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Student stories

As an actor and financial journalist, Simon Boughey earns his living through his speech. Simon is in his 40’s, lives in Islington and has stammered since early childhood.

In the 1990’s he attended a speech therapy course in New York where he learnt a new technique known as vocal fold management, now taught at City Lit. This tool gave him much greater control over his speech, but he was still struggling in some situations.

It was a City Lit speech therapy course that changed his entire view of stammering. “For years I looked at fluency as the Holy Grail – my stammer was something I had to conquer. City Lit has given me a new way. I now see stammering as something which is a part of me – a part with which I am making my peace. This has been truly liberating”.

Moving towards fluency and self-confidence – an overseas student’s story

I come from Qatar in the Middle East and have been stammering since I was a child. I have always been looking for ways to improve my fluency and self-confidence. I have recently been promoted to the position of Marketing Manager in my company and due to the nature of my job, have to make presentations in public and at conferences.

I was identified as a high flyer within my organisation and therefore encouraged by senior management to look for therapy to work on reducing my stammering. After looking for a therapy course around the globe, I joined the City Lit course ‘Stammering therapy: an integrated approach.’

My attitude towards therapy and work on my speech has significantly and totally changed since joining the City Lit course.

The first steps along this great journey that has changed and will continue to change my life were to start accepting that I stammer and that I needed help.

After the course my attitude of ‘I don’t want to talk about my stammering or I don’t want to work on it’ has positively changed to ‘I will voluntarily talk and be very open about my stammering with other people and I will make use of every opportunity to speak and practise using the stammering management techniques and vocal fold management that I have learned during the course’.

Since the course I have managed to improve my fluency significantly and I’m now able to manage my stammering moments much more easily and effectively when making presentations.

Ali Al-Kaabi, April 2009


Speech therapy evening class at City Lit

I remember arriving at the first session of my Stage One Stammering Therapy course on a cold and dark January evening and being a little apprehensive about what was going to happen. I’d had speech therapy before about four or five years previously, and while it had been useful at the time, it hadn’t really taught me any techniques that I could use when the actual therapy came to an end. I hoped that this course would be different, but I was wary of being too optimistic about being “cured”.

I was also mildly concerned about the other people on the course. The only speech therapy that I had had previously had been on a one-to-one basis, and while I thought that being in a group would be interesting, I wasn’t sure whether it would help in terms of self-consciousness, since I have always had trouble in being open about my stammer with complete strangers.

Fortunately, both of these initial fears proved completely unfounded. The therapy is entirely based on techniques that can be applied in the outside world (to whatever extent you as a stammerer feel confident), and has given me lots of ideas for how to adapt my stammer in the outside world. The group dynamic also proved to be one of the best points of the therapy, since it is easy to become self-absorbed as a stammerer and to forget that there are others who have had the same experiences, and not to talk to people about it through embarrassment and a feeling that it is your problem and something you have to face alone.

For me, the main thrust of the therapy was the idea of desensitization and the empowerment that comes through that. The idea is, essentially, that stammering is neither a good nor a bad thing but just a different pattern of speech from what is usually heard, and that it is by being sensitive about this different speech pattern that the stammering behaviours become engrained in us. These stammering behaviours are generally classified as “avoidance” behaviours and are the things that we try to do in order to not stammer and to adhere to some “normal” speech pattern.

I found this approach extremely fruitful, since I am a strong believer in the power of positive thought and being able to change how you feel by changing your approach to an issue or problem. The work on avoidance reduction was a real eye-opener to me, as I had not realised that a lot of what I usually said and how I acted was simply the avoidance of stammering, and that if it was removed it led to a much smoother and easier-sounding speech pattern. I had previously thought that any way of masking the stammering had to be a good thing, thinking more about what I perceived to be good for the listener than what was good for me and hoping that as a by-product I would discover a fail-safe way of speaking without a stammer.

What I discovered was that, as the therapy had said, by trying to avoid stammering I was making myself more afraid of it and that this made me more likely to stammer more. I would say that this was the most important realisation of the whole course, and that you can only really progress on it if you accept that stammering is not an inherently bad thing, it is just a different thing. I cannot claim to have fully accepted that, but I believe that I have done so sufficiently and that had I not there would have been no progress made at all.

Once desensitization and avoidance reduction had been introduced (there is no natural end to these processes – you have to continue practising them or you risk lapsing back into the bad habits that you have been trying to avoid) we then moved on to practical ways of adjusting the stammering speech pattern so that it both feels and sounds more fluent. I found this the most challenging aspect of the therapy, since it was the one that required me to start doing new things rather than to stop doing old things. It was also the part of therapy that I felt was the crux of the whole matter (speaking more fluently) and the one that I was the most afraid of failing at. I think because of this I was unable to commit fully to it during therapy, but the techniques that I learned have become the main things that I work with now that I am not having therapy and am working on it on my own.

I am very glad that I took part in the course, and I think that I now regard my stammer in a much healthier and more positive way. You should not approach the course expecting it to cure your stammer, but to provide you with the tools to make you more proficient at adapting the way you stammer. It has not been easy since the end of the course to continue using the techniques that were learned, which is why I am taking a Stage 2 Course to consolidate what I have learned, but I am very grateful for the way that it has changed how I view myself as a stammerer and how I should tackle any negative perceptions of stammering. The course does, however, stress that it is not a quick cure and that the process can be a long one which requires a lot of commitment from the person taking part. I think that this course is the perfect start to that process as it equips you with all of the necessary tools while also teaching you enough that you can begin to see some immediate results, and I cannot recommend it strongly enough.

Adam Lecznar, 2008

My experiences of stammering therapy at City Lit

I have stammered since just after I started school and fluency was a particular problem for me in my early years, which led to a sense of isolation and frustration. As I became more confident in my teenage years, the stammer became less of an issue, but it was still there and in certain stressful situations was as bad as ever. I enrolled on a City Lit Stage 1 stammering therapy course expecting to find the cure, only to discover that there is none, well not in the usual sense of the word.

There are three stages to the course. During the identification phases we were encouraged to gain a better understanding of our stammer: how long had we stammered? which words were most difficult to say? which situations created most anxiety? what goes through our minds when we stammer? what avoidance techniques do we use?

Next, we learned to become more de-sensitised to our stammer, to understand that basically it's ok to stammer and in fact, the more accepting we are about stammering the easier it will be to manage stammering. We were introduced to the idea of “voluntary stammering”, where we would deliberately stammer in everyday situations, just to judge people's reactions and to show that we could control the stammer rather than the other way around. By the end of this section of the course, I had stopped thinking of stammering as a problem or barrier and more as just something I do, which actually makes me a more interesting person.

The final stage of the course involved learning techniques for dealing with stammering situations. The main technique was block modification: you seek to modify your speech before stammering (pre-block modification), during the stammer (in-block), or after (post-block). My chosen method soon became in-block modification, but all versions of the technique work not so much by making the stammer disappear, but rather giving you the knowledge that it you do get into a stammering situation then you can do something about it. This, as any stammerer will tell you, is more than half the battle. If I'm facing a situation where I believe I am likely to stammer, I now know that I have a good technique for dealing with it. This in itself makes me more relaxed and means that I’m less likely to stammer in the first place; replacing a vicious circle of thoughts “I'm going to stammer, I'm nervous, therefore I stammer, I can't do anything about it, so I get more nervous and stammer more”, with a virtuous circle of thoughts – “if I do stammer, so what? I can use the techniques I've been taught, which makes me more relaxed, which means I'm less likely to stammer”. It all sounds very simple but it’s easier said than done!.

Stammerers often feel isolated because they believe no one else stammers in quite the same way they do. Through participation in a group stammering course, you will learn that most of us have faced similar challenges and had similar thoughts and I would recommend the course to anyone who stammers.

Ian Kernohan, 2008

Block Modification

Having attended the Block-Modification course precisely two years ago today, my life has a 180-degree shift and my attending the course at City Lit was the first major-stepping in my doing so.

The course covered all the different forms and guises of stammering in its entirety and was very comprehensive and practical. The group aspect of the course proved indispensable: learning alongside people of similar interests is something that only advanced my learning whilst on the course. In fact, I am still in touch with many of my fellow students and we have grown to become good friends.
The course consisted of numerous different group and individual exercises, lots of facts about stammering and outside practical work where we would implement everything we had learnt.

I would unreservedly recommend this course to anyone with a stammer. Initially I had my doubts but these doubts were soon to be quelled upon starting the course and, had I not taken the initial step of signing to the course 2 years ago, I very much doubt I’d have tackled the world and my speech as I did.

Jamal Muse, 2008

Mindfulness Meditation

I enrolled in the City Lit Mindfulness Meditation evening course in April 2008. I came with an open mind to investigate the benefits and applications of meditation to my life and stammering. The course was split up into 8 weekly sessions lead by two tutors. We were given CD’s for home practice.

Mindfulness means paying attention in a particular way, on purpose in the present moment and non-judgementally. This was first demonstrated to the group by mindfully eating a raisin. The purpose of this was to make a deliberate effort to bring moment-to-moment awareness to something that we may usually do on ‘automatic pilot’.

We followed this with the Body Scan technique. This exercise was to focus our awareness on different parts of the body. The Body scan can be very relaxing and it is not uncommon to fall asleep for a few minutes. The main purpose was not to sleep but to have moment-to-moment awareness and to just let the experience be the experience.

Each week we were introduced to new practices including Mindfulness of breathing. The breath was used an anchor to focus our attention on each. moment. I found this technique very beneficial as the breath changes with our moods.

On the third week we began with some mindful movement and stretching. The point of the stretches is to provide a direct way to connect with awareness of the body. The body is a place where emotions often get expressed and I found this exercise very beneficial to tune into my body and to be aware of any sensations arising.

I found that my life was full of stress, time-pressures and deadlines. We were next taught the 3 minute breathing space - something I could incorporate into my day-to-day working lifestyle, We were taught to take time-out for a breathing space in the morning, afternoon and evening, to have time to our selves and to be with moment-to-moment awareness. This technique focused and grounded me so that I was able to step out of the automatic pilot mode and make choices about what to do next. The concept of automatic pilot is very relevant to people who stammer as stammering and speaking in general is something that we tend to do whilst in automatic pilot mode. Becoming more non-judgementally aware of our automatic patterns leads the way to us being able to make more conscious choices about changing them e.g applying techniques or not avoiding. We also learnt a guided sitting meditation and we were invited to practice these different techniques at home each week. I liked this as it gave me the opportunity to try all the different CDs and to choose the one that suited me best.
At the beginning of the course, I was curious about how mindfulness meditation would link to stammering. This became apparent to me from the ’awareness of thoughts’ practice. Our thoughts can have very powerful effects of how we feel and what we do. Often those thoughts are triggered automatically. By becoming aware, over and over again, of the thoughts and images passing through the mind and letting go of them as we return our attention to the breath, it is possible to get some distance and perspective. This can allow us to see that there may be other ways to think about situations, freeing us from the tyranny of the old thought patterns that automatically “pop into mind” .

We were taught to bring awareness to times of difficulty and stress. This enabled me to become aware of the stress indicators and what actions and strategies I have that are helpful or unhelpful to me. The core point is to use your awareness of where you are in each moment to make the best choices for yourself in each moment.

I left the 8 week course with a feeling of immense gratitude for having been taught all these techniques that I can apply to my every day life. I feel a sense of liberation and inner strength. For me now, mindfulness meditation has become a part of my life that I practise regularly.

SJ

Paul's story
For three full days in January I found myself with nine other people on the City Lit Presentation Skills course. The course was well planned and comprehensive. Although I found it quite tiring, it was always stimulating and I learned a lot - about myself, about the ways in which listeners may react to me, and about the importance of non-verbal communication. The need to make a good presentation of ourselves need not be restricted to our business or commercial lives: I found the course was useful in helping me tone up my ability to communicate a message to any listener.

After beginning with the recognition and identification of our fears of giving presentations, the course moved on to practical ways in which we can deal with and channel those fears. It covered the cognitive cycle and how to turn negative self-talk into positive self-talk.

On the final day we used the technique of speaking circles, and then finally each of us gave a 5 minute presentation on a subject of our own choice.

This course is an excellent platform for meeting other people who stammer, for making the discovery yet again that you are not alone in feeling the way you do, and for setting new personal goals. I highly recommend it.

Paul Vernon


Student on our interiorised stammering course
When I applied for this course I wasn't completely clear about how it would help me, but looking back the clue was in the name!! It focussed on all those feelings that we hold inside ourselves about our stammer - the stuff that no one else sees. People see the physical symptoms of my stammer, the blocks, the lack of eye contact etc but what they don't see is the emotional baggage I carry that comes with having a stammer. What this course did for me was to help me start to understand those emotions and feelings and help me to become more accepting of my stammer. For me the course was about acceptance - accepting that I had a stammer and then trying to reduce the negative feelings and beliefs that almost re-enforced it. It wasn't about finding a cure - it was about learning to live with my stammer in a more accepting way, allowing myself to get my stammer in perspective with the rest of my life and through this starting do the things I wanted to do that previously I had avoided because of my stammer.

The other aspect of the course that was equally powerful and effective for me was being able to talk to other people about how my stammer made me feel and the part it played in my life. Being able to do this with a group of people who understood the emotions and feelings I had was as therapeutic as any part of the course. The simple realisation that there were other people who felt the same things I did was an immensely powerful and re-assuring feeling. I wasn't on my own!


Richard and the speaking circle
The speaking circle course gave me the opportunity to practise speaking in front of a group of people. What made this course so worthwhile was that it allowed me to practise my public speaking in a safe environment - in front of an audience of fellow stammers. Don't get me wrong - it was still a challenging experience that generated some tension within but the usual worries over how I would cope were lessened by the knowledge that my audience knew exactly how I was feeling and through positive feedback showed their support and appreciation.

Speaking without notes provided a new experience for me, as most of my presentations at work are carefully scripted!! It gave me the opportunity to try and think more about what I wanted to say rather than as I normally do focus on how I was saying it. It also gave me the opportunity to practise some of the techniques I had learned on previous courses within a safe environment. This and hearing about other stammerers' lives made it a thoroughly enjoyable course.

Richard Wheatley


No cure for stammering: Michael's story
I have stammered since I was three years old. Growing up and going through school was, mainly, enjoyable. Mainly. Because always hanging over me was this thing that made me different from other children - I couldn't talk very well, and a lot of my energy and efforts were devoted to ensuring one thing above all else - that nobody found out. My family and friends knew I had 'a bit' of difficulty, but I just wanted to keep my stammering to a bare minimum. It became a constant game of concealment of something I was unhappy about and pretty much ashamed of.

This made me despondent and isolated. I felt that nobody knew what I was going through. And experienced a constant fear of meeting people, of asking for things, or speaking generally. Everything I had to do was affected and, the older I got, the more my frustration and anxiety grew. And when I couldn't get out of speaking and then stammered when I did, I felt like an idiot, a failure, an abnormal person.

I wanted to get cured and underwent various types of therapy and, for periods, I enjoyed a degree of fluency. But I wasn't cured. My stammer stuck to me and reoccurred mostly at those times when I wanted to be at my most impressive, witty and charming. I would miss job and relationship opportunities due to fear of stammering and fear that the real me ' a stammerer ' would be exposed.

I enrolled unwillingly on an intensive course of speech therapy at the City Lit. Unwillingly, because I thought that all I could do with my stammer was to try harder to speak fluently (which, perversely, always ended in more tension and more stammering).

When I started the course, the main thrust was a revelation to me - I had to let my stammer out, be more accepting of my stammer, tell people that I stammered, to not feel any pressure not to stammer, not be ashamed of stammering, not try to speak like a fluent speaker, and to try to stammer more easily. The theory being that the less pressure I felt not to stammer, the less I would.

The course was split into three phases - (i) identification of all the tricks I'd developed over the last 30 years to conceal my stammer (the word substitution, the extra 'ums', 'ers', 'I means', 'you knows' I padded my speech with to avoid silence or to get me started) and of the overt aspects of my stammer (repetitions, facial strains, lack of eye contact) all of which I'd then have to work to eradicate; (ii) desensitisation to stammering (which involved talking about stammering openly and stammering in front of other people); and (iii) three means of modifying my stammer when it came out so that I'd stammer more easily and fluently (known as cancellation, pull-outs and presets).

Basically, I had to change my speaking and behavioural habits. No mean feat. But with a great deal of hard work, determination and support from others on the course and from the City Lit staff, big changes became possible. In class we stammered away at each other, practised the modifications, shared experiences and difficulties. As part of desensitising myself, I even got to stammering purposely in front of total strangers, something I would've given both arms to avoid doing previously.

But I'm not cured. There isn't a cure. What the course has given me, however, is a way to put my stammer in perspective and to work on it. It's the start of a very challenging road to taking the fear and tension out of talking, to changing my speaking habits for the better, to enjoying communicating and to say what I want to say when I want to say it.

If you're a stammerer, I'd thoroughly recommend the course. If you know someone who stammers, recommend that they do it. Even if they're unwilling.

© Michael Scammell


How I called a truce on my war of words
Darren Stockford recounts how an intensive City Lit course helped him loosen the grip that stammering had on his voice and his life.

Ironically, the term 'lifelong stammerer' rolls quite easily off my tongue. I've often used it to describe myself to anyone who's asked about my speech problems. It's a concise but, unfortunately, very basic definition of the battle I've been fighting for more than three decades.

While it paints a picture of someone who struggles with speaking, it doesn't convey the feelings I've experienced - the helplessness, anxiety, panic and, in some cases, sheer terror. It doesn't conjure up a picture of someone who's spent years dreading any kind of change in his life, in case he has to meet new people or go into new environments. It doesn't suggest a man whose own name is a source of worry because he sometimes finds it difficult to say.

In February I was made redundant, and I hit rock bottom. I was exhausted, and tired of living only half a life; of being a burden to my wife; of feeling scared of everything. I decided I had nothing to lose by trying some group speech therapy, so I booked a place on the next available course at City Lit in London, which I'd heard about through the British Stammering Association.

The start of a new beginning
The three-week, full-time block modification course didn't focus on, or teach, fluency. It was about accepting stammering, and learning strategies to lessen the impact it has on my life - both mentally (not viewing it negatively when I stammer) and physically (bringing some comfort to the way I stammer).

There were eight people in the group - six males and two females, whose ages ranged from early twenties to sixty. Of the three tutors, two stammered themselves, though both had excellent control of their speech. I found the tutors easy to talk to; they were open, listened well and encouraged the sharing of experiences and thoughts.

In week one, there was a lot of work on the way that thoughts create feelings. It's a simple concept, but revelatory for someone like me who'd been trapped in negative spirals of thought - and therefore feeling - for years.

At the same time, I was given tools to strip down my stammer to its core components - ditching starters and fillers (such as 'um'), losing physical crutches (such as tapping my foot), and stopping the things I would do to avoid stammering, such as pretending to think for a moment. The most important thing was to say the word I wanted to say and keep eye contact, no matter how much I was stammering.

Results from really hard work
By the middle of the first week, I was stammering openly, with hardly any avoidance behaviour. It might seem like a curious process at this stage -unmasking my stammer. I felt raw and exposed, but it needed to be done if I was to successfully use the block modification techniques that would be taught in the second week.

With my stammer naked, the next step was to speak outside - the one aspect of the course I'd been dreading. As I left the classroom with another student by my side and my stammer blowing a gale around my head, I walked into a newsagent to ask for a box of matches. I blocked hard, but the man I spoke to was patient, and I was rewarded with the next best thing, a disposable lighter, which I took back to the classroom as a trophy.

The people I stammered in front of didn't bat an eyelid, but I'd be lying if I said I was comfortable. When I got home that night I cried my eyes out, so intense were the emotions the day had dredged up. I knew it needed to be done, though; I could sit in a classroom all day but it wasn't the real world. And once I'd taken that step, once I'd stammered at a cashier in Starbucks and let out all that pent-up emotion at home, I felt pretty good. I'd been out of my comfort zone and survived.

There were more outside tasks, usually when we'd been taught something new, so we could experiment. Many found that voluntary stammering - adding fake stammering on non-feared words - was a big challenge. When you've spent most of your life trying not to stammer, it can be a wrench to do it on purpose. But the idea - to give the speaker a feeling of control, and to ease the pressure of waiting for the first real stammer to occur - makes a lot of sense. It's a form of 'self-advertising' - being upfront and open about stammering.

The tutors didn't pressurise anyone to do anything. It was surprising, though, how much confidence I gained by being in a class with other people who stammer. It was desensitising being around stammering all day, and liberating to be able to speak freely and be listened to.

In the second week, two block modification techniques were introduced. Post-block was harder for me to get a handle on, and it wasn't something I felt I'd be likely to use outside the classroom. But in-block modification was a revelation, and I quickly started to try to use it every time I stammered - something I'm still doing now, to the extent that it's become second nature when I'm talking at home.

So much more than confidence
After two weeks, with the main part of the course complete, there was a four-week break to allow everything to sink in. My confidence was blooming and my speech was better than it had been for ages (a side-effect of my increased confidence was much more fluency), but I was aware it would be easy to slip into old thought patterns and avoidance behaviours. So I pushed forward with my desensitisation. My block modification fell by the wayside in feared situations, but I was proud to be facing them.

After four weeks, it was good to see everyone again for the final three days of the course. There was a bit of revision before the third technique, pre-block modification, was taught. Though the concept was easy to understand, I haven't slipped into using pre-block in the same way that I took to in-block, which is my new best friend.

Two months on from the first lesson, I'm feeling much more at peace with my stammer, both mentally and physically. Though I still have moments where I feel my thoughts turning negative, I can quickly pick myself up using the ideas I learnt. I know it's early days, but at least I have a bit of positivity to start building on. And if I do slide downhill, I know it's repairable.

My speech has changed for the better. Instead of wrestling with blocks, I'm stammering more comfortably. I hold eye contact without even thinking about it, and there's virtually no word replacement, which I think is what has helped me to feel calmer. Speaking without a jumble of thoughts spinning through my head is liberating. I've had brief lapses, sure, but I catch myself and analyse what I'm doing.

I still struggle with phones, but face to face I'm going into more feared situations and doing what I want to do, such as ordering takeaways and buying train and cinema tickets. While these appear to be everyday tasks, they're things I hadn't done for a huge chunk of my adult life. In some ways, it feels like I've rejoined the human race.

I just have to be myself
The best thing to come out of the course is the realisation that I have the right to be listened to and treated just like anybody else. Telling people that I stammer was something I already did before I started the course. But through meeting other people who stammer, I've realised just how important this act is.

Trying to hide stammering increases its power over me. The more matter-of-factly I treat my stammer, the less likely it is to bother me or anybody listening. I hope it follows that the more people come into contact with people who stammer openly and unashamedly, the less the burden on everybody who stammers. Then the condition will be well on its way to becoming 'normalised' and understood.

At the beginning of this piece, I described my stammering as a 'battle' I've been fighting. The City Lit course has taught me that I don't have to wage war; that stammering isn't about winning and losing. Sometimes, fighting for peace can be like looking for darkness with a torch. Not that I'd want to try right now - I've only just started to enjoy the sunshine.

Postscript: One month after the course ended, I started a new job, having attended two interviews at which I was completely open about stammering.