Speech Therapy For Stammering That Works

I attended speech therapy on a regular basis from the ages of four and eighteen. Why? Well it was because I had, for whatever reason, developed a stammer when I was four years of age. But why did you attend speech therapy for fourteen years? It seems rather a long time, did the therapy not work for you? It was helpful to a point but it did not provide me with the real answers that I was looking for, the answers that would enable me to achieve fluency. So why did you continue to attend the therapy for fourteen years then? Well I suppose it was because there were a lack of alternative therapies available at the time.

As you have seen from the opening paragraph of this article traditional speech and language therapy did not prove to be as successful as I had hoped it would have been. In fact some of the advice that the speech therapists had given me was actually, in my opinion, quite damaging and wrong. I will never forget the day that a certain speech therapist advised me to try and come to terms with the fact that I had a stammer. In his opinion if I was able to accept the fact that I had a stammer then things would become far easier for me. Accept the fact that I had a speech impediment, are you for real? This was something that I was never going to do, I have many beliefs in life and one of them is to never accept second best. To accept the fact that I had a stammer would be to accept second best.

Then there was the time when another, different, speech therapist advised me that there was no point in dreaming of achieving fluency as there was no cure for stammering. I went home and had a good cry that day. Yes I know that boys are not supposed to cry but I just could not help it on this particular day. The next day I told my parents what the speech therapist had said and I stated to them that I did not want to continue the therapy with this negative person.

All of the above may seem a bit like doom and gloom however there is a happy ending to this article. At the age of twenty-two I was able to achieve my dream of overcoming the stammer. I had managed to formulate my own stammering cure techniques and after a year of working extremely hard at the practice side of things, the techniques became a natural part of my speech and fluency was attained.

This was all thirteen years ago and I am happy to report that there are now specialist speech therapy courses for people who stammer which are run by people who have previously had this form of speech impediment.

Steve Hill is a speech coach from the UK; he has a number of websites including:

http://www.stammering-stuttering.co.uk

http://www.stutter-cure.com