Stammering Speech: A Psychotherapeutic Approach
One per cent of the UK population stammer, which accumulates to roughly half a million people. There is, by common agreement, no cure for stammering. There have been many different theories and approaches to the problem of stammering - and for many people who stammer, it is a big problem, affecting relationships and work, how they feel about themselves and how they think the world feels about them.
The therapies that exist to help people deal with their stammer range from personal construct therapy, which asks the person who stammers to experiment with themselves and anticipate situations that will cause them to stammer. PCT is a psychological approach that asks the client to work on their attitudes and perceptions, to be ahead of the stammering game. This is also quite similar to CBT that also works with patterns of thinking that may hinder the stammering person from fluency. The idea being that if we think we are going to stammer then we probably will, but if we think we are not going to stammer this is because we are preparing ourselves positively to speak as well as possible.
As a psychodynamic counsellor I am drawn to viewing stammering as some kind of symptom of trauma, or a series of traumas that build up over time, a self perpetuating nightmare in fact. Traditional psychoanalysis has viewed stammering as a form of psychoneuroses, caused by inhibition in infancy and childhood, with the added possibility of language itself being a taboo, e.g. the forbidden use of bad language, the disallowing of a child to speak of certain subjects in the family, e.g. a mother or father may not want to hear the child speak of the other parent, if the parents hate each other.
What all these psychological therapies have in common is that they are verbal therapies. I am interested in the potential of psychosomatic work, breath work that can release trauma and the associated feelings of panic, anxiety and fear by deep, rapid breathing into the areas where the stammering is felt most acutely, usually the chest and throat. is it possible for this somatic work that already has its therapeutic place in the work of Wilhelm Reich and Stanislas Grof, something that could be used for beneficial work for persons who stammer.? Certainly, the breath work, developed by Geof, seems to be a powerful stimulant for personal change, if his claims are to be believed. I would like to see this approach, perhaps on a slight reduced scale, be used for people who stammer and am also investigating such potential in my practise.
©Copyright 2013 by http://www.NaturalTherapyForAll.com CBT Peckham - All Rights Reserved.