I Have a Voice

was lucky in that I never went through traditional speech therapy. So my vision was not colored by other people’s ideas of what stuttering was all about. Consequently, I ended up foraging on my own for answers, and by the age of 30, I had a different picture of stuttering than virtually anybody else I knew. I had also fully recovered, and this recovery has held for more than 35 years.
What I discovered during my recovery process was that my stuttering was not a speech problem per se, but a problem with my experience of communicating to others. That was why I never stuttered when I was alone. I was not communicating with anyone. I also learned that my stuttering not only involved my speech, but all of me, and that included my emotions, perceptions, beliefs, intentions, and physiological responses. These elements were joined together in a spider-like web of interconnections, where a change at any point caused a change at all the other points. In short, I had to look at stuttering as an interactive, dynamic, self-sustaining system. If I wanted to achieve a lasting recovery, I had to address, not just my speech, but the entire system. Forces that shaped my thinking
An important part of this system was the way I thought about stuttering and about myself. Early in the recovery process, I began to question my way of seeing things. Was the world really such a threatening place, at least on a social level? Or was I creating it that way? Why didn’t everyone tense in the presence of authorities? Why didn’t other people panic when they had to give their name, or when they had to speak on the telephone to strangers? How was I managing to frame the world in such a negative way?
I eventually discovered that when I blocked, I did so to prevent myself from experiencing things I didn’t want to experience. But if it was I who created my speech blocks, then I needed to understand why I held myself back and blocked. What was I afraid of? What didn’t I want to see? What might happen if I let go? And how could I make my world less threatening?
There were two books back in the early 60s that provided me with a novel way to approach these issues. Both had to do with the running of my mind.
The first was a book called Psycho-Cybernetics by a plastic surgeon named Maxwell Maltz. Maltz makes a compelling case for the fact that your unconscious mind accomplishes whatever your conscious mind puts before it – similar to the way a technician programs a computer.
He points out that when confronting a performance fear – such as whether you can make the two-foot putt that wins the golf tournament – if you mentally image only what you’re afraid might happen, you’ll probably miss the putt. You need to focus all your attention on the desired positive outcome.
The problem is, my mind is also programmed to keep me safe by focusing on any imminent danger, such as the black widow spider on the ceiling or the footsteps behind me as I walk alone at night down a dark street. Not to think about the danger is counter-intuitive. Yet, I must do just that when dealing with a performance fear such as stuttering. The book offered some simple but compelling rules for how my mind worked.
The second book, S. I. Hayakawa’s Language in Thought and Action, was a simplified presentation of general semantics, developed in the 30s by Alfred Korzybski, one of the brilliant minds of the day. General semantics looks at how our habits of thinking color our experiences, and how the structure of language itself forces us to see things in a particular way. Thanks to general semantics, I had a platform from which I could step outside my normal frames of reference and observe and reframe my day-to-day experiences, thus making my world more manageable and less stressful.
Now fast forward 35 years. In early 2002 I received an email from Linda Rounds, a 38-year-old human resources director of a company in Indiana whom I had met over the Internet. Linda wrote to tell me that thanks to my book plus several telephone sessions with a remarkable individual named Bobby Bodenhamer, she had abruptly put an end to a lifelong stuttering problem.
I quickly got in touch with Bob to find out more. It appeared that Bob was a practitioner and teacher of something called neuro-semantics (NS). I discovered that NS is a further development of neuro-linguistic programming (NLP) which, in turn, is a further development of general semantics, the discipline I had found so helpful back in the 60s. Now my interest was really piqued.
It was apparent from the first emails and later, through several phone conversations that Bob Bodenhamer and I were on the same wavelength. Although he had never stuttered himself, Bob had an intuitive understanding of issues that are central to stuttering. This is in part because neuro-semantics, which Bob teaches, addresses the very challenges that I had wrestled with when I was trying to overcome my own stuttering.
I was especially interested in what Bob had to say because, as a person who recovered from stuttering, I have frequently been asked how I got over it. After I tell my story, people naturally ask what they can do to follow in the same path.
Until very recently, I didn’t have much to offer when it came to the mind management aspect of stuttering. Maltz’s book is still relevant in a general way, but many people want guidance on specific steps they can take to address their blocking. And general semantics, though still valid in its precepts, also does not directly offer specific approaches and exercises on how to address the issues associated with stuttering.
All that has changed with the publication of this book.A new resource
I Have a Voice is a compendium of concepts and tools that use the principles of Neuro-Semantics to reframe the