Author: Raymond H. Hull, Phd, FASHA, FAAA

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Hull-Stuttering 1

Title: A Stutterer’s Search for Fluency: Or, How I Discovered the Field of Communication Sciences and Disorders!

Author: Raymond H. Hull, PhD, FASHA, FAAA

Affiliation: Professor of Communication Sciences and Disorders, Audiology/Neurosciences

Department of Communication Sciences and Disorders

School of Health Sciences

College of Health Professions

Wichita State University

1845 Fairmount St.

Wichita, Kansas 67260

THE PROBLEM

When I was very young, I was called a “pretty boy” by those who saw me, so I suppose appearance can disguise anomalies to some degree. Among my recollections that I was doing something different from other children was when I was six years of age, in the first grade, and was living in town with my parents and my older sister. As I was walking the four blocks from my elementary school to our home after school one afternoon, three tough boys from my school met me about half way. I did not know their names, but I knew they were tough by reputation. They were laughing and teasing me because I was a “stutterer”. “He talks funny!” they said in a taunting manner as they knocked me down and walked away. After I recovered my senses, I picked myself up off of the sidewalk and ran home crying. The teasing was occurring with greater frequency, and I was angry at those who teased me, and angry at myself for obviously being so different.

The On-Going Problem

Before and after that incident, my parents tried to offer their own brand of therapy to “cure” my dysfluencies that they called “stammering”. “Slow down”, “think about what you are saying”, “sing your words”, “swing your arms and talk in the rhythm of the movements”, were among my parent’s “cures”. Of course, none of those worked, and my dysfluencies became worse as my fears of the embarrassment I felt because of my stuttering and my inability to say my name or answer the telephone without severe stuttering “blocks” continued and strengthened. The stuttering blocks had become so severe that they prevented all vocalization from being emitted as I tried to talk. Attempting to force vocalizations only resulted in a sustained guttural vowel [a] as in [daaaaaaaaaaaaa] as I would, for example, attempt to utter the word “dog”.

The Realization

What kept me going, however, was the realization that I did not stutter when I talked to my dog Laddie. So, I talked frequently to him. I also did not stutter when I talked to the calves I was preparing for the County Fair, or when I was feeding the cows each morning and evening on our farm. There, I would use loud words to help manage their enthusiasm at the feeding trough, and I was always fluent. And, being quite musical vocally, I was also aware that I did not stutter when I sang. I reasoned from those experiences of talking and singing successes that I perhaps did not have to stutter, that perhaps there was nothing organically wrong with me! Perhaps if I could get over my fear of talking, or rather my fear of the embarrassments that resulted from my stuttering, maybe the stuttering would subside. But, how does one do that? How does one cease what one has done so automatically for so many years that results in the anger and embarrassments that causes the behavior (the stuttering) to perpetuate itself?

My Course of Action

So, with the knowledge that there were times when I did not stutter, I set about to “cure” myself from the stuttering that I considered to be a dark cloud that was with me wherever I went, and whenever I spoke.

My parents suggested that I be seen by a speech-language pathologist at a local clinic, but I refused to go. I did not want to feel handicapped, and I felt that if I committed to therapy, I would in a sense be admitting that I was, and I refused to do that.

My first course of action was to begin placing myself in situations that required talking, and to do that as many times as it took to begin to experience success. I reasoned, correctly or incorrectly, that if I was occasionally successful in speaking with greater fluency, then those successes might breed further successes. I decided for better or worse that rather than avoiding situations that required talking, I would force myself to enter those environments, environments that once entered, I would not have the opportunity to withdraw.

They included:

High School Plays. Perhaps due to my youth as a high school student, and perhaps with more youthful bravery than good sense, I had what I thought was a good rationale for auditioning for acting roles inplays. My rationale, for better or worse, was that if a part in a play was offered to me and I accepted, one cannot walk off of the stage during a production since the other actors would be depending on me to say my lines, and say them correctly. I auditioned for every play I could during my years in high school. My Freshman year in high school, I was given the role of “Johnny Appleseed” in the musical by the same name. Since I could sing, and had a rather high tenor, near soprano, voice, the role fit. Thankfully it was a non-speaking role, and all I had to do was sing two solos. As is found with the majority of stutterers, I sang fluently, and it was a great morale booster when I heard the applause from the audience.

Public Speaking 100. But, successes can have road blocks, particularly when it comes to speaking in public. On the first day of a required course into which I had enrolled my junior year in high school that was entitled “Public Speaking 100”, the teacher asked each student to introduce her or himself. She asked each of us to stand by our desk when it came our turn, and then introduce our self and describe something interesting that we did during the previous summer. As my turn became eminent, my face and larynx began to tighten in preparation. When my turn came, I trembled as I stood up by my desk. As I feared would happen, I opened my mouth, but nothing would come out! My vocal folds were tightly closed, and the stuttering block was both massive and embarrassing! Even when I was finally able to release my vocal folds to generate air flow, the stuttering block was so severe that I could not utter a sound other than the repetition of a guttural “Mah…mah…mah…mah….”, trying desperately to say, “My name is …”. Students around me began to snicker quietly. My teacher, looking somewhat embarrassed, quietly said, “Thank you Raymond”, and went on to the next student. I quickly sat back at my desk, and remained there quietly with my head down, not wanting to look at anyone. Even after that embarrassing experience, however, I was not going to give up my attempts to become fluent! Becoming a radio disk jockey. My Junior year in high school, I did something that I did not think I would ever have the courage to do. I nervously drove to a local radio station after school one day and asked if I could speak to the manager. The secretary at the front desk allowed me to see him, and from a script that I had written ahead of time to help me to speak as fluently as possible, I asked him if I could have 30 minutes every afternoon Monday through Friday for a rock and roll disk jockey show. I am sure that I was dysfluent while I spoke with him. But, perhaps he thought that I was simply nervous. In any event, he thought about it for a few minutes, apparently having thought about it before, and then he finally said “Yes, I think we might try that. We’ll see how it goes. You will begin next Monday at 4:00 pm. Be here at 3:30 pm to prepare. A Studio Engineer will run the control board for you for a few days until you get the hang of it.”

The day I spoke with him was Thursday, so I had three days to prepare! The show was eventually expanded to an hour, from 4:00 to 5:00 pm Monday through Friday as its popularity grew. For the first few weeks, I spoke and introduced songs by reading from a script that I wrote each day so that my stuttering would be less. Eventually, the script was placed aside, and I spoke as a typical disk jockey without one. And, as long as I was speaking into a microphone, and there was not an audience on the other side of the large glass window in the studio, I was more fluent than I could ever remember being.

Intercollegiate Oratory. As I entered college, I continued to place myself in situations that required talking. Among the situations in which I placed myself, with a continued hope for success, was intercollegiate oratory in which the competitors were to prepare and give twelve to fifteen minute orations from memory. In this specific competition, the topic was “Achieving World Peace”. With the help of my forensics coach who was not sure that I should enter the competition, I wrote my oration, and then rehearsed it until I was able to present it from memory.

The day of that competition, I was to drive to one of the large universities in our state, about 90 miles away from our farm. It was the middle of winter, and it was snowing. I did not want to go to the competition where the other large state universities would be sending their best speakers to present their orations. I had a feeling that I was going to embarrass myself and my small college. I tried to convince my parents that the snow was too heavy, and it would be dangerous to drive. But, at their urging I left our farm that morning and began the 90 mile drive to the university campus I had never before seen. After arriving, and not exactly sure where I was to go, I parked in a nearby field and walked through mud and slush to where the building was located.

When I finally arrived at the building where the competition was being held, the lower one-third of the pants of the new blue suit my parents had purchased for me to wear for this occasion, and my new shoes were covered with mud. I hurried to the room where the competition was being held, and slowly opened the door. As I did, I discovered that the final competitor was just finishing his oration. When he concluded, I quietly asked the judges if there was still time for me to present. The judges conferred briefly, and then said that I could still present my oration. I then asked if I could go to a nearby restroom to attempt to wipe some of the mud from my shoes and pant legs. They again kindly agreed that I could.

After washing off as much mud as I could, I hurried back to the room where I was to speak, although by now my new shoes and socks were soaked. I walked without hesitation to the front of the room, faced the judges and the other speakers and their coaches who were seated near them, and without forethought, began my 15 minute oration from memory. I was so concerned about being late, and the appearance of my shoes and the slacks of my new suit, I did not have time to build any level of anxiety, and was therefore fairly fluent. If there were dysfluencies, I tried to use them as pauses for purposes of emphasis.

At the conclusion of my oration, I simply thanked the judges and walked from the room. Without hesitating, I walked back across the muddy field to my car, and then drove the 90 miles back to our farm in central Kansas. By then it was late in the evening. At about 9:00 pm, the telephone rang and my mother answered it. The call was from my forensics coach at my college. When I put the receiver to my ear, he informed me that I had won First Place in the Kansas State Men’s Oratory Competition, the first time it had happened to anyone at our small college! It was difficult for me to believe what had just happened, that I was the best orator of the best from the colleges and universities in my state! It was a grand achievement in the life of a stutterer! My confidence grew greatly after that time, and I was absolutely “floating” in fluency!

A Backward Slide

Since I had won the State Intercollegiate Men’s Oratory competition, I was to move on to national competition. It was at that time that my successes in fluency began to decline. In preparing for the recording of my oration that was to be sent on to the national competition, I rehearsed in my bedroom on the second floor of our ancient farm house, presenting it into a borrowed tape recorder. As I was rehearsing, speaking into the microphone, I slowly began to experience the return of stuttering blocks. I am still not sure why that occurred, perhaps fatigue or a fear of failure. They began slowly, but as my fears grew, the stuttering blocks quickly grew in both frequency and intensity, and then increased with a vengeance! In spite of all of my successes, the fears and the stuttering blocks had returned! But, in light of my previous successes, I was not going to give up and spend my life as a stutterer.

On To Graduate School

So, upon graduation from college, I decided to go on to graduate school into the field of radio-television broadcast, a return to an area in which I had previously experienced success. My parents gave me some money to pay my tuition and dormitory room for the first summer after I had chosen one of the three universities that offered a graduate degree in those fields. During the first summer, I was required to take an introductory course entitled, “Human Communication Disorders”. During that course I became fascinated by the variety of disorders of communication that can affect children and adults. When we entered the topic of fluency disorders, I reluctantly accepted the invitation to talk about how it feels to be a stutterer. When I went to the front of the classroom to make my presentation, I was surprised that I was not dysfluent at any time while I spoke about the feelings one experiences when confronted with the problem of stuttering. After that presentation, I reasoned that perhaps in talking about my feelings about the problem of stuttering and not attempting to hide it, or to disguise it, the pressure to be fluent was reduced, and likewise the fears and anxieties that perpetuated my stuttering. Therefore, fluency increased!