Articles

Mindfulness and stammering Signal Issue 26, Winter 2006
Carolyn Cheasman is currently taking a Masters in Mindfulness Based Approaches.
This training offers a range of Eastern and Western practices and thinking, combined in a way which makes some ancient wisdoms accessible to modern Western lives.
The approach has been further developed by UK practioners into Mindfulness Based Cognitive Therapy.
This transcript is drawn from a conversation between Carolyn and Bracha Ophir, an Israeli psychotherapist, art therapist and specialist in stammering,who attended the IFA Congress in Dublin.


CC: I understand you have an interest in Buddhism and applying some of its ideas to working with people who stammer.

BO: I’m studying Buddhist philosophy with a small group of psychologists in Israel. People always focus on the past and the future, but Buddhism says you must be ‘here and now’, not thinking about past experiences or future expectations. When you meditate, you try to be in the present moment. You may have many kinds of thoughts and associations – it’s natural, but you train yourself to be empty, not to think about anything. So, how can this help stuttering? Well, sometimes people who stutter feel very anxious and try to avoid stuttering based on past experiences and future predictions. This approach emphasises the present, rather than thinking about what has been or will be, or beliefs such as ‘I don’t want to stutter’. It does not seek to change or improve anything. I encourage clients to speak in this moment, whatever happens, to really be in the experience – and not to worry. You really have to train to do this – it isn’t easy to achieve. Another thing is that, if you take the word ‘stutter’, the word itself brings associations and stories. We can see, for example, if a child has Down’s Syndrome – sometimes you don’t see the child because you see the diagnosis of Down’s Syndrome – and it’s similar with stuttering. You don’t see the child, you see a stutterer. We have to train ourselves to be without predconceptions … You know, in Israel there are people who are always studying the Bible and this approach couldn’t be used at the beginning of therapy because nobody comes to therapy seeking meditation. You have to establish a good rapport before working in this way. Some people are ready for it, but it’s not for everybody. I worked with an adolescent who was ready to meditate but it took time – stutterers often want to be in control, nobody wants to lose control. He learned to give names to all his thoughts and to be in his thoughts.

CC: When you meditate, you notice your thoughts arising, you notice them come and go, and you become aware that ‘these are all things that I’m creating in my head’.

BO: Yes, we create our own stories. I tell myself that I can’t do something – nobody else tells me. If I can get rid of this thought, I can change my story. If you speak in the moment, you don’t get stuck on the stuttering – not before, not after. You really can keep going. You stutter less, most of the time.

CC: There’s a different focus…

BO: … and this can improve stuttering.

One client came because he changed jobs and needed to talk to people in the United States using teleconferencing. He was feeling very afraid. I worked with him using this method because all the anxieties he felt were based on past experiences.

CC: There are certainly some similarities to the work I’m doing. So far I haven’t brought this directly into my work with clients, although next summer I’m planning to run an eight week course called ‘Mindfulness Meditation for People Who Stammer’. It’s going to be based on something call Mindfulness Based Cognitive Therapy which is being developed by people who’ve worked with clients recovering from depression. They found it very helpful in preventing relapse. Already, in groups, I ask people to notice, without judging, what’s going through their head and maybe also physical aspects as well – so it’s awareness of cognitions, emotions and behaviour. You can bring this non-judgemental awareness to all aspects of your experience.

BO: Exactly. You can develop observation exercises. Even to sit in front of a beach and take a little piece of the sea – what do you see there? Instead of seeing the wide things (the beach and the sand), you can discover many things. Or if you watch a small spot on your hand – what do you see? When people observe small things, they become more aware.

CC: There are two key things I think are relevant – awareness and acceptance. I’m interested in how mindfulness work might help people to really develop an unconditional acceptance of themselves as people who stammer. I was struck by a line from Tony Di Lollo’s keynote presentation. He was talking about a client who’d written a piece from the perspective of her stammer, in the first person. She wrote ‘As long as Lisa doesn’t like me, I have a chance’. I feel that really encapsulates a lot of what I believe.

BO: You must not try to ‘improve’ – because being forced to change things makes you unhappy. You have to accept – not to change.

CC: … And this is a radical invitation to deal with our experience in a different way – because what we naturally do, as human beings, is try to be happier. We struggle against what is, and in doing so, maybe quite often increase our anxiety and unhappiness. We can see this operating in stuttering. Coversely, for many people, if they can just allow themselves to be who they are, they actually become more fluent. We introduce people to desensitisation strategies, but there’s a real, understandable tendency for people to say ‘OK, I’ll be open about my stammering or reduce my avoidance if it will make me more fluent’. What’s really hard is to just allow ourselves to be with what is, without viewing this as a way of getting somewhere else. This is particularly hard in our Western 21st century culture where we’re always being invited to buy this, achieve this, change this because we will somehow be happier.

BO: Exactly – but just because you are not trying to change, it doesn’t mean that you have no motivation to learn and achieve.

CC: … No. It’s not the same as resignation. Catherine Montgomery was saying that acceptance isn’t the same as saying ‘I’ll just lie down and give up all hope’, but rather ‘this is how things are at this moment in time’. That’s what this work can maybe help people to do – to develop some true acceptance of who they are right now.

BO: Yes. I think we have to say ‘You can’t be perfect, you are good enough’… We are training people to ‘be’ and to accept this moment. In Israel right now, the situation is very bad. It’s very difficult for me to be here. And I try, first of all, not to be in my thoughts and, really, to be here and now, till I go back. If not, I don’t think I could participate.

CC: Do you believe that your work on meditation is helping you to do that?

BO: Of course, I’m sure of it. You have to experience it to believe in it.

CC: Yes, I’ve been meditating for two years now, more extensively for the past 10 months. I don’t think it’s something that you can offer to clients without experiencing yourself.

BO: No. I went to India for two months. I heard a lecture from the Dalai Lama in the north and liked it very much. Then I began to study in the group of psychologists. We did lectures, but also learned meditation and patience for supervision. We learned walking meditations in which you become aware how you pick up your leg, how you meet the ground – all of these automatic things that you never have the time to pay attention to. You can observe/feel how you breathe etc.

CC: I think physical meditations can be very helpful. Sometimes people find meditation hard initially – their minds are very busy and walking meditations can be a very useful place to start. But it’s also about integrating the practices into your everyday life, so sometimes you’re having a shower or doing the washing up mindfully. Another concept we’ve been introduced to is the contrast between ‘the being mind’ and ‘the doing mind’. Normally we spend a lot of our time in doing mode. That can really help us function in life, but it’s not very helpful for other things, eg, difficult emotional issues that we may try to solve in our head. When we practise meditation, we are trained to just ‘be’. I think, as speech therapists, we’re trained to ‘do’, and our clients come along expecting and wanting to ‘do’, so this is a very different orientation.

BO: Of course, I agree with you. When you are correcting articulation, you are ‘doing’. But when the family of a stutterer comes to you, they want you to take the stutter out, like an operation. And it takes time to work with the family and with the stutterer to accept it, which in turn reduces the stuttering, the anxiety and suffering.

CC: . It seems we are thinking along some very similar lines – thank you for a really interesting conversation.



carolyn.cheasman@citylit.ac.uk