An Important Reframe of “Success” in Stuttering (and Life)

My clinical assignment for the quarter stared me in the face: Teenage Stuttering Camp.

I was rounding out my second year of graduate school, and this was my last little hurdle. I loved the stuttering sub-discipline but was not particularly thrilled by the idea of working with a group of teenagers. In many ways, I still felt like a teenager myself. And, at 24, I wasn’t too far from the technical definition of one. Toddlers were my comfort zone.

We were overstaffed for the camp, so I was paired with a friend—a fellow student clinician—and one client, Luci. Within minutes of meeting her, a few things were clear about Luci: she was incredibly bright, had a vibrant personality, and stuttered very severely. I mean “stuttered very severely” in a strictly clinical sense; Luci scored in the “very severe” category during her fluency assessment. She stuttered through the majority of spoken syllables, with stuttering moments often lasting for many seconds at a time.

Over the course of the “camp” (a euphemism for “therapy intensive”), I watched as Luci completed assessments, rated her own attitudes around communication, and participated in group activities. She practiced fluency shaping strategies and stuttering modification techniques, monologuing and reading aloud passages again and again and again.

I was in awe of the process. It works, I thought. When she used the tools provided to her, Luci was totally fluent—she didn’t stutter. At all. She prepared for a culminating presentation in front of a large group of peers and parents and clinicians. In these practice sessions, Luci consistently achieved 0% stuttered syllables. (We counted.)

But as it turned out, Luci had more to teach me than I had to teach her.

On the day of the presentation, Luci stood up at the podium and stuttered up a storm. It took her maybe 15 minutes to get through a couple of paragraphs’ worth of text.

As she fought her motor system during that presentation, Luci changed my perspective on my own discipline.

Why did it feel like we were measuring success by the percentage of stuttered syllables?

What if the goal had been to witness her stuttering – celebrate it, even – and help her feel good about herself, proud of her accomplishments?

Why does society say that fluent speech is “good” and stuttered speech is not?

And what if the solution is not to change Luci, but to change the rest of us?