Stuttering: Working on Negative Beliefs and Emotions

This text-based course is a written transcript of the course, "Stuttering: Working on Negative Beliefs and Emotions", presented by Marilee Fini on December 9, 2010.

Click Here to View Supplemental Handouts

Click Here to View Activities and References

>> Amy Hansen: Welcome to today's expert seminar series entitled, "Stuttering: Working on Negative Beliefs and Emotions", presented today by Marilee Fini. Marilee is a practicing speech-language pathologist in Cleveland, Ohio running her own private practice MLF Speech Therapy. She graduated from the John Carroll University with a B.A. in Communications in 1991 and graduated from Kent State University with a M.A. in Speech Pathology in 1993. Marilee regularly speaks on the subject of stuttering throughout the U.S., often being an invited speaker for speech and language conventions as well as presenting for seminar companies, schools, hospitals and other agencies. In her workshops she sheds a unique light on the subject of stuttering since she has spent most of her life dealing with her own stuttering. So, welcome Marilee and thank you for sharing your expertise with us today.

>> Marilee Fini: Okay, it is a pleasure. My name is Marilee Fini. I always start off my presentation with hard and severe stuttering at the beginning of my talks so that I'm comfortable and you're comfortable, too. A lot of people say, "You know, how does stuttering and speech pathology go together?" And it has gone together quite well for me for these past 16 years. I consider my speech a work in progress. Certainly my speech is not perfect. It is not 100% fluent but I work on my speech in terms of eye contact, attention and most importantly fears.

Introduction

We are going to talk about primary emotions, negative beliefs, evaluation and treatment and then at the end I am going to save time for questions.

I want to first share with you a little bit of my early experiences with stuttering. I began to stutter when I was 4. I'm the youngest of four so I was extremely spoiled, hence all the pink and all the dollies in the picture. But when I became aware that I stuttered I certainly was very embarrassed and shameful. It was that thing that was there and I didn't want it to be there and it was not comfortable and it just kind of existed. In terms of speech therapy, I had speech therapy from the time I was 7 until the time I was an adult. Most of the therapy I had was centered around fluency shaping approaches - working on all of the speech while also working on breathing, easy onset, etc. All of those are good techniques for changing all of the speech rather than just the moment of stuttering. But I would learn the techniques in a clinical setting and I would go out in the real world and my stuttering and my speech would crumble. It seemed like the techniques wouldn't work. I felt really bad about that. I had a lot of pressure to be fluent. A lot of people said, "If you want to do anything with your life, you really need to get your stuttering together." But I just didn't know how. I was a complete mess. I felt like I was dying inside. You know, I felt like I was a failure because I couldn't do it. I was a smart chickadee but still I couldn't get this one thing called 'stuttering' together. I thought "bad talker" equals "bad person". So it really began to affect my self esteem.

In 1992 I joined an organization called the National Stuttering Association. The National Stuttering Association is a self help group for people that stutter and they have local chapters, so I became very involved in that. I would see people who would stutter and go up to the podium and start talking and stuttering and were effective communicators. I always thought when people who stutter go up to a podium to speak - bells would go off! I always felt like this was something that people who stutter couldn't do. You know, that is just not done. But through the NSA I saw these dynamic role models who were doing awesome things and I learned that stuttering wasn't a crime. I learned that I could do what I wanted in life.