An End To Stuttering

A Real End - to stuttering.

2011-11-08T15:15:00.000-08:00

Finally, a complete end to stuttering.
This entails not dealing further with those who stutter.
Would that it were otherwise, but that is not the case.
I have tried hard, across many formats and over many years, to assist those people, but they all - to a man(or woman) - know better than me.
They like stuttering, whether they know it, or not.
That's fine.
I will not be bothering them further, with anything so reprehensible as a cure.
Blog closed :)

How I Ended My stutter

2009-01-06T08:27:00.000-08:00

People ask me often how I did it. How did I stop stuttering and start speaking.
Well...

I may not be typical, but then again I might just be.
I have a theory, that stutterers are "Golden Children".
We come into the world and are - from the start - different to most people.
We detect, early on, that the world is crazy.
We can make no sense of it.
We see adults as completely nuts. And other children as spiteful creatures that would do us harm.
We do not understand it at all, because we are not like that.

But what we are, as a group, is more sensitive, more vulnerable, than others.
Stress sets in. It builds up. We want to talk about this, but nobody understands. Nobody listens.
The need to communicate builds and builds, and we use more and more effort to try to be heard.
And to be understood.
And at some point the effort we put into trying to vocalize our needs causes our vocal cords to close.
Like a tin whistle will not whistle when blown too hard, our vocal cords are blown too hard and they stop vocalizing.

I may be wrong. Or at least only right about myself.
But consider the possibility that this may have happened to you.
You have learned, over a lifetime, that you stutter.
How in the world are you going to unlearn that?

How I did it is probably not possible for most people, but for those who are serious enough about speaking fluently, it may work for you.

You must discover yourself all over again.
Put yourself in an environment where you can do this. A seething city will not do.
Silence and solitude are necessary. A desert is ideal. Or a sunny, empty beach.
Teach yourself to meditate. This is easy. Do it alone. There is no such thing as meditating in a group, at least not for me. You must be alone.
Empty your mind and breathe.
Really breathe.
Become conscious of every breath. Do not force anything.
Sink into nothingness.

I recommend reading what must be one of the world's shortest books:
Tao Te Ching: the Stephen Mitchell translation.
Absorb it. Read it over and over. Live it. Become it.
And realize that effort used is effort wasted.
Give your vocal cords, and your entire mind and body a break.

Just stop.

After a week - or a month - of this, you will be very different from when you started.
And you will be able to speak.
It may not last, but you will know it can be done, and how it can be done, and you will be able to build on that.
A time will come when you simply forget about your desire to speak fluently, and that will be the moment that you can.

We want it too much. and that is the very thing that prevents us from getting it.
Until you understand that last sentence, you will not be fluent.

No guarantees on this: but understand: what you get out of it is directly proportional to what you put into it. Put everything you have into it, but do it without effort, or the desire for any result.

Just do it.

2009-01-05T12:02:00.000-08:00

Someone asked me if I felt afraid that my fluency might disappear again at some point.
This was my answer:

I may well stutter again, and probably will, from time to time.
But I have no fear of this. My life is my life.
Its very imperfections power my willingness to improve myself.
But fluency, whenever and for however long, is like an unexpected gift from a clear blue sky.
I love it, but know it is not mine to possess.
Like enlightenment: knowing what it is, is good enough.

2008-12-29T15:14:00.000-08:00

Speech Therapy experiences.

I have often wondered if there are any success stories out there concerning experiences with speech therapists.
I have had negligible results from my own experiences.
To wit...

Miss Metherall.
I was about ten years old. She gained my confidence and then asked me what was the absolute worst thing about being a stutterer. I told her: when kids at the children's home, where I lived, called me a "stutter-baby".
She then started calling me a "stutter-baby".
Which really didn't do a lot for my ability to trust people.

Then a rather plain old bat, when I was about twelve:
The only thing I remember about her was that she made me lie down on the floor in front of the desk where she sat and told me to relax.
I don't know whether or not she realized I could see all the way up her skirt to her stocking tops and panties.
I enjoyed that, but it did nothing for my stutter.

Long break - I was in my late 20's - when I met Jan Karlberg.
She was nice: I really liked her. But the only thing she was able to achieve was to teach me to speak like a frozen retard, freshly dug up from a glacier.
Long drawn out sounds at a rate of about three words a minute.
I decided that - as bad as my stutter was - I would rather have that, than sound retarded.

And that is about it for my adventures with therapy.
Very few stutterers seem to have had much luck with therapists.
Does anyone have any more positive outcomes to share?

2008-12-29T15:13:00.000-08:00

The Thing You Like Most...

Many stutterers seem to share something in common:
The way they see themselves.

Self-respect - for a stutterer - is as elusive, as hard to grasp and hold, as a wet mackerel.
So I tried an experiment on my wife.
She does not stutter, but even she had trouble with this:

"What is the thing you like most about yourself?"

She was unable to answer. She got more and more uncomfortable.
I answered for her, what I thought was her best point:
"You are kind".

She seemed happy enough with that, but still, not sure.

What I said I liked most about myself was:
"My Resilience".
No matter what happens and has happened to me along the way, I am still able to be as I am today: someone I genuinely like and respect.
This was not always so!

What is it about you that you like the most?

2008-12-29T15:10:00.000-08:00

Birdbrains and Rhythm.

When I was young, a favourite aunt
said "crows can see what most men can't.
Most find it hard to like a crow,
For crows knows things that men don't know".

From high above, crows can look down
on all these self-important clowns.
Crows flap and squawk and know no bounds
While men lash out and wear deep frowns.

Some men set out to wipe out crows,
Why they do this, they don't know.
They call crows names and vent their spleen,
But crows just laugh, when they're so mean.

To a crow it is a full time job,
Sidestepping the lumbering human blob.
Who rants and raves and points and shouts,
so full of rage, so full of doubt.

Crows like to spy on what goes on,
But the day is theirs when men have gone.
To plot and plan and do mischief,
To bring mens' best laid plans to grief.

Men never will dispense with crows,
Why this is so, who really knows?
But conflict is the way of men
The crow flies off, but comes back again.

The seeing-eye, the beating wing,
The bird that laughs at everything.
Misunderstood by everyone
who can not see all things as one.

Oh dear, I just remembered that
this post should be in General Chat,
But what the heck, I am a crow,
How could I know where things should go!

Easy for you to say!

2008-12-29T15:07:00.001-08:00

Many years ago, I found myself at a drunken party in the Pulp-Mill town of Ocean Falls, British Columbia, Canada.
I made some kind of announcement, or other, I forget about what…
The other drunks dutifully endured my glacially slow and tortured attempts to get the message out past my lips, and when - at great length - I had finished, one of them said:
"Easy for you to say!"

That was about the funniest thing I've ever found about stuttering. Everybody laughed - even me! But...

Stuttering is no fun.
If you stutter, you already know this.
It is one of the most insidious of handicaps, in that it can not be seen.
The listener is often left with the impression that the stutterer is either stupid, mentally subnormal, or stoned on drugs or drink.
I've often wished for ANY other handicap rather than the one I have: at least people would KNOW I had a handicap!

Stuttering has shaped my life: limiting what I might have achieved, preventing me from having any kind of ordinary existence, and setting me on a dangerous course that has led to mountains of trouble and hurt.

But even so, there has been a good side to this…

I wonder how boring and underdeveloped as a person I would now be, had I not been forced to deal with this affliction.

2008-12-29T15:04:00.002-08:00

There once was a crow in a forum

There once was a crow in a forum,
Who never intended to bore 'em.
So he kept to the point, and he shook up the joint,
Every word that he said seemed to floor 'em.

You see one day he got quite offended,
He replied in a manner quite splendid.
His intent was ignored, while his words really scored,
A direct hit, that his welcome ended.

Reviled was the crow from then on.
Every word that he said was frowned on.
He knew not what to do, he did not have a clue,
All his readers just thought him a moron.

Now it's hard for a crow to accept,
That some people could think him inept.
For a crow knows too much, for all those out of touch,
But wisdom is a secret best kept.

The crow did what crows can do best.
He peered down at them from his nest.
From a man with a gun, it is wiser to run,
Than to try to convince him he's blessed.

A crow has his own bright ideas,
Unclouded by other men's fears.
He thinks what he wishes, the man shoots but he misses,
A crow is more than he appears.

From high in the sky he can see,
All those things that a thing can be.
It is hard to expound when you're stuck on the ground,
What things look like to one that is free.

A crow doesn't think such a lot.
A crow knows what thinking does not.
“I know what I know”, really sums up a crow,
And all crows know just what they've got.

If you see a crow up in a tree,
Say a big hello to it from me.
Study it well, listen for it to tell,
How you too might end up so free.

But a forum's no place for a crow.
For most people have no wish to know.
What a crow knows inside, as his life opens wide,
Still he cares for those humans below.

He lives his life Asif it matters.
While most people stay mad as hatters.
Though he hopes things will change, still he stays out of range,
When they close in on him, then he scatters.

Consider that solitary crow.
He's so used to you down there below.
Just because he's above, does not mean he can't love,
Though to some its not easy to show.

A crow doesn't care what you think.
The worst thing merely makes him blink.
As he laughs at his life, he has no time for strife,
But by golly he kicks up a stink!

2008-12-29T15:04:00.001-08:00

There once was a man with a stutter.

There once was a man with a stutter,
Not one single word could he utter.
He was not to blame, he was perfectly sane,
Although everyone thought him a nutter.

He spent many years feeling anxious,
His life seemed so awfully thankless.
He first took to drink, but then started to think,
It might help him if maybe he drank less.

By the time he was round about thirty,
He became most exceedingly thirsty.
So to compensate he, raised a circus of fleas,
But then everyone thought he was dirty.

By the time he acquired a few wrinkles,
He had run out of squeezeable pimples.
His head in his hands, he had run out of plans,
And then everyone thought he was simple.

Deciding that he'd had enough,
His manner became rather gruff.
He would stand for no more, so he stormed out the door,
And became rather shockingly tough.

He shouted "why can I not speak?"
He shouted these words for a week.
And no-one came near, for they thought in their fear,
This man is an absolute freak.

Then on his head landed a crow,
Who asked what was it he'd like to know?
"To talk's what I wish, I'm as mute as a fish,"
"And I can't get the damn words to flow."

"Ah," said the crow, "you're like me,"
"I will show you, if you'd like to see."
So they spread both their wings, and they flew round in rings,
Then they landed on top of a tree.

"Look at those people," said crow.
They talk lots, but what do they know?
They want lots of things, but none of them have wings,
And they all move so terribly slow.

The stuttering man stopped to think,
It was years since he'd had a good drink.
Yet up in this tree, with the crow, he felt free,
Speaking words without even a blink.

"How is it I can talk to you?"
Said the crow, "Oh it's nothing so new."
"Crows can't talk at all, but still they can call,"
The man had discovered a clue!

By the time he was back on the ground,
Quite a large crowd had gathered around.
"He flew up in a tree! With a crow! Did you see?"
And from then on the man was renowned.

There once was a man with a stutter,
But nobody thought him a nutter.
Anybody can cry, but not many can fly,
To the heavens, from out of the gutter.

2008-12-29T15:01:00.000-08:00

Dysfluency 1: Who needs fluency anyway?

>An illustration of why message content, execution, organization and delivery is important:
**************************************************************************

my mistaek - when i com a this fourm - was too asuume people wanned to overcum their stuterring. yeah? gotit? silly me : ) LOL heheheheeeeee : )
so fuk it yeh. and fuk anyone who wanna help us do somefin we dson't want to do. LOL : ) hehehehehehe wait gotta turn up the fukin rap mousik LOL : ) : ) heeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeheheheeee : ) hehehehehehehheeeeee : ) fukit man nuffin gonna change me coz I am liek fukin perfict yeah? LOL : ) : ) : ) hehehehehe : ) an enywone wot finks he nose sumfin is a fukin fake man liek u no wear me comin from innit? yeah? coz we is cool man liek so fukin cool yeah? an we wanna jus smoek doep an get blastid man coz we coooooool an fuk it man no wot i mene? an fuk god an al yeah : ) : ) : ) fukim yeah : )
an liek wothefuk man me cat jus pukedup its shit al ova teh carpit yeah fukit man. : ) : ) : )
me gonna fukin give siht toenyone wot sez enyfink wot me don wana here so fuk him hes a fukin fake yeah : ) : ) : ) LOL hehehehehehehehehe : ) : ) : )
me is to coool for his siht. liek me lief sumtime it hard man an its nuffin to du wiv me innit. me im eekwal wiv fukin enyone yeah hehehheeeeeee : ) : ) : )
an i fink stuf so its true no wot i mene: ) : ) : ) hehehehehehhhhhhhhh
liek yeah thas OK to man leik so wot teh fuk yeah: ) : ) : )
i is so fukin clever man al i need noew is a fukin GF man yeah that l maek me lief pirfic man yeah.............................................. ......................
.................................................. ................................................
.................................................. ................................................
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..........is so coooool man getign me fukin foughts out liek dis imsharin shit man an i fiel beter now

2008-12-29T14:59:00.000-08:00

Doctor Who and the Daleks.

If you don't know who Dr. Who was then Google it.
If you don't know what a Dalek is, Google that too.

It occurred to me that a lot of stutterers are a lot like Daleks...
Oh boy: this is going to make me lots of new friends...

...Daleks can be described thus:
Machines that can only operate on perfectly smooth surfaces. They can not - for example - climb stairs, or get over a rock.
They are equipped with:
One eye on a rigid stalk. A huge electric gun. And a toilet plunger.
They have a three-word vocabulary: Exterminate! Annihilate! Obliterate!
And that's it. That's their whole inventory.

Doctor Who noticed these Daleks were somewhat challenged, and - in the interests of not being exterminated - entered into a debate with them.

He soon noticed that debating anything with a machine equipped with only the above was not going to get very far.

He was a smart and determined doctor. He tried various approaches:
He tried reason. No good.
He tried flattery. Nope.
He tried running. They kept after him.
He tried not responding: Difficult when he was the star of his own T.V. show.
What I never could figure out was why he never tried simply going upstairs...

What he finally did, was get himself introduced to the chief Dalek.
Who - when it came out of its machine - resembled a fried egg.
No wonder the Daleks had such a low opinion of themselves, and responded to every contact by trying to annihilate it.

The good doctor managed to convince the fried egg that it was a very nice fried egg, and there were great things in store for fried eggs everywhere, as long as they could manage to not exterminate everything first.

The fried egg lived happily ever after, thus opening the door to Doctor Who's next big challenge: The Cybermen...

Who knows why the Daleks started out as fried eggs?
It really doesn't matter.
You wouldn't even notice them now they are cured.
When was the last time you met a Dalek?

2008-12-29T14:54:00.000-08:00

Fluency 7: The Truth.

A young woman on a stuttering forum once said:
"I try not to assume people are lying".

And that is it.
That is the key to our lives. And to our broken speech.
I have been utterly bewildered by events on that forum.
I hadn't a clue what was happening or why.

People have often asked what changed for me, when I quite suddenly found that I did not stutter any more.
Bear in mind that - for me - it was a mystical experience. And that - as a whole - is what I usually focus on when I try to tell it.

But now I understand completely.
It was my decision to never again lie, or be dishonest, that healed me.
Think about that.
That was the connection that jump-started my speech.
Instant fix: lying=off. Honesty=on.

This is going to be my shortest and final Fluency post.
But these are the crown jewels.
This is all you need to know.

It has been assumed - by some - from the beginning of my posts, that I am a liar.
Believing that, people inverted everything I said and that alone was the reason that there could be no reason.

If you read my truths as lies, there is never any chance I can reason with you.
Perhaps, being liars yourselves, you are unable to see or know truth when you see it.
Liars will swear on their mother's grave, that their lies are truth.
There is no way to recognize truth if you deny its very existence.

So yes: I can say that truth is the one thing many stutterers lack.
The one thing you have in common.
You lie to the world, and you lie to yourselves.
That is the nature of your disability.

Is it any wonder that every time you either speak - or write - all that comes out is chaos?

2008-12-29T14:53:00.000-08:00

Fluency 6: The Buried Bones.

A million years ago, a mammoth was born.
He was small and defenseless.
He depended upon his mother for everything. Food, love, care, safety. Encouragement.

Being a special baby mammoth, he had qualities other baby mammoths did not have.
His world was new and unknown. He was interested in it.
So interested, that he would wander off and discover new places and experiences where his mother could not find him. He had no concept of fear.
She became annoyed. She resented having to give her attention to a baby when she could have been off getting laid by the big bull mammoths.
Every time she tracked her baby down, she would shout this at him.
“I never wanted you! You have ruined my life! You should never have been born!”

The baby mammoth was hurt. He cried but his mother did not comfort him. He wanted her to love him, but she could not. He was hungry but she didn't care, because she was so angry.

The baby mammoth, cried and shouted and threatened and smashed up anything he could find.
All the time he tried to tell his mother what he needed, and all the time she did not listen. He cried so hard it interrupted his ability to breathe. He became so emotional that he started to shake and quiver. No matter how hard he tried to reach his mother, he could not.
He began to starve, and in his fear became ever more desperate to tell his mother this.

But she was too wrapped up in herself and her own selfish needs to listen.
The baby mammoth knew this was not good, but it was all he had ever known. He accepted everything as normal. All his emotional turmoil, his erratic breathing, his twitches and his anguish were all just the way it was for him. And he continued to starve.

One day he awoke and his mother was gone. He went into a panic. Fear gripped him. He ran around, yelling and wailing, but there was nobody to hear him. Nobody was interested in what he had to say.
Nobody at all.

He wandered off, searching for food. He was weak from hunger and his reactions were slowed by his preoccupation with his plight. He didn't notice the frozen lake until it cracked open beneath his weight and swallowed him without trace.
***************************************

When we are young, we need parents to survive.
Our minds are like sponges, soaking up every new experience.
We are intelligent. We wonder about things. We have questions.
We run to our mothers to babble about it all.
Our mothers are proud of us. They love and care for us.
But not always.
Sometimes they do not care. Sometimes they do not love. Sometimes they can't be bothered to give us what we need. Sometimes they are too sick to be able to. Some are crazy. Either way, sometimes there are children who can not get what they need the most of all.
*********************************************

The man dug through the snow to the hard ground beneath. He was obsessed with the need to understand something. He didn't really know what he was looking for, so he just dug and dug and dug.
Finally his shovel hit something that was not earth nor rock.
He scraped away the soil carefully, wondering what he had found, so deeply buried, beneath layer upon layer of time gone by.
He picked up the bone and stared at it...
**********************************************

The baby mammoth bone he held was like the corpse of his own childhood.
Buried under so many other things, he had never even suspected it was there.
Tears rolled down his cheeks as he saw how it might have been, and how it was.

All his life he had stuttered without knowing why.
Nobody could help him.
Anyone who tried, he would push away, get angry at, ignore and scorn.
Certainly he would not listen to anything they said or wrote.
Never once realizing he was doing to them exactly what his own mother had done to him.
************************************************** **********

We learn some very basic things from our mothers.
Or not.
Rejection at too early an age leaves a scar so deeply buried by all that comes later, that we never even suspect it is there at all.

Nobody can offer you a cure for your stutter. But understanding how it began is a good place to begin undoing some of the damage that first caused you to stutter at all.
My story is true for me.
That is my story.

I hope it is your story too, because now you can start from the best place to relearn the art of communication.
At the beginning.

2008-12-29T14:51:00.002-08:00

Fluency 5: The Quiet Mind.

When one reads a book about a particular subject, one reads and that's that.
One does not have to agree, or disagree with what the book says.
One can read it or not read it.
Most of all one does not have the option of demolishing the author on everything in the book.

I was a stutterer too. You could say I still am, only almost nobody else notices what is left of my impediment. A slight hesitation, from time to time, a longer pause between words than is usual. But all in all: very fluent and easily understood.

How I got to be this fluent is a longer story, and judging by the way things have gone so far, a story that will never be told in the way I first set out to tell it.
But for now, I can say this:

As a severe stutterer, my mind was tight shut. I knew more about the moon than I did about myself. Everything set me off. Everything was a threat, or an insult, or some slight or other. Nothing and nobody could help me, or make contact with me, because I was unable to let them.
While simultaneously crying out for help, the chip on my shoulder was so big it blocked out the sun.

In my endless desire to be like other people, I was unable to see that I was never supposed to be like them. I was me, but I didn't know what "me" was.
And I hated them for the ease with which they could speak, while all I could do was make incoherent sounds and stretch my face into awful parodies of the image of myself I carried around inside my head.

I hated myself, but never once recognized that fact.
I hated everyone else, too, for having it so much easier than me.

My emotions were always in a rampant state of hair-trigger readiness: loaded and ready to go at the slightest thing. Anger. Sorrow, Self pity and loathing. Envy. Jealousy. Despair.
I remember myself as a friendly, pleasant child, but I wasn't like that at all.

For years I went around like this: seething with emotions too frightening to face.
Chaos reigned inside my head, and no way to turn it off.
Popular songs, advertising jingles, noisy neighbours. Noise, noise, noise...

What I needed the most was finally thrust upon me by fate.
A hurricane washed me ashore in nothing but a pair of underpants on the coast of the Sonoran Desert in Mexico. My boat and everything I owned lay disintegrated and ruined: scattered across the beach.

But what I found was peace, all around me. Silence and time to just be.
When I was not scrambling around trying to feed myself, I was asleep in the sun, or else sitting silently watching a spectacular mountain peak.

Weeks passed. With the passage of time, desires faded away. I may have been resigned to dying in that alien place. But whatever I was doing, I simply ended up giving up.

And that was what changed in me.
Putting aside all desires, something opened wide in me.
When you stop wanting the unattainable, that is when it hovers within your reach.

To cut a very long story short, after I finally walked out of there and back into the world, I could speak perfectly fluently for the next six months.
The thing is: living in modern society, one is bombarded by outside stimuli.
Emotion starts getting in the way again.
But it is never as unmanageable, once you have cleaned emotion out once.
From 100% fluent, I went to maybe 98%.
And I can live with that.

Meditation, as often as you can manage it, can only help.
The object is to empty your mind of everything.
Everything.

If you succeed, you will know it: you will wonder if you have damaged your brain, because it is just so quiet.
If you can get that far, you will be well on your way.

2008-12-29T14:51:00.001-08:00

Fluency 4: Writing for fluency.

People sometimes take issue with the way I write.

They see it is different from the way they expect it should be.

There are short sentences, with lots of space between.

This makes it easy to read, and lets each idea stand apart.

But it makes some people uncomfortable and they read all sorts of things into it which are actually not there. They often have never seen anything quite like it.

But try reading the words as if you were speaking them.

Each sentence is short, followed by a pause.

Now contrast how I write, with other posts on this forum.
Often there are no spaces, the punctuation is sparse or non-existent.
Little care is taken over the content. Things are not checked.

Delivering your message is what this forum is all about: Every time you speak, you have a message to deliver. It may be a good thing to consider how best to deliver that message, rather than just fire it from a cannon.

And most of all: the more care you take - over anything - the more it shows that you care.

2008-12-29T14:46:00.000-08:00

Fluency 3: Aikido in action.

This was a response to a series of unbelieveable attacks I was subjected to by (fellow) stutterers on a forum.
They seemed to misread and invert everything I said. Losing all track of what it was about.
I tried to calm things down, for a long time. But nothing worked:

I would like to go to sleep now, but I realized I still had something to do...

SST, JD, ADRIAN, etc...
Did I mention I am an aikido master?
You may not have realized it, but you have been aikidoed.

The harder you come in, the harder you go down.
The faster your attack, the faster you leave.
The more idiotic you try to make me look, the more you look like idiots.
The more bigoted you claim I am, the more bigoted you become.

So now we reach the final scene.
I have no wish to ruin anyone's self image.
Nor will I allow anyone to ruin mine.

I never set out to offend anyone. I was the one who was offended.
But I can see that you were offended too.
And you didn't like it any more than I did.

So I apologize for that: profoundly.

I offer a truce.
You may not like me, nor agree with my views on some things.
But it would not harm you to admit that by now, you hold some grudging respect for me.
All of you fought well and hard for your cause, as did I.

Nobody won, and nobody will.
This is not about winning.
And now it really is my bedtime

2008-12-29T14:45:00.000-08:00

Fluency 2: The Word.

When did we first become aware of getting hung up on words?

When we see a painting, do we see the individual brushstrokes?
No. We were never meant to.
We see the picture itself.
We may or may not like the picture, but it is what it is: a statement.
You can't argue with a picture.

When we get hung up on a word, the only thing that we see is the word itself.
A wall. An obstacle to be overcome.
All meaning is lost as we go into tunnel vision mode.
All we can see is that damn word, set against an ocean of chaos.

And then the never-ending succession of words that stand between us and the idea we had hoped to convey.
Somewhere along the way, the meaning is lost.
All we see are words.

The first lines of the Bible say:
"In The Beginning there was The Word.
And The Word was God."
Have you ever wondered what that meant?

What if whoever wrote that, made the first typo in the history of mankind?
How would things have turned out for the world if it had actually said:
"And The Word was Good" ?

What I see on this forum is a lot of very angry people,
pretending to be well-adjusted and "nice".
They like all the "right" things.
They hate all the "wrong" things.
Well: there is nothing wrong with being angry.
Being unable to speak like other people tends to have that effect.

But why bother trying to appear to be "nice" ?
Either you are or you are not,
but either way, if you are not, you may become so at any moment.
Appearing to be, is not the same as being.

Some years ago, Political Correctness - PC - appeared seemingly out of nowhere, and started inverting the meaning of words. For generations, words had meant what they meant. Everyone knew the meaning of words. Now we don't. Words no longer convey precise meanings. Often they mean the very opposite of what they once did.

New words have suddenly appeared that had no purpose or reason in the past.
And disturbingly, these new words are on everyone's lips, and are accorded an importance that seems a bit far-fetched to say the least.
When there is no Good, politicians make the rules. For their own dubious benefit.

The effect of this can be readily seen.
I have become very aware that no matter what I write, the message is rarely received. Not only are the words as big an issue as they have always been to stutterers, but now - in addition - each word carries an emotional trigger, that sets the reader off on some sidetrack, beautifully diverting attention away from the meaning.
The Book of Revelations has quite a lot to say about this recent phenomenon.

What I see on this forum is a Christian or two, endlessly poked at in an attempt to coax them to admit the foolishness of their beliefs and turn them into "free-thinking" clones of the atheists, who seem to need frequent affirmation that their non-belief is the right choice.
I would say being a Christian is a good start on the road to fluency.
Because it provides an infallible ally.
The value of that can not be underestimated.

I like the idea of a misnamed God being called Good.

The Hebrew Good is called Yahweh.
Yahweh = I Am.
Good created all of us in his image, so the story goes.
So we too = I Am.
People who deny the existence of Good isolate themselves from a principle that includes them in the secret of life. They can end up feeling alone and outside of things.

But "I Am" means that there IS no outside.
I Am, and It is Me. I Am It. And It is Good.
That is why - even if there were no such thing as Good - it would benefit all of us to choose to believe that there was.
Certainly it could do no harm.

We may have issues with religion: I certainly do.
But religions are man-made things.
Good existed before mankind, and will always exist.

So what is this about?
It might be true to say that stuttering is a major problem for us.
Or we would mostly not be concerned with it.
It makes sense to align ourselves with Good.
Face it: "free-thinking" along with all the other crude tools of mankind hasn't worked too well so far, has it?

I can only suggest a re-think of the proudly-held view that atheism is somehow enlightened.

And finally: may I ask you to please read the above as a whole, rather than react emotionally over individual words?

2008-12-29T14:36:00.000-08:00

Fluency 1: The Long and Winding Road.

Fluency depends upon self-esteem.
What is self-esteem? Well...
It's an overused and abused term for not being worried about how you look, sound, act or think. It is the (natural) ability to simply "be".
Most importantly, self-esteem comes from you. Nobody else can either give it to you or take it from you.

Consider a crow, for example. How does it behave?
A crow does what it does, and is what it is.
Apart from that, it is intelligent, curious, interested in imitating what it sees and hears. It practices new things until it is satisfied with them.
What it does not do is compare its performance with turtles, vacuum cleaners, or even other birds.
It just does what it does.

We can be like this. We do not have to obsess about the mega-importance of being like everybody else. Everybody else can talk. So what? They can do things you can not do. So what can you do that nobody else can do?
If you really feel the need to obsess about something, maybe try obsessing about this instead.

There is always something that you can do that nobody else can do. And this simple truth gets completely ignored by stutterers in general.
Stutterers forever compare themselves to people who can talk.
How silly is that? How doomed to failure?
Did you know that you are unique?
There is nothing like you in all the universe.
This is worth remembering.

Right now - at this point in time - you may be a stutterer.
And this may continue for quite a while.
But there is no real reason why it should always be this way.

I am going to share great secrets and revelations with you in the coming months. If I don't lose interest or get sidetracked. Or if you don't.

All you have to do is read and consider.
If you like what you see, you can try the things I suggest.
I can not guarantee that what works for me will work for you, but I can guarantee that what I will write about does work for me.

I imagine what I know can be used by you a great deal faster than it took me to discover it
So although I always make a point of claiming that this will not be either easy or quick, I may just be wrong about that.

Are you ready?
Watch this space
****************************