I Have a Voice

about his mis-speaking as a young boy. He was teased by his brother who put him down and who judged him because he stuttered. Important to the creation of negative meaning frames, Bertie’s father also judged him harshly without showing any mercy. This is deadly to the PWS. Logue comments:
“You don’t need to be afraid of the things you were afraid of at five. You are your own man now.”
What great frames! The past-is-the-past and what you feared as a five-year-old doesn’t need to be fearful now as a man. You once were controlled by others, now you are your own person. Breaking these judgment frames is critical. PWS have to master the childish fear that others will judge them for failing to be fluent.
And yet, even more important, is that they will have to master their own self-judgments.
The movie portrays this in a fascinating way. It occurs when Logue invites the King to read a famous text. When he does so, because he can hear himself, he is simultaneously judging himself. But when Logue turns up some music and plays it so loudly the King cannot hear himself reading, he reads the literature fluently, only he does not recognize it. And because he is so impatient, so self-critical, so non-accepting of the process, he storms out. However, he takes with him the recording that Logue has made and at a later time, late at night, he puts on the record and listens. He is amazed! The recording only recorded his voice and not the loud music – and he was reading fluently. Why? What was the difference? When he could not hear himself, he was unable to judge himself.
5. True to your own emotions – The movie portrays another process when Logue provokes the King to anger. He notices that when the King gets angry enough to curse, at that point he does not stutter. “Do you know the ‘F’word?” he asks. At another time he “reproves” and “commands” him regarding sitting in a chair, “You can’t sit there!” It frustrates and angers the King to be talked to that way by a commoner! Logue thus brings his ability to be fluent-while-cursing to his attention.
What’s going on here? Bertie is frustrated and angry enough to curse – and when he curses, he is fluent! When he curses, he moves beyond the frame of caring what people may think should he stutter. Bertie is true to his emotions – to himself. This leads to fluency, because, generally speaking, PWS dismiss their emotions. Indeed, they believe that to give themselves permission to feel their emotions will result somehow in their being hurt. This belief is rooted in Bertie’s childhood experiences with his brother and his father.
6. Focusing elsewhere – Finally there is the scene where Logue brings Bertie into his home. There is a model plane on the table in the process of being put together. When the King was a child he was not allowed to play with model planes, so Logue encourages him to play with it. As he becomes preoccupied and focuses on the plane, his speech gets more and more fluent. Ah, again, this is an experience that moves him outside of his usual frames of judgment, of disapproval, and of over-consciousness of speaking.
Due to his lack of knowledge of the yet-to-be-discovered field of cognitive psychology, Logue was limited in what he could do to help the King. The book you now have in your hand is filled with suggestions and patterns that will assist you in changing those negative meanings that have been driving your stuttering. Remember, as with the King, when you change the meanings about stuttering, the speaking changes. And that’s the potential we wish for you to unleash!
Notes:
1 Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fourth Edition (DSM-IV). (2000). Washington, DC: American Psychological Association.
Our first article on stuttering was based on basic general semantic ideas. You can find it at: http://www.masteringstuttering.com/articles/how-to-create-a-good-dose-of-stuttering/.

Foreword
by John C. Harrison
One evening a while ago I received an email from my friend Professor Judith Kuster, who is webmaster for the Stuttering Home Page at Mankato State University.
“I have a challenging little puzzle for you,” she wrote. “See if you can solve it. Here are ten numbers. Can you tell me why they’re in the order they’re in? The numbers are 8549176320.”
There was no way I could pass up this challenge. I dropped everything and started wrestling with the puzzle. Now, I pride myself on having a mind that can grasp numbers, even if I can never get my checkbook to balance. I tried everything to make it work. I looked for hidden numerical sequences. I tried dividing numbers by other numbers. I tried multiplying them. I looked for exotic progressions. I wrestled with this conundrum on and off for the better part of two days. No luck. I just couldn’t get those numbers to unlock their secret.
Finally, in utter frustration, I wrote back to Judy. “I give up,” said. “I need to get a good night’s sleep. Tell me the answer.”
A little later came her reply. “They’re in alphabetical order.”
It was so simple. Why couldn’t I think of that?
I couldn’t think of it because I was stuck in a traditional way of approaching number puzzles. I had made certain unconscious assumptions about how the problem needed to be addressed. I did not know that I had limited my solutions. But the model within which I was working automatically ruled out non-numerical solutions.
This same habit of thinking “inside the box” explains why for the 80 years since the birth of speech pathology, most people have not been able to solve the mystery of stuttering. Our paradigm, or model, of stuttering has forced us to look at the problem through a set of filters that have masked out relevant information and issues. In short, for 80 years, stuttering has been incorrectly characterized, and as a result, most of us have been trying to solve the wrong problem.
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