Author: Kevin Lee (SHB Lead Editor)
Most stutterers who haven’t joined a stuttering organisation have the fantasy that one day they’ll no longer have a stutter as long as they work hard enough to be fluent. But as the years pass by, they start to realise, whether they want to acknowledge it or not, that their stutter keeps popping up during their speech, and it just never seems to go away.
To continue to have the fantasy of eventual perfect fluency, and at the same time this realisation of the stutter not going away is a very see-saw way to exist which is just not sustainable. It’s unhealthy, mentally. Living with these two types of expectations is, if I can take liberty with my comparison, a schizophrenic way to exist. You no longer feel like a singular unit as a person, but split into two.
To become whole again, I think the healthiest path is to admit to yourself that you have a stutter and allow it be a part of you, just like if you were to have a mole on your face and you admit that it’s there and there’s nothing you can do to make it go away, no matter how hard you rub at it with a napkin.
You “own” your stutter because you admit it is something you have, and you take custody of . You take it in stride. That way you can move forward once again as a whole person who just happens to have a stutter as one of your characteristics, and you can take on future challenges that lay before you in your ordinary course of life.
Instead of being someone who is divided and unsure of your abilities as a person, you can be confident once again, which, if you think about it, was the thing you were looking for this whole time.
Having friends who stutter who also subscribe to this mentality of acceptance is important for you to maintain self-acceptance, because you will probably have days when you want to revert back to your old way of thinking and be tempted to treat stuttering as something outside of yourself that you can eventually get rid of.
As long as you have these friends who can remind you that they also accept their stuttering, through osmosis you’ll also be more easily able to maintain the acceptance of your stutter.
Here’s a good video by a stutterer who lives in the U.S. who talks about accepting his stutter.
At 9m55sec
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