Debbie Mason is a CI, IFS and Hypnotherapy trained Speech & Language Therapist who has worked with children and adults who stammer for 30+ years. She is currently interested in the significant increase in functional stammering in the UK. Mandy Rodstrom is a stutterer and Speech-Language Therapist who specializes in developmental stuttering through her client- and family-centered, neurodiversity-affirming, and trauma-informed lens and stuttering-affirming therapeutic approach.I
n this excerpt, Debbie explains how an overburdened nervous system can give rise to functional stammering by sharing one client’s story. Hear the full conversation on The Gifts of Trauma Podcast.
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In our culture we constantly override the signals of our nervous system. So we might be completely exhausted or have a virus, and yet we think, “I have to get up, I have to go to work, I have to take the kids to school, or I have to meet that deadline.” We’re constantly overriding the signals from our nervous systems. We’re not good at listening to our bodies, and that doesn’t tend to go well for us.
In fact, that sort of overriding can lead to functional stammering. A professor in London, Mark Edwards, explains functional neurological disorder (FND) as burdens on the nervous system. The biopsychosocial model he uses to describe FND is something Gabor talks about a lot as well.
It’s this idea that we all have certain biological things going on. For me, at the moment, that’s menopause. Somebody else might have a viral infection or be living with another illness. We all have a unique psychological makeup. Some of us are prone to anxiety, others to perfectionism. We all have psychological traits that may or may not be helpful. We all have coping strategies that may or may not be helpful.
And we all experience social pressures; we might be worried about our job or our finances or our relationships. The biopsychosocial model recognizes that all of these elements play into our health, or illness. So basically, these all contribute burdens to our nervous systems. In my opinion, multiple events occurring in recent years have added new burdens.
In the UK today, we have a cost of living crisis. People are having to work really hard just to stand still. We experienced a global COVID pandemic. Many people got ill, died, or were left with long Covid. We have escalating mental health crises; on a psychological level, people aren’t doing well. So it’s not surprising that some of those burdens get somatized and show up in the nervous system. It’s not research-based, but it’s my sense that everything going on around us can add to that burden.
Let me share a client’s story that illustrates my perspective.
Tony had been stammering for six months when I met him, which was having a significant impact on his life. In his 40s, he had no history of stammering. The first time we met was in a hospital outpatient department. He was extremely agitated, tense, and struggling to say anything at all.
As we were speaking, he was so tense he was rocking and vibrating. The thought went through my mind, “Gosh, what are you doing here in an outpatient department? You should be getting more help.” When I learned he’d actually been refused input at a mental health unit because he was unable to speak, that made me quite angry.
When I took Tony’s case history, a few things struck me. One was that he had experienced multiple bereavements over a period of 15 years, including the loss of a child to suicide.
“I bottle things up,” he said. “My mind is constantly whirring. I can’t switch my head off. I have headaches 24/7. I have nightmares.”
As we sat together, I noticed that his breathing was so confined that he couldn’t exhale. We did a little bit of work on his breathing, which he found quite difficult. He said he felt like a pressure cooker.
I sensed that he was holding a lot of grief, and he expressed some suicidal thoughts.
I saw him for four sessions. We combined breathing work with exploring why he was holding on to his grief, which was not allowing him to move through it. It turned out that he saw suppressing emotion as strength and expressing emotion as weakness. He also had a belief that, ‘If you cry, you forget about people.’ That was also getting in the way of him grieving. I gently challenged his belief, which he’d learned as a child.
In the first two sessions, I wasn’t sure if anything was changing. Even in the third session, I still wasn’t sure. But when he came in for the fourth session, he said, “I’ve been practicing the breathing that we’ve done, and I noticed that when I’m really wound up, I’m holding my breath. So I’m working on my breathing, and my headaches are less severe, but I’ve still got this plug in my chest, which is grief.”
This was great progress. He also shared that the most significant thing he’d begun doing was talking to his wife about how he felt. Talking about their child who had died had been a forbidden subject, but he realized speaking about them to his wife was helpful. He said, “All of these little things make me want to help myself more. I want to be around more. I don’t want to go off the bridge anymore.”
One of the things that struck me was that it didn’t actually take much to create this change. Tony’s journey isn’t over, but he’s now able to speak more easily. He still has to process his grief. When he left, I thought, ‘Okay, now you’re in a position where you will be able to turn things around.’ He was referred to some mental health services, and it turned out that indeed, he didn’t need a lot of support to turn things around. He had been blocking a lot. Not only his voice, but also his emotions and his grief. Bottling it all up like that was probably a very helpful coping strategy when he was young, but it was the opposite of helpful by the time I met him. When we override the signals from our nervous system for too long, eventually our bodies find a way to make us listen.
The Gifts of Trauma is a weekly podcast that features personal stories of trauma, transformation, healing, and the gifts revealed on the path to authenticity. Listen to the full conversation, and if you like it, please subscribe and share.
