I developed a stutter or as some people call it a stammer in childhood. I have spoken to my family regarding this and they have confirmed that I developed it when I was a young boy.

Despite regular speech therapy over the next fourteen years my stutter became worse. I remember quite clearly the fear of having to read out from a book in class. Walking into the classroom, for example an English lesson, I would see that there was a book on each desk. I would start to panic straight away believing the teacher would make me read a paragraph. Just waiting my turn, knowing that it would result in yet another one of those stuttering moments would be torture.

Socialising with friends was not exactly easy for me either. Most people look forward to their Friday or Saturday night outs with their mates. For me though this was not the case, I would be counting down the days as the week went on.

My worst area of speech was using the telephone. I certainly had a phobia to the phone and was quite lucky as my father would make a lot of my calls for me. Some people may say that this was not exactly helping me in the long run. This may be correct and I was very grateful at the time.

After leaving school, I started to attend interviews to try to find employment including a very bad one at a business cost cutting company. I would normally stutter more when under pressure or when meeting new people and both of these situations are prevalent in an interview situation. I would normally arrive at the interview very tired after a lack of sleep through the stress of it all and I have to say found it very difficult to convince any employer to take me on.

As you can no doubt imagine I was eager to find a way of stopping stuttering and I did eventually attain fluency after purchasing a seventy minute self-help stuttering therapy DVD from the UK. I now live happy and successful life and as a career I now I work for a DVD authoring company.

This was my history of having a stutter and as you can see it was to have a happy ending - stuttering can be overcome with hard work and dedication.

 

 

Tags: attain fluency, stuttering, speech, Health, stop stuttering

Are you one of the many people who suffer with the speech impediment known as stuttering or stammering? Does your stutter/stammer cause you to become very frustrated at times? Have you attended speech therapy in the past in the hope that it would help improve your speech? I am a person who has overcome a stutter and I now help other people to achieve fluency. In this article, I write about the frustrations and emotions that people who stutter have to deal with.

When I had a stutter, it created many different forms of emotions within me. The stammer was not exactly something that I was proud of; this is why I was less than eager to discuss it with other people. My family, especially my parents, even to this day are unaware of most of the difficulties that stuttering caused me, during my time at school and in my late teens. Even when I had a really bad day at school, I would not talk about what had happened with my parents. I would instead just go to my bedroom and attempt to forget it.

I also felt quite sorry for myself. I feel that I am a good human being; I am kind, I am honest, I am loyal, I am friendly and I am caring - I could therefore not understand why I had to have this most frustrating of speech impediments. There were many people in my class who in my opinion deserved to have the stutter much more than I did, however in truth I would not wish a stutter on anybody.

I was a person who felt like a second class citizen due to the fact that I had this speech impediment. I was not able to socialise with the ease as what everybody else seemed to, and had many traumatic experiences in the classroom when attempting to read out of a book for example.

I was, at times, able to speak as fluently as the next man, despite the fact that I had this annoying stammering problem. I found it difficult to comprehend as to why I could speak fluently to some people but not to others. This caused me many frustrations.

When I was about sixteen, I started to drink alcohol. This helped my speech in a massive way as I was able to speak fluently when I was under the influence of alcohol. This showed me that it was possible to "stop stuttring".

Speech therapists and negative national associations, have for years attempted to convince me to accept my stutter and have told me that there is no cure for stuttering. How can this be right, if I was constantly drunk, I would be fluent, there is a cure in itself. Of course it is not right or healthy to be constantly drunk but I am sure you know what I mean.

There were certain speaking situations that were especially difficult for me to handle during the period of my life when I had the stammer. Making and answering telephone calls was especially hard for me. I look back now and can not believe that I coped with working in an office environment for six years, at a time when I had the stutter. I remember traveling to work feeling sick in my stomach through the stress and fear.

Ordering drinks and food at the bar, introducing people to each other, attending meetings and job interviews were other aspects of my life which were made all that more harder by my inability to talk fluently.

My advice to people who have a stuttering problem is to not give up, believe in yourself and your own ability to one day achieve fluency. Do not listen to negative people who try to convince you that there is no cure for stuttering. Most of the people who say this to you will have never had a stutter and will have no idea how our brains work.

Tags: stuttering, talk fluently, Health, stuttering problem, stutter, achieve fluency, cure for stuttering