Well, the title says it all. A little over a month ago, I completed the intensive program at AIS (American Institute for Stuttering), it is amazing, I recommend it to everyone, and one of the biggest things I took away from it is, if I do not tackle my fear of stuttering, I will barely be able to use any of the techniques that I learned, because the fear of stuttering is stronger than the will to correct it (this was the issue for me). So now I do objectives daily, whether it be walking up to a person on the street and asking a simple question or making phone calls, or focusing on monitoring my secondary behaviors when with friends.
The past two weeks have been low fear, for me, I have been stuttering openly with little fear, disclosing with little fear, working through my stutters with relatively low fear, it felt amazing, and because of the reduced fear, I am also having reduced tension, which mean reduced secondaries, win Win WIN. Until today duh Duh DUH. I knew today would be difficult when I blocked and stuttered uncontrollably as I asked my roomate to buy another Almond Butter (She is someone I hardly block with). As a Paleo chick...almond butter is not only insanely expensive, but its one of very few foods in the house that I can eat, and she uses spoonfuls of it in her "protein shakes." This would normally be a low fear situation, but I blocked the entire time while I was trying to ask her to get a new one.
During my past few weeks of low fear speaking I would have looked at the situation and said, ok what was I feeling in that moment of the block, what was I thinking? I would have taken a step back, and examined the situation to learn from it. Instead my mind went strait to, OOOHHHH NOOOO IM STUTTERING!!!!! Which only exacerbates it, of course. This started the wall of fear, because of course if I stuttered like crazy in that encounter, I will absolutely stutter horribly in encounters with people I don't know. Well, I told myself that, and guess what happened. I did. Our sub-conscience is programmed to do whatever we tell it to, and it listened. It listened all day. Thankfully I volunteered to watch baby stutterers as AIS today, and had a chance to reprogram my thinking while there, they are always so incredibly helpful in moments like this.
I have now chosen to hop back on the forward moving bus. Since the past few weeks had gone so well, I had stopped giving myself praise for each block I worked through. I wasn't aware of how much my mind and stutter ego needs constant praise, until I stopped. I also sat down and made 10 phone calls to random restaurants in the city (a pretty low fear situation for me) asking random questions to re-instill the positive reinforcement. I also gave myself an actual pat on the back for a good pull out, or for sticking with a block, why not give yourself verbal accolades, what we do is not for the weak of heart or mind.
I still had my pity party though, don't think I didn't. I am an actress, whose emotions tend to go from 0-100 within milliseconds. But now, these emotional peaks don't last as long and aren't as traumatic, and pulling myself out of it, usually included setting an objective that I can succeed in. We have to be overly nice to ourselves in every way. I hope this reminds you to be nice to you, because as humans were usually nicer to strangers on the street, than we are to ourselves
My Group from AIS, I love them like blood.
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