you,” she wrote. “See if you can solve it. Here are ten numbers. Can you tell me why they’re in the order they’re in? The numbers are 8549176320.”

  There was no way I could pass up this challenge. I dropped everything and started wrestling with the puzzle. Now, I pride myself on having a mind that can grasp numbers, even if I can never get my checkbook to balance. I tried everything to make it work. I looked for hidden numerical sequences. I tried dividing numbers by other numbers. I tried multiplying them. I looked for exotic progressions. I wrestled with this conundrum on and off for the better part of two days. No luck. I just couldn’t get those numbers to unlock their secret.

  Finally, in utter frustration, I wrote back to Judy. “I give up,” said. “I need to get a good night’s sleep. Tell me the answer.”

  A little later came her reply. “They’re in alphabetical order.”

  It was so simple. Why couldn’t I think of that?

  I couldn’t think of it because I was stuck in a traditional way of approaching number puzzles. I had made certain unconscious assumptions about how the problem needed to be addressed. I did not know that I had limited my solutions. But the model within which I was working automatically ruled out non-numerical solutions.

  This same habit of thinking “inside the box” explains why for the 80 years since the birth of speech pathology, most people have not been able to solve the mystery of stuttering. Our paradigm, or model, of stuttering has forced us to look at the problem through a set of filters that have masked out relevant information and issues. In short, for 80 years, stuttering has been incorrectly characterized, and as a result, most of us have been trying to solve the wrong problem.

  I was lucky in that I never went through traditional speech therapy. So my vision was not colored by other people’s ideas of what stuttering was all about. Consequently, I ended up foraging on my own for answers, and by the age of 30, I had a different picture of stuttering than virtually anybody else I knew. I had also fully recovered, and this recovery has held for more than 35 years.

  What I discovered during my recovery process was that my stuttering was not a speech problem per se, but a problem with my experience of communicating to others. That was why I never stuttered when I was alone. I was not communicating with anyone. I also learned that my stuttering not only involved my speech, but all of me, and that included my emotions, perceptions, beliefs, intentions, and physiological responses. These elements were joined together in a spider-like web of interconnections, where a change at any point caused a change at all the other points. In short, I had to look at stuttering as an interactive, dynamic, self-sustaining system. If I wanted to achieve a lasting recovery, I had to address, not just my speech, but the entire system.

  Forces that shaped my thinking

  An important part of this system was the way I thought about stuttering and about myself. Early in the recovery process, I began to question my way of seeing things. Was the world really such a threatening place, at least on a social level? Or was I creating it that way? Why didn’t everyone tense in the presence of authorities? Why didn’t other people panic when they had to give their name, or when they had to speak on the telephone to strangers? How was I managing to frame the world in such a negative way?

  I eventually discovered that when I blocked, I did so to prevent myself from experiencing things I didn’t want to experience. But if it was I who created my speech blocks, then I needed to understand why I held myself back and blocked. What was I afraid of? What didn’t I want to see? What might happen if I let go? And how could I make my world less threatening?

  There were two books back in the early 60s that provided me with a novel way to approach these issues. Both had to do with the running of my mind.

  The first was a book called Psycho-Cybernetics by a plastic surgeon named Maxwell Maltz. Maltz makes a compelling case for the fact that your unconscious mind accomplishes whatever your conscious mind puts before it – similar to the way a technician programs a computer.

  He points out that when confronting a performance fear – such as whether you can make the two-foot putt that wins the golf tournament – if you mentally image only what you’re afraid might happen, you’ll probably miss the putt. You need to focus all your attention on the desired positive outcome.

  The problem is, my mind is also programmed to keep me safe by focusing on any imminent danger, such as the black widow spider on the ceiling or the footsteps behind me as I walk alone at night down a dark street. Not to think about the danger is counter-intuitive. Yet, I must do just that when dealing with a performance fear such as stuttering. The book offered some simple but compelling rules for how my mind worked.

  The second book, S. I. Hayakawa’s Language in Thought and Action, was a simplified presentation of general semantics, developed in the 30s by Alfred Korzybski, one of the brilliant minds of the day. General semantics looks at how our habits of thinking color our experiences, and how the structure of language itself forces us to see things in a particular way. Thanks to general semantics, I had a platform from which I could step outside my normal frames of reference and observe and reframe my day-to-day experiences, thus making my world more manageable and less stressful.

  Now fast forward 35 years. In early 2002 I received an email from Linda Rounds, a 38-year-old human resources director of a company in Indiana whom I had met over the Internet. Linda wrote to tell me that thanks to my book plus several telephone sessions with a remarkable individual named Bobby Bodenhamer, she had abruptly put an end to a lifelong stuttering problem.

  I quickly got in touch with Bob to find out more. It appeared that Bob was a practitioner and teacher of something called neuro-semantics (NS). I discovered that NS is a further development of neuro-linguistic programming (NLP)
which, in turn, is a further development of general semantics, the discipline I had found so helpful back in the 60s. Now my interest was really piqued.

  It was apparent from the first emails and later, through several phone conversations that Bob Bodenhamer and I were on the same wavelength. Although he had never stuttered himself, Bob had an intuitive understanding of issues that are central to stuttering. This is in part because neuro-semantics, which Bob teaches, addresses the very challenges that I had wrestled with when I was trying to overcome my own stuttering.

  I was especially interested in what Bob had to say because, as a person who recovered from stuttering, I have frequently been asked how I got over it. After I tell my story, people naturally ask what they can do to follow in the same path.

  Until very recently, I didn’t have much to offer when it came to the mind management aspect of stuttering. Maltz’s book is still relevant in a general way, but many people want guidance on specific steps they can take to address their blocking. And general semantics, though still valid in its precepts, also does not directly offer specific approaches and exercises on how to address the issues associated with stuttering.

  All that has changed with the publication of this book.

  A new resource

  I Have a Voice is a compendium of concepts and tools that use the principles of Neuro-Semantics to reframe the mindset that leads to speech blocks. Several groups of people will directly benefit from this book.

  Therapists and speech-language pathologists who work with those who stutter will find the various neuro-semantic processes and tools extremely helpful. As a practitioner, you’ll not only have resources for addressing the physical behaviors of your clients that are counter-productive to fluent speech, but for the first time, you’ll have tools for addressing the habits of thought that shape their negative mind state. This is a major resource that has been lacking in the therapist’s toolkit. Processes such as those for redefining self, altering states, reframing the meaning of stuttering, and remodeling behavior will now allow you to follow a multi-dimensional approach.