00:00:00 Mandy

That’s a beautiful thing too in therapy is that we offer agency, we offer a choice other than just focusing on fluency. Stuttering is so much more than just what people hear. And stuttering involves feelings, thoughts, the environments in which we’re communicating with the people that we’re communicating with. Our listeners, our communities …has been so important to me in my work is offering exploration and getting curious about getting connected to communities. So stuttering involves getting connected to the rich culture that exists out there. As someone who lived in a different generation, who was never connected with her community, whose parents were never afforded that privilege and gift, I, I find it just so critical, just as something for people, again, for the kids I work with, for the parents I work with, “Hey, did you know that there’s these lovely community full of children who stutter, there’s parents of the young children who stutter that come to this space. There’s conferences across the country that people meet up for a whole day. There’s even an annual conference where we spend three days together where stuttering exists.”

00:01:25 Rosemary

This is the Gifts of Trauma Podcast. Stories of transformation and healing through Compassionate Inquiry.  Welcome to the Gifts of Trauma podcast by Compassionate Inquiry. I’m Rosemary Davies-Janes and today I have the honor of exploring stuttering or stammering. It’s a topic I don’t hear spoken about very often and I’m delighted to welcome two guests with deep expertise on this topic. Joining us from Oakton, Virginia ,in the US is Mandy Rodstrom. She is a stutterer, a speech language therapist, and she’s passionate about advocating for transforming how speech therapists understand stuttering and how they support people who stutter. She’s got 19 years of school based experience and she specializes in developmental stuttering through a client- and family-centered neurodiversity-affirming and trauma informed lens. Welcome, Mandy.

00:02:37 Mandy

Thank you, Rosemary.

00:02:38 Rosemary

It’s great to have you. Now your full bio is in the show notes and I’m curious, what else would you like to share about yourself and or your work with our listeners, who are welcome to read the full bio. But maybe what’s not in the bio that you’d like to share? 

00:02:56 Mandy

Ooh. I’m a mother of three wonderful children, teenagers, a daughter going off to college next year. So in the midst of transition ahead here as a mother sending off her firstborn into the world and what else? I’m an avid music lover and I often always say, music is my first language and so I’m always listening to all sorts of music and I think it’s the first way of expressing myself as someone who used to play instruments as well, and a person who loves to sing.

00:03:32 Rosemary

Wonderful. What do you play? I’m curious now.

00:03:35 Mandy

Yeah, well, it’s been a long time, but I proudly played flute, cello, piccolo, oboe throughout my adolescent to high school years. And I actually went off to college to be a music teacher. I did not go to college to be a speech therapist. And somehow my destiny, stuttering, was actually calling me a long time ago to say, “No, you’re meant to be a speech therapist, not, not, not a music teacher.” So interesting roads lead back to stuttering.

00:04:02 Rosemary

It’s interesting. I have a question coming up later, I won’t get into it now where there’s sort of a connection between the two. So that’s very interesting to hear. So welcome and hailing, I have to say that because you’re in England. Hailing from Bristol, England is Debbie Mason, a speech and language therapist who for 30 years has worked with children and adults who stammer. She has a private practice, leads a national health stammering service in southwest England and is committed to supporting the goals of the Stammering Pride movement, which aims to create a society that understands, values and honors the stammering voice. Welcome, Debbie.

00:04:40 Debbie

Thank you, Rosemary.

00:04:41 Rosemary

Now I will confess, Debbie and I know each other. We met in the Compassionate Inquiry Professional training back in 2022. So she is a Compassionate Inquiry Practitioner and as well has trained in internal family systems, hypnotherapy, acceptance and commitment therapy, and neuro linguistic programming, or NLP. And she’s always been interested in the Mind body link and the role of the unconscious mind in this link. Debbie, your full bio is also in the show notes. Is there anything else you’d like our listeners to know about you before we dive into this exploration of stammering?

00:05:22 Debbie

Gosh, yeah, it’s probably obvious that I quite like a training course. So I do a lot of training. I guess my, probably my favorite thing to do is to go on a long country walk with my partner and friends to maybe involving a beach, definitely involving a dog and a pub and lots of treats. But yeah, I love being outside. I find nature a big resource as well. Like Mandy, I love music, but I don’t play anything like the number of instruments that Mandy plays. But pleasure, pleasure to be here.

00:06:00 Rosemary

Yeah, thank you, Debbie. And to begin, this is actually funny, I see that Mandy speaks about stuttering, while Debbie, you speak about stammering, which I am guessing is just a national shift, like what we call sneakers in the U.S. we call trainers in the U.K. what we call jumpers in the U.K. we call sweaters in the U.S. so is that accurate or is there a more different distinction? Are they interchangeable?

00:06:29 Debbie

Yeah, absolutely. So stammering is just British, English and Irish and Americans talk about stuttering and Australians as well. So it’s exactly the same phenomenon.

00:06:40 Rosemary

Okay, thank you. Yeah, yeah, I noticed. And I will probably use them. I bounce back and forth between the two. I have another minor point before we really get deep into this conversation, but working in this spoken word media, the podcast, one of the things I do is reviewing the transcripts that come from our interviews before they’re shared, just to make sure they’re accurate, because transcription software is not infallible. And it’s become clear to me after, gosh, over a year and a half of doing this work that many of us stammer or stutter a little bit, including myself, which makes me curious about the tipping point from what might be considered average stammering or stuttering into something that might bring someone to one of the two of you to address. So, Mandy, would you like to share your thoughts on that?

00:07:38 Mandy

Yes. And that’s very frequent for us in the stuttering community. A lot of times when, if we have self disclosed, you know, I stutter, and oftentimes people say, oh, no worries, I stutter too. And that’s a beautiful offering of support, but actually there is a difference. So what we talk about in the field is there is typical disfluencies which speakers have, which are common speech interruptions, such as um, uh, or brief pauses to gather one’s thoughts. And typically, people who do not stutter don’t experience negative reactions or feelings related to speaking, communicating. In contrast, stuttering is multifaceted,, often described as a constellation of experiences. And it includes much more than what listeners hear and often involves behaviors that are not visible. The observable features, as we say, of stuttering can include repetitions of sounds, syllables or whole words, prolongations of sounds and blocks, which is where sounds become stuck. The hidden aspects of stuttering may involve avoiding certain words due to anticipation of stutterings, substituting words, or choosing not to speak at all. People who stutter may also experience feelings of attitudes such as fear, shame, anxiety, and negative thoughts about speaking. And finally, stuttering can lead to adverse social and environmental impacts, including stigma and widespread misunderstanding, which may contribute to avoidance of communication across many areas of a person’s life. Debbie, feel free to add anything that I may have missed.

00:09:41 Rosemary

Thank you, Debbie. Did you have anything to share on that?

00:09:44 Debbie

Yeah, I think that’s a great explanation. I guess the difference for me is often around the level of control. So I think, as you say, Rosemary, none of us are completely fluent. We’re all non-fluent frequently. But I guess when you stammer or stutter, it’s about the level of control that you do or don’t have. And I think people who stammer can feel out of control in a way that those of us that don’t stammer probably don’t appreciate or understand. So I think as fluent speakers, we take our fluency for granted. It’s not something we have to think about very much.

00:10:23 Rosemary

Yeah, that’s a very good distinction. Thank you. Yeah, I think it’s a very interesting thing for us all to consider and notice as we have conversations in our lives. Now, as we begin, I just want to share a little bit of research that I did for this interview. Some general statistics I came across which stated that globally around 1% or 80 million people stutter. The childhood incidence is higher, which is around 5 to 8%. In the US it’s 1% over 3 million, while in the UK up to 3% of adults and 8% of children are affected. And what was also interesting is the, they cited a 4 to 1 male to female ratio. So maybe it’s not a headline topic that we don’t hear about every day, but it certainly is affecting a lot of lives. Is there anything either of you would like to say about the prevalence of stuttering?

00:11:19 Mandy

I know also recently some of us in the field are kind of wondering if those numbers are accurate because stuttering is a stigmatized experience or condition or disability. And so sometimes we do wonder, gosh, this whole idea of covert stuttering, are those people, are they actually reporting, do we know? You know, are the researchers aware of those people that are not openly or even maybe aware or have, that… That. What am I trying to say? Maybe like that connection or owning that identity. I am a person who stutters. And if we’re, if they’re not, then we are missing them, those numbers.

00:12:01 Rosemary

Your gut is telling you that the numbers reported are actually not accurate, that it’s actually higher. Debbie, what’s your thought on the statistics?

00:12:10 Debbie

Yeah, I guess I’d just like to. At this point as we start, I think it might be helpful to outline that there are different types of stammering. And the statistics that you, that you have… will be for developmental stammering, which is the type of stammering that most people will be familiar with. So developmental stammering starts in childhood, has a neurological underpinning. And I think that’s really important because given that we’re on a podcast about trauma, it’s really important to say that if you have a young child who starts stammering, they are not traumatised. Their brain is just trying to learn how to speak. So that’s really important. Obviously, growing up stammering can be traumatic if we use the definition of trauma as something that causes contraction in the system. But developmental stammering is not caused by trauma, so that’s really important. And then there are two different… Two other types of stammering as well, neurogenic, which we probably won’t talk about very much today in the context of trauma, that stuttering as a result of brain changes. So somebody who has a brain injury or Parkinson’s disease or something like that might start stammering. I’m using them interchangeably. I can hear myself. And the other type of stammering, which is increasing hugely in the UK at the moment, is functional stammering. And that often starts later in life. And the etiology or cause of that is not completely understood. But one way of looking at it is that the nervous system becomes overburdened and dysregulated and stammering results. And the burden might be biological, have chronic fatigue or a viral illness, or it might be psychological, it might be social, you might have relationship issues. But I guess the key thing is that we know that adverse life experiences and trauma make you more likely to develop functional stammering. And it can often occur as part of functional neurological disorder. It might… can occur on its own, or it can occur as part of functional neurological disorder. And we don’t understand enough about it yet. But I think it’s just important that when Mandy and I are speaking, we try and be clear about the differences, because one is more of a potentially… can be a lifelong condition, and the other is something that any one of us might wake up and experience.

00:14:49 Rosemary

Thank you, Debbie. That is a really great overview. I think perhaps where I’d like to go next is to explore. You each have different expertise with different types of stammering, stuttering. It’s always really helpful to hear examples that demonstrate what you’re speaking about. So I’m wondering, Debbie, have you got some stories you could share that illustrate the types of stammering that you help clients work with?

00:15:19 Debbie

Sure, yeah. Yeah. I guess there’s two ways of working as a speech and language. There was probably multiple ways, but two main ways that we perhaps see it. And a traditional medical model might be more inclined to work directly on modifying or changing speech behaviours. A social model has very much more focus on empowering the person who stammers to be themselves, to speak, to use their voice. And I guess I see myself maybe as somewhere different, again, slightly so I think for me, and again, I do want to draw a difference between working with adults and children, because what you would do with an adult and what you would do with a child might be very different. Children don’t tend to have… Young children particularly don’t tend to have a lot of baggage around their stammering. It might be something that they cloak or it might be a bit annoying, but they don’t tend to have any feelings about it initially. Obviously that happens. But by the time you’re an adult, stammering has often become quite a complex issue that there might be fear around speaking, there might be shame, that there might be all sorts of feelings that are constellated around the speech behavior. And I guess, a goal that I always have at the back of my mind is to support someone to almost… Almost for the stammering to become irrelevant. So I think people who grow up stammering can become very identified with stammering. It can become a core part of their identity and it’s trying to maybe minimize that. And this is something that sometimes you do, it’s not who you are.

00:17:06 Rosemary

Right. So rather than saying I’m a stutterer, or like I’m autistic, or I’m adhd, you separate that out for them, or help them separate it out for themselves is probably more accurate.

00:17:20 Debbie

Yeah, I think it’s changing. I have got a story, Rosemary, that might help to illustrate it, but I think shifting the focus away from fluency sometimes to communication, so I think fluency on its own is a little bit, Who cares on one level, who cares if it takes you two or three seconds longer to say something, it doesn’t really matter, reduced to that level. But if you live in a society where there is stigma around that or judgment around that, or people maybe think you’re a bit slower, or not quite picking up on things, then it does become a problem. Somebody that I worked with recently, a lovely example, I think, of somebody who’s grown up having a lot of shame and anger around his stammering. So he’s now in his 40s and he came to therapy knowing that shame and anger were key pieces of what was going on with him regarding his stammerings. He actually came to stammering therapy because he was… He started to go through aa, so he had a history of alcoholism, and he described alcohol as a ‘magic potion that allowed him to be fluent’. And I think that’s a lovely illustration of what Gabor talks about. And he talks about the function of an addiction. So when working with people who are addicted, it’s, ‘what is this doing for you?’ And for Peter, it was allowing him to speak to share. He’s got a lot to say. Very bright, huge amount that he wants to say. And he was unable to say it when sober. And when we explored what was going on for him, two key memories came up for him. He actually used… He actually said, “they’re seared into my brain.” And one memory was of him being at junior school, where the teacher, trying to be helpful, highlighted that he was stammering and asked what he would like to happen around that. But she did it in front of the whole class, and they all laughed. And that’s seared into his brain. And the other memory that he had was of his nan’s quizzical look. And he had a good relationship with his nan. She obviously was not doing anything deliberate, but he, as he describes it, she used to give him this quizzical look when he stammered, as if she couldn’t quite work out what was going on. And he said in his little sort of young brain, he looked around him and thought, nobody else has this problem. I’m different. And he said, “I wanted to disappear.” And of course, as we know, those are big feelings. There’s a lot of shame around stammering. He also was part of him that was really angry. And when he voiced that, that part said, why don’t you all just go off and leave me alone? So there’s shame, anger, complex feelings. And so as an adult, he now is very scared about speaking out, because stammering is linked with feeling shame. Basically, one of the main things that we’ve been doing in therapy is we have worked directly with the shame, with that little child that’s feeling the shame. We’ve worked with that child part. And what we’re doing a lot of. We’re also trying to decouple fluency from communication. So he’s very much.. In order for me to speak out, he wants to speak out at an AA meeting. And in order to do that, he believes he needs to be fluent. And actually, we’re trying to shift his goal and sort of thinking, actually, do you need to be fluent, or is the outcome really about sharing and saying what you want to say, isn’t that the real goal? So it’s a combination of lots of different things, and parts come up. I want to talk. And there’s this part of me that puts the brakes on. So there’s lots going on that just needs to be worked through.

00:21:20 Rosemary

Yeah. That’s a beautiful story, very illustrative. And clearly, the more emotion involved in something you’re trying to say, the greater impact on your ability to communicate. So that’s a beautiful illustration. And that’s functional stammering?

00:21:38 Debbie

That would actually be developmental. So he’s stammered since childhood. Yeah. Yeah.

00:21:44 Rosemary

Okay. I wonder, Mandy, if you have a story that you’d like to share, something that illustrates a different aspect of stuttering for our listeners.

00:21:54 Mandy

Oh, yeah, I guess. I think another part, and I want to revisit my answer to your question earlier. Like, you know, stuttering. What is stuttering? And I. I think this just brings it back. I know I just mentioned, like, the core, like, what people hear. Right. The parts of stuttering that people hear. But stuttering is so much more than just what people hear. I know Debbie spoke to that. And stuttering involves feelings, thoughts, the environments in which we’re communicating with, the people that we’re communicating with, our listeners, our communities. And so I know that I just want to do a plug for that. And what has been so important to me in my work is offering exploration and getting curious about. Right. Like getting connected to community. So stuttering involves getting connected to the rich culture and community that exists out there. And so a lot of times with the children. I primarily work with young children to high school age, so adolescents. And then I also work with preschoolers, which are typically… I work with the parents of young children who stutter because, as Debbie mentioned earlier, oftentimes preschoolers aren’t really aware that they stutter, and their parents have more of the concern, which is a very loving thing that parents do and want to offer help. But one of the things that I always like to introduce is getting my clients connected to their community that’s out there. As someone who lived in a different generation, who was never connected with her community, whose parents was never afforded that privilege and gift, I. I find it just so critical, just as something for people, again, for the kids I work with, for the parents I work with, “Hey, did you know that there’s these lovely community full of young children who stutter? There’s parents of the young children who stutter that come to this space. There’s conferences across the country that people meet up for A whole day. There’s even an annual conference where we spend three days together where stuttering exists. And everyone has the choice to participate in whichever way they want to or not.”  That’s a beautiful thing too, in therapy, is that we offer agency. We offer a choice other than just focusing on fluency. And so getting to meet…. How critical it is to get to meet another child who stutters, whether or not how they stutter sounds like you, or maybe it does sound like you. “Oh, wow!” It’s seeing yourself in someone else that gives that permission, that invitation to, you know, to the wholeness, to acceptance, to. To discovery. And it’s really important. And I think not only is it so important for kids to be connected with other kids who stutter, but for the parents to not be alone on their island either. They’re just. They are the. As we like to say, they’re the expert of their child. And it’s really important that we get them connected to other experts of their children and let them know that they’re not alone in their journey in this space to grieve, perhaps to make space for that. To. To like, wow, I wish my child, you know, this. This perceived struggle, you know, like, oh, gosh, my child, I wish this wasn’t for them and just be able to have a safe space to talk with another parent. And maybe that parent says yes. And on the other side of that grief is this beautiful community where we can talk about our worries, or we can talk about our struggles, but also talk about our. Whether it’s. I don’t know if the word is win, but celebrate what it is to stutter. And it’s like Debbie says, yes, stuttering is not all of us. It’s a It’s a part of us. And we are. Our voices are. Are worthy. We can share them. We can be good communicators, confident communicators. And stuttering can be a part of communication. Or on days. Maybe there’s days now. I don’t want it to be a part of my communication and making space for it all, for individual choice in how we meet our stutter, but also that importance of. In the community. We see our allies as well. So it’s a lovely opportunity for speech therapists to come and learn from people who stutter. It’s the lived experience that is much more. More this, I think, much more. I don’t think the word is valid, but I just think it’s of much more importance than just a definition that maybe a graduate student might read in a book or, you know, unless you’re connected to the community, to the lived experience, you really don’t understand what stuttering is. So it’s… community has such rich resources, rich, varied, you know, and we also see intersectionality existing in this as well and just the beauty that lies there. And it’s incredible. And just a lot of witnessing that happens in community. Permission to explore, permission to make friends. We talk about, make friends with our stutter permission to take up space when maybe back home at school, we don’t always do, but here, but then it’s always nice to take that back within us and maybe again that curiosity, that invitation to maybe introduce that in a space that I’ve never been afforded.

00:27:43 Rosemary

What you’ve described is so rich and empowering for everyone. I love that. It’s beneficial to the therapists who attend. It’s beneficial to the parents, it’s beneficial to the children of whatever age they might be. So I have a question about this… growing up, stammering can be traumatic and something Debbie referenced earlier. We all quote Gabor Maté a lot in the Compassionate Inquiry, but if we use his definition of trauma not as the event that happens to us, but as the internal psychological and physiological wound that develops within, as a result of that event. Expanding on this, he characterizes trauma as a state of contraction in the system, resulting in rigidity, reduced flexibility, and a defensive, closed off way of engaging with the world. Mandy, obviously firsthand lived experience that how traumatic it can be to grow up with a stammer. I wonder if you could talk about that a little bit because you had that experience and I’m wondering how early it started. Are you okay sharing that with us?

00:28:53 Mandy

I walk into this beautiful question with just, yes, it started very early on, probably as early as 6 years old. I was raised in a house where stuttering was not okay. My father cured himself of, of his stutter. And so that was the narrative that was shared with me and that I, it was just any. I remember early on opening up my mouth and being yelled at by my father to stop, do that again. And it just right off the bat, did not, did not feel safe. So communication did not feel safe. Connection. I was, it was a fracture of that, of that safety of that connection. And it was assigned to me. “Ooh, something’s wrong with me. I don’t want to make my dad talk to me like that. I need to do something.” And so I, My parents. Well, well, before I move on. Now I understand my Father was born in a different generation. He was never allowed to know his stutter or to stutter himself. So I know now it was under all of underneath that, that anger and worry. It was worry, it was shame, it was grief for his own experience of being a. stutterer.. But moving forward, my mom took me to therapy and my first memories of therapy were going to the local hospital. And I’m sitting there with my mom in the waiting room and then a man in a white lab coat comes to me and I’m meant to go back into this room with him. I’m waving goodbye to my mom and kind of uncomfortable about that, but she sits in the waiting room and I go off to this room with this man who teaches me to put my hand in a fist and put it in my pocket and squeeze it when I talk. And you know, I’ve… I’ve done the work and I, I’ve unpacked. Like, I think those were early again. Another. Ooh, this does not feel good. I don’t like that I’m doing this, even putting my hand in my pocket. But this is what they’re telling me I gotta do, so I, I better do it, right? Not having choice but to just do what they tell me. And again, reinforcing how you talk is not okay. And you can’t do that. And then just my parents, their support in it was make sure you’re doing your exercises on your little… Your. We called em back then dittos… worksheets and make sure you’re doing that up there. And I would. What. The focus of the therapy was pure what we call fluency shaping, which is again, the focus was on making my speech fluent. So a lot, many, many hours of doing really, again, things that didn’t feel right to my body. My body would say no, but I, hey, it’s what they’re telling me. And so it would be. I think that’s where I, you know, I meet. That wholeness had to be denied in order to be something else, right? So that inauthenticity starts to set in. The connection to wholeness and self is no longer. And so I stepped into this like covert identity is what we call. Is where we’re hiding the stutter. It was further affirmed on those many first days of school, of our introductions and having to go around the room while everyone else. I know it’s a universal first day jitters. Everyone has them. It’s very normal. But for me, as a person who stutters, it was survival. It was like, how many kids are there in front of me. I mean, I would look around the room to count, okay, there’s 15 kids in front of me. Okay. And I’m sitting there in this state of panic. At the time, I never had any language to even know what was going on. But my body totally remembers sheer panic, wanting to escape. And in the moment when it came to, I was. I was born, all of my family members called me Mandy. But as you could just hear in that very authentic, beautiful open stutter, it was always hard to do that in introductions because when you introduce yourself, you’re just supposed to say your name right away and not trip up. And so I remember kids would laugh at me, and my teacher would say, Andy? Is your name Andy? And so couple that with already being like, I hate doing this. And so this survival mode came in and like, oh, when you say Amanda, you don’t stutter. So then I’d have this marked moment. Oh, I’m going to introduce myself as Amanda now so I don’t stutter. And that was another layer of this response to this, to the trauma, to the, like, I can’t live with this. I don’t know what to do with this. And so this is going to bring me ease and I can.

00:33:43 Rosemary

Oh, go ahead. Can we just take a moment and send some, like, compassion and appreciation to that part of you who came up with that brilliant solution? “Amanda. I’ll just introduce myself as Amanda.” Like, what a brilliant strategy.

00:34:01 Mandy

 Right? Just like this innocent. No one else. Again, no speech therapist ever told me how to self disclose, which we do now. Like to tell people that you said or can help with mitigating listener reactions and, you know, just letting the cat out of the bag should you choose to do so. But no, I. I was never afforded any of those tools. So, yeah, I found it innocent. Innocently on my own. And how beautiful for survival, she found Amanda. But on the other side of that, it just further affirmed this is you can’t be yourself. You have to do what they tell you. You have to talk this way, even though you don’t like it. And those strategies they teach you, they never work. But we’re going to keep going.

00:34:42 Rosemary

It’s the classic attachment versus authenticity decision. Like to stay in your dad’s good graces and to adapt to the world you lived in, you abandoned little Mandy and became Amanda. Who? The masked virgin. And it’s just sending little Mandy some compassion for that. 

Mandy: Thank you, 

Rosemary: Debbie. What would you like to say? 

00: 35:07 Rosemary
We’re taking a brief pause to share what’s on offer in The Compassionate Inquiry Community. Stay with us. We’ll be right back. The Compassionate Inquiry Suicide Attention training is for therapists, health professionals and others working in therapeutic, healing, educational, medical or coaching roles. If you’re seeking sensitive training to help you recognize and support people in your communities who may be experiencing suicidal distress, tap the link in the show notes. It will take you to a webpage where you can learn more about this training and decide if it’s a good fit for you.

00:35:45 Rosemary

Debbie, what would you like to say?

00:35:47 Debbie

Yeah, I think I just want to flag as well. I think this is maybe where Mandy and I would see things slightly differently with little children. I referenced earlier that I think thinking about stammering, for me, it’s very different at different ages. When I’m with little children who stammer, I notice that I don’t want to give them the identity of someone who stammers because I’m more inclined to try and support their natural fluency. I totally agree with Mandy that I don’t like techniques. I don’t like doing anything to somebody’s nervous system. I just don’t think rule in life, really don’t impose things from the outside on somebody’s nervous system because it tends not to go well. But I do think there is a place for supporting children to find their natural fluency. And we know that the brain is very plastic, particularly under seven. And we know that children who grow up stammering are more likely to be bullied. They’re more at risk of mental health difficulties, particularly social anxiety, but also other mental health difficulties. And we know that those implications can go on into adulthood. They can affect people’s quality of life, job opportunities. So I am much more inclined if I have a young child, to think, not to use techniques. Absolutely agree with Mandy, but to work, to think, okay, how do we support you to speak fluently more often? Because the brain is very plastic. Sometimes I see it as, is your brain practicing stammering or is it practising fluency? And if we can support it to practice fluency, that probably is going to make life easier for you. And it’s not about… For me, it’s not about denying the stammering. It’s just a recognition that, to be honest, life is easier if you’re fluent. But I think as you get older, as children get older, as you have teenagers and adults, then I think you very much. For me, it’s much easier then, because you can have a conversation about stuff, stammering. And some people might say, look, I really don’t want to do this. What can I do to do it less? Other people might be actually, this is who I am. This is how I speak. I’m embracing this. And I think as people get older, you can have that conversation. But I find it trickier with young children because there’s a lot. There’s a lot to be thinking. There’s a lot to be thinking about. And I don’t think children can make those decisions for themselves. And one of my colleagues made an interesting observation. I thought that’s true because there has been a way move away recently from direct intervention on speaking that one of my colleagues made the point that there’s no other area of parenting where a child is probably obviously struggling to master something, where the parents don’t offer support in some way. Pretty much everything else, whether it’s reading or learning to ride your bike, you support your child, you coach your child, you support. And I’m not quite sure why we see stammering as different from that. I think, can we not support that in a very honoring way? Not doing some of the things that the man in the white coat did to you, Mandy, because it’s clearly not appropriate. Even the idea of leaving your mum, just feels very strange, actually going off with a strange man.

00:39:16 Rosemary

Yeah. Thank you, Debbie. Absolutely. I’m wondering if we can take a 90 degree turn and speak a little bit more about functional stammering. Debbie, you mentioned before we began that there’s been a huge increase in the recent years in the UK in functional stammering. I’m wondering if you have ideas about what’s driving this increase. Let’s turn the spotlight on functional stammering a bit.

00:39:42 Debbie

Yes, I have ideas, certainly. I guess we don’t have the research to back the ideas up, but I guess we do have more research about functional neurological disorder. And functional stammering can occur as part of that. Not always. And I guess that the way there’s a professor in London, Mark Edwards, who explains functional neurological disorder, or fnd shorter way of saying it, as burdens on the nervous system. And he uses a biopsychosocial model to talk about that, which is something I know that Gabor talks about a lot as well. So this idea that we all have a biopsychosocial equation, so we all have certain biological things going on. So me at the moment menopause, or that somebody might have a viral illness or be living with sickle illness, we all have a psychological makeup. Some of us are prone to anxiety. We might be prone to perfectionism. We all have certain psychological traits that may or may not be helpful. We all have coping strategies that may or may not be helpful. And we all have social pressures, so we might be worried about our job or our finances or our relationships. And the biopsychosocial model recognizes that all of these elements are key for our health. So traditional medicine just looks through a biological lens and this is a broader way of looking. And basically, I guess if we see nervous systems as being burdened, I think again, this is my opinion, in recent years there have been lots of burdens for people. So certainly in the UK at the moment we have what we call cost of living crisis. So people are having to work really hard just to stand still. So people are working hard. We had a COVID pandemic. A lot of people got ill. People were left with long Covid. We know that we have escalating mental health crises. So psychologically people aren’t doing so well. So I guess it’s not surprising, maybe that some of those burdens get. Can get somatized, if you like. Some of those burdens show up in the nervous system. So that’s not research based, but that would be my sense.

00:42:12 Rosemary

Yeah, that makes sense. Given the state of chaos in the world right now, the number of wars going on, what’s happening politically, all of the polarization that’s going on everywhere, it seems like the future, the present and the future are very uncertain. So really, just to make sure, I’m mirroring back what you said, like everything going on around us can add to that burden.

00:42:34 Debbie

Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. We live in a culture in the west where we override the signals of our nervous system all the time. So we might be completely exhausted or we might have the virus and we think, I have to get up, I have to get to work, or I have to get the kids to school, or I have to meet that deadline. We constantly overriding the signals from our nervous system. We’re not good at listening to our bodies and that doesn’t tend to end well for us. I think there’s various things going on and we know that certain people are more susceptible to functional conditions. And a lot of what we know would very much echo Gabor’s work. So we know that people who tend to have difficulty saying no, people who might suppress emotion, people who are maybe hyper responsible, take on the problems of everyone else and ignore their own needs, are more susceptible. Certainly there’s functional voice literature.

00:43:37 Rosemary

Wow. Functional stuttering. Is there someone you’ve worked with? Perhaps you could share their story to illustrate what you just said?

00:43:45 Debbie

Yes, absolutely. That I worked with. He’d been stammering for six months when I met him, in his 40s, so no history of stammering, but had started stammering. And the first time that I met was actually in hospital outpatient department. What struck me was how agitated he was. So he was really very agitated. And I have to admit, I had a thought went through my mind, gosh, what are you doing here in an outpatient department? Because you should be getting more help. Anyway, Tony came into the room and blocking very significantly. So speaking was very tense. He was struggling to say anything at all. He’d actually been refused input at a mental health unit because he was unable to speak, which made me quite angry at the time. So it was really having quite significant impact on his life. When I took the case history, as we do, a few things struck me. One of the key things was that he had experienced multiple bereavements over a period of 15 years, including the loss of a child to suicide. And as we were speaking, he was just rocking and vibrating. He was so tense. He said, I bottle things up. My mind is constantly wearing. I can’t switch my head off. I have headaches 24 7. I have nightmares. And he couldn’t really exhale. But I noticed with him that his breathing was so held that he couldn’t exhale. I described. I saw it as a pressure cooker. I used that term with him because he just felt like he was a pressure cooker. And it just felt to me that he was holding so much grief. And we tried to do a little bit of work on breathing, and that was quite difficult for him. And he had some suicidal thoughts. He was saying, so it’s better if I were not here. And long story short, I saw him for four sessions and we did a combination of breathing work. And we also explored why he was holding on to this grief, what was not allowing him to move through. And he saw suppressing emotion as strong and expressing emotion was weak. And he also had a belief that if you cry, you forget about people. So that was another unhelpful belief that was sort of getting in the way. And so I gently challenged those beliefs. We talked about those, we explored where they come from. They came from his childhood. Unsurprisingly, it’s what he’d learned as a child. And gradually. It wasn’t actually very long, really, to be honest. For the first couple of sessions, I thought, I’m not sure anything’s happening. I’m not sure anything’s Changing third session, still wasn’t sure. And he came to the fourth session, and he said, I’ve been practicing the breathing that we’ve done. He said, I noticed that when I’m really wound up, I’m holding my breath, 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. But the big thing that he’d started to do, which he hadn’t been doing, was he’d started to talk to his wife about how he felt. Talking about their child had been a forbidden subject, and he realized that it was helpful to talk about their child. And 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. And that was his talking about suicide. And what struck me. Lots of things struck me, actually. But one of the things that struck me was it didn’t take very much, actually. So he was then could go on to have meds. So he’s now able to talk more easily. You know, his journey isn’t over. He still has to process that grief. But actually, when he left, I thought, okay, now you’re in a position where you will be able to with longer support. He’s actually referred onto some mental health services. And I think what struck me about that was that he didn’t need a lot of support to be able to do that. And that was a bit of a lesson that sometimes we think these things will be very difficult to turn around.

00:48:09 Rosemary

Yeah. What’s striking me is, I think… you said you used a term when you started speaking about him, that his ability to communicate was… stopped? Is that what you said?

00:48:18 Debbie

Blocking?

00:48:19 Rosemary

Yeah, blocking. Okay, blocking. Perfect. Because you were so right. He was blocking a lot. He was blocking. But it wasn’t only his voice. It was his emotions. It was all this grief. It was like blocking. Bottling up like that was probably a very helpful coping strategy when he was young. So, Mandy, I would like to turn to you and ask, as someone who has been a stutterer, who has come to accept her stuttering, what does our audience. What do the listeners need to know? Or what would be beneficial for the listeners to know about during an interaction, a stutterer, how to communicate in a way that is supportive to that person.

00:49:06 Mandy

Thank you, Rosemary, for this beautiful offering of how can we support each other? How can we support. If we meet someone who stutters, how can we support with them? And I think one of the biggest. And it’s really simple. But I think we’ve just talked about it. You just mentioned how fast paced this world that we live in is. And our bodies are humming on that vibration is too. A lot of the times we’re feeling like we have to hurry up and everywhere. And really what we like to see in this community is stuttering.

00:49:35 Mandy

It allows invitation to slow down for more presence, for more connection, for intimacy. And so really just time, just a little bit of patience goes so long and so just being as present as possible and neutral, non verbal. So our body language. But again, I want to honor our listeners who. Whose bodies aren’t really familiar with stuttering. And when they hear it, it might be, ooh, that’s different. And so our facial features might change a little bit because our body’s like, oh, that’s new, you know, so again, non judgmental there. I want to offer that. But try to be neutral in your body language. Refrain from finishing what the person is saying as much as we think that’s going to help that person, but also asking, how can I support you? Is it, you know, if you know the person really well? Because not everyone who stutters will openly disclose too. So yes, they may be stuttering in front of you, but maybe they’ve chosen not to go more into it. So really just that universal precaution, so to speak, or just universal invitation to just listen and refrain from saying or filling in words. Understanding that stuttering is just a different way of speaking. And yeah, it takes two to stutter. I want to say that it takes two to stutter. So thank you.

00:51:04 Rosemary

I almost jumped in at just honoring the person as a human being. Yes, thank you. I can’t believe this, but we are almost out of time. Something that we like to do on this podcast is to invite our guests to close. You know, you have the ear of many, many people who will be listening to this episode when it’s released. What pearl of wisdom suggestion quote, piece of advice would you like to leave them with as it relates to stuttering or stammering?

00:51:39 Debbie

Debbie. Gosh. Wow. Yeah, maybe just leaving people with the invitation to just to consider that, as you mentioned, Rosemary, a lot of people stammer. There’s a lot of people. So if you’re a teacher or a trainer, it’s very likely that even if there aren’t overt stammering behaviors, that people are struggling to speak. So I just want us to live in a world where that’s understood more. Maybe allow people to volunteer when to speak. Give people choice, just be conscious that. Yeah. That there might be people struggling to. Or not confident to speak. We all have a role in supporting that and being aware of that. I think we’re very aware as a society now, certainly in the west, we’re very aware of people with mobility issues that if you’re in a wheelchair, you have to have wheelchair access. We’re very good at being aware of those issues. And I think when it comes to communication, we’re really not there. We really judge it in different ways. We just don’t respect that some people are having to work quite hard.

00:52:46 Rosemary

Yeah. So rather than a mobility access or a lack of mobility access, parking spot, we create a little bit of space in our conversations.

00:52:56 Debbie

Absolutely. Yeah.

00:52:57 Rosemary

Lovely. Thank you, Debbie. Mandy, what would you like to share as your final words before we wrap up?

00:53:04 Mandy

Yeah, I think just going off as Debbie, so beautifully said. I think it’s on. It’s holding that space. I think it’s this invitation, as I, the wonderful Dr. Joshua St. Peter says, it takes two to stutter. And so that invitation for that space to hold that space for stuttering to exist is what I invite our amazing, wonderful listeners around the world for. That invitation to allow stuttering to exist. Be that other person, have that choice. I’d like to invite them to consider that. And from that could be connection. And that’s what we’re all here to be. Right. Connected.

00:53:44 Rosemary

So beautiful answer. Mandy Rodstrom, Debbie Mason, thank you both so much for being guests with me today here on The Gifts of Trauma podcast by Compassionate Inquiry. It’s been an absolute delight to explore this topic with you both.

00:54:00 Debbie

Thank you, Rosemary. It’s been a real pleasure.

00:54:03 Mandy

Thank you, Rosemary and Debbie. An honor.

00:54:13 Rosemary

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