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TUESDAY, DECEMBER 21, 2010 My stutter, my self: How I learned to get the words out stutter from E1


taking a handoff and running through the line of scrimmage: I’d look five or 10 words upfield, and if I sawameanword, such as “camping,” I’d stiff-armit and cut back hard in search of a less-re- sistant path, opting perhaps for something more literal: “I want to sleep in the woods this week- end.” But the strategies of substitu-


tion and circumlocution were never foolproof. The stuttering rat always lurks. When I was 14 years old, Iwanted to ask a girl to the high school dance. Unfortu- nately, her name was Kim. I sweated it out for a few days, waiting for gumption to arrive. WhenI finally calledKim’shouse, hermother answered. “Yeah hi, I was wondering if


ahhh…if ahhh…if…” I needed to bust through that


K. But all I could do was pant, breathless, as the K clung to the roof of my mouth like a cat in a tree. I breathed deeply and said at


once: “YeahhiIwaswonderingif- Kimwasthere.” “Kim?” hermother said with a


laugh. “Are you sure?” Another deep breath: “Ohyeah


I'msureKim.” WhenKimtook the phone, she


told me her mom thought it was funny that I'd forgottenwhomI’d called. I laughed along with them, of course, because it was preferable to forget the name of a girl you liked than to be thought an idiot.


A checkered past More than 3 million Ameri-


cans stutter, about 1 percent of the population. Stuttering afflicts four times as many males as females. Five percent of pre- school children stutter as a nor- mal developmental trend and outgrow it without therapy. While no single cause has been identified, stuttering is thought to result from a combination of genetics (about 60 percent of those who stutter have a family member who stutters), neuro- physiology and family dynamics, such as a legacy of high achieve- ment. Stuttering, like other enigmat- ic ailments, has a checkered past.


Top row, from left: Vice President Biden, actress Emily Blunt, former professional athlete Bo Jackson and actor James Earl Jones. Bottom row: ActressMarilynMonroe, television journalist Byron Pitts, singer Carly Simon and sports commentator BillWalton.


Beginningmore than 2,000 years ago, one ridiculous theory fol- lowed another. Aristotle, who may have stuttered, believed the stutterer’s tongue was too thick and therefore “too sluggish to keep pace with the imagination.” Galen, the Greek doctor, claimed the stutterer’s tongue was too wet; the Roman physician Celsus suggested gargling andmassages to strengthen a weak tongue. Such quackery reached its logical climax in the 19th century, when Johann Friedrich Dieffenbach, the Prussian plastic surgeon, de- cided that people stuttered be- cause their tongues were too unwieldy. In several cases he cut the organ down to size. It wasn’t until the early 20th


century that serious steps were taken to understand and treat stuttering. Therapists tended to focus on the adolescent context in which stuttering evolves. Al- bert Murphy, a speech patholo- gist atBostonUniversity,promot- ed a psychogenic theory, suggest- ing that the roots of stuttering “lie in disturbed interpersonal relationships and the stutterer’s fractured self-image.” This theory is at the heart of


“The King’s Speech.” Screenwrit- er David Seidler, a stutterer, focused on the trust-building process through which an Aus-


tralian speech therapist coaxes out of King George his earliest memories. In the breakthrough scene, the king recounts his childhood torments inflicted by his older brother, Edward, the sting of ridicule and hismistreat- ment at the hands of the royal nanny. The psychogenic theory can be


a seductive one — My parents screwed me up! — but it has largely fallen out of fashion, re- placed with techniques such as breathing exercises and delayed auditory feedback, which uses hearing-aid-like devices that play the stutterer’s speech back to him. (See sidebar.)


The return of the rat For someone who stutters, ev-


ery speech hang-up carves a little more confidence out of him, leav- ing behind an ever-deepening sinkhole of shame and self-ha- tred. A child who stutters might excel at science, be a good reader, throw a perfect spiral pass or demonstrate loyal friendship. But in his mind he only stutters, and that is all thatmatters. Every stuttering incident intensifies that feedback loop of failure in- side his head—“Everyone thinks I’m an idiot” — making the next speech attempt even more diffi- cult.


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Yet, small victories—even one


fluent sentence — can be equally emboldening, because the stut- terer is a powerful believer. “I’ll keep trying to speak,” he thinks, “because tomorrow I might just be able to.” The trick, forme, was switching that internal sound- track from: “Oh no, here we go again” to: “Breathe, relax and let it ride.” When I was 8,mymother took


me to a speech therapist. He was a bighearted, supremely patient man with whom I spent many afternoons discussing my favor- ite things: football, movies and my baseball card collection. He taught me the “airflow” tech- nique developed by Martin Schwartz, a professor at New York UniversityMedical Center. Schwartz believed that stutter-


ing is caused when the vocal cords clamp shut. To release them, the stutterer is instructed to sigh, inaudibly, just before speaking. Like a roller coaster, my speech therapist would tell me, the words get a free ride on the airflow. After a year of therapy, Iwasn’t


completely fluent, but I left with new confidence and a toolkit for dealing with my stutter. One of those tools entailed practicing fluency through imitation, whether quoting songs or spout-


ingmovie lines withmy brother. This was all about changing


the feedback loop of failure: Psy- chologically, I could slide into a different character, no longer ex- pecting to loathe the sound ofmy own voice. Physiologically, imita- tion provided new feedbacks to my breathing and voice mecha- nisms: a different pitch, a differ- ent articulation and a different rate of speaking to which I could pegmy own speech. However, just as the word-


switching technique was never foolproof, neither was imitation. When I was 16, the stuttering rat emerged again. In a class about the legal sys-


tem, I was assigned to be the prosecutor in a mock murder trial. I would have to write and deliver an opening statement. “A Few GoodMen,” a movie about a military trial, had recently been released on video. I loved theway Kevin Bacon strutted before the jury, so self-assured and confi- dent ofhis case against the defen- dants. So I practiced in his speak- ing style. I even wrote the last sentence of his monologue into my own statement. The next morning, when I


stepped to the podium, I tried to relax and breathe. But a strait- jacket of stress shutmedown; the muscles in my throat and chest


They confronted the problem, too: A sampling of prominent stutterers


choked off the air. Thanks to pure stubbornness, I persisted, block- ing on every fifth word of a 500-word speech. By the time I reached the Kevin Bacon line — “These are the facts of the case and they are undisputed” — I couldn’t move sentences with a dolly. A couple of days later, the


teacher stopped me in the hall- way and said, “Dan, I had no idea. It was so courageous of you to try.” She was a sweet woman, but it was the last thing I wanted to hear. The recognition of one’s stutter can be as humiliating as the stutter itself. I’d been found out. During college I ditched out on


a couple of class presentations and made it through a couple of others. In law school I spoke fluently before groups on several occasions but declined an offer to be in the mock trial club. During six years in journalism, including a stint at theWall Street Journal, I’ve found radio interviews to be much easier than videotaped seg- ments. I’m33now. Ibelieve I’mmostly


cured of my stutter. Yet, when I recently visited a speech thera- pist in New York and spoke with him, he disagreed. He said that nothing I had said during our meeting indicated disfluency. But when I confessed that I switch words several times per day and think quite often about my stutter, he said: “A lot of energy goes into hiding it, to hoping no one finds out. You’re thinking about it a lot.We would not call this a mark of success.” Think about it a lot? But of course. For all the empathy that can


make a good speech therapist effective, perhaps there’s one thing a non-stutterer can never understand: If we go to therapy, we think about it. Ifwedon’t go to therapy, we think about it. It’s always there. Either it defines us or we find ways of accommodat- ing it, working toward a state of peaceful coexistence, pushing on with the Kims and the Katies. health-science@washpost.com


Slater is a writer and freelance journalist living in New York. He is editor of the LongForum, aWeb site that promotes long-formjournalism.


One approach to stopping stuttering In the field of stuttering treat-


ment, it has long been known that singing, imitating other speakers, speaking in unison with others— such as by reciting the Pledge of Allegiance — or even just paying attention to background chatter at, say, a cocktail party, can all promote fluency. These concepts are the basis of


a technology called delayed audi- tory feedback, orDAF.DAF devic- es are hearing-aid-like gadgets that play the stutterer’s speech backtohim, sometimes inaslight- ly altered form, after a split-sec- ond delay.The devices,which cost about $4,000 to $5,000, have gained in popularity over the past 15 years.


John Haskell, a speech thera-


pist inNewYorkwhoworkswitha variety of DAF devices, says that while it’snot amagicpill,DAFcan beeffectiveifusedasanadjunct to more-traditional speech therapy suchas breathing exercises. “Stuttering is largely aproblem


of timing,” he said. “The signals from the brain to the vocal cords and the breathing mechanisms are off. They have to be coordinat- ed; the person has to slow down. DAFdoes this for you.” When I tried the device, it was


difficult, at first, to speak. I found that if Ididn’t slowmy speechrate drastically — waiting for the de- vice to playmy last sentence back before starting the next—Iwould


get tripped up. Haskell told me this is normal for people with no stutter or little stutter; for them, DAFtends to cause a stutter. I understood how DAF might


work formany stutterers, particu- larly people with severe cases, though it was strange to hear not only my own sentences played back but also the sentences of those aroundme. It remindedme of the way hysteria is depicted in movies:voices insidethehead.For these reasons and others, not ev- eryone is bullish on DAF, includ- ing Jane Fraser, the president of the Stuttering Foundation, who claims thatDAF is impractical for everydayuse.


—DanSlater


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Karen C. Before photo, May 2008 After photo, January 2010


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