Defending Covert Stuttering, Part 2

If you are having a bad day with respect to fluency, consider talking less. Doing so may involve avoiding speaking situations within reason. This advice may be contrary to that given by most speech therapists.

Parkinson’s disease victims, like stutterers suffer from deficiencies with their dopaminergic systems. But their problem is too little dopaminergic activity rather than too much as in the case of stutterers. Like stutterers, Parkinson victims have good days with regard to motor function and bad days. They are generally advised to engage in physical activities on good days and take it easy on bad days when physical activity may be difficult.

So why should stutterers be treated differently from Parkinson’s victims? Covert stutterers may be mostly fluent but they also have their bad days when fluency is diminished. On such days it would be perfectly reasonable to engage in speech and situation avoidance behavior within limits.

What are these limits? If a Parkinson’s victim is having a bad day and his house is on fire, you would not advocate that he wait until he has a good day before he fled. Similarly, situations may occur whereby a stutterer should not go to extraordinary means to avoid speaking situations. For example, some social engagement for which you have a firm commitment should be kept. In a roomful of people, there are always several long-winded ones, and all you need to do is ask a question and they will happily launch into a 15 minute monologue. Linking together several of these people will easily occupy a cocktail hour with minimum speaking on your part.

Speech avoidance on a bad day is reasonable as long as you don’t do so out of a sense of embarrassment. Rather, you do so because speaking on a bad day is not fun. No matter how much you may think of yourself as a militant in-your-face overt stutterer (as a result of speech therapy), your limbic system (governing emotions) will still influence your fluency. Greater disfluency during bad days (along with negative emotional reactions at a subliminal level) may lead to an overall increased average level of disfluency. On the other hand, good experiences with respect to fluency may be expected to diminish disfluency over the long run.

Speech therapists should not advocate that a successful covert stutterer become an overt one. Instead, the focus should be on diminishing the involvement of the limbic system on the fluency problem. Doing so does not necessarily require that a stutterer stand on a soapbox in the middle of a mall declaring his disfluency.