I Have a Voice

some fears of speaking that were rooted in childhood. Once he realized that he was mentally causing the stutter, he thanked me, paid me and left. And as far as I know, he gained complete fluency. The key for him was understanding that he was creating the stuttering, that it was neither something physical nor out of his control.
I have been working as a practitioner of Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP) since 1990. A major component of my work has been in dealing with fears, anxiety and phobias. Over those 14 years I have worked with hundreds of clients – approximately three thousand hours of therapy. NLP offers a model for understanding and for changing the way someone makes meaning of their experience, based on how they perceive their world in terms of language, thoughts, states and behaviors. NLP offers effective techniques which can be used widely: in therapy, sales, management, relationships, and, yes, for dealing with stuttering and much more. You will learn more about how change happens as the book unfolds.
Excited about the results with Charles, I wrote up a case study of the therapy and sent it to my colleague Michael Hall. He expanded this case study into an article, “Meta-Stating Stuttering: Approaching Stuttering Using NLP and Neuro-Semantics”, which I then posted on our website:
http://www.neurosemantics.com/Articles/Stuttering.htm
After posting the article, I was contacted by a friend of mine whom I had worked with early in my practice. We had worked on his stuttering years earlier but that hadn’t helped him. After reading the article he called me and asked me if I had learned something new. I told him that I sure had and for him to come on over. Six months after our one hour session I saw him again and asked him how the stuttering was. He paused briefly, wrinkled his brow, and replied, “I guess I have forgotten to stutter.” “Well,” I said, “that sure is a great thing to forget to do.”
Needless to say, I was elated with that outcome. However, the major breakthrough came in the spring of 2002 when Linda Rounds emailed me from Indiana. In her search to overcome her stuttering she had read a work by Anthony Robbins at the recommendation of John Harrison. From Anthony Robbins she learned about NLP, so she searched Amazon.com for NLP books and found the book I co-authored with Michael Hall, The User’s Manual for the Brain. From that she obtained my email address and wrote to ask me if I could assist her. In just a few therapy sessions on the phone and via some emails, Linda gained complete fluency. Wow, was I excited. As a result, Linda and I wrote an article entitled “From Stuttering to Stability: A Case Study.” John Harrison published the article in the National Stuttering Association newsletter, Letting Go. I have included the complete article in Appendix B.
Because of this article I have had the opportunity to work with several People Who Stutter (PWS), including the speech pathologist Tim Mackesey, SLP (Speech Language Pathologist). It was somewhat ironic to assist to fluency a speech pathologist who had blocked and stuttered most of his life. Tim is now using my techniques in his own practice near Atlanta, Georgia, working with people who block and stutter.
Tim’s website is: www.stuttering-specialist.com.
Let me say up front that not everyone has attained fluency but many have. Importantly, out of all the people I have worked with, I am confident that all of them have the capacity to attain fluency eventually, just so long as they continue working on their thinking.

Chapter One The Origins of Stuttering How blocking begins
In every case I have worked with, the roots of the individual’s blocking are in childhood. Sometimes however, the actual blocking does not appear until adolescence or even adulthood. People who block usually refer to their non-fluency as blocking or stuttering (stammering in the UK). In itself, this is no problem. It is when they come to believe that blocking is something bad and to be feared that problems arise.
CASE STUDY 1
Susan was very angry with her parents because she believed that if they had not gotten all upset about her childhood problem of learning how to speak, then she would not have started blocking and stuttering. I encouraged Susan to speak with her mother about it. Here is Susan’s reply:
Well I did it! I spoke to my mom about my stuttering and it was not bad. I actually feel some peace. It is not complete, but better. I was afraid to talk to her but I did. We talked about stuttering openly but we didn’t talk about the touchy-feely stuff. I said I’d been very angry and explained how the work I do sometimes increases my feeling of anger because I think she could have behaved better. I was able to show empathy and to see it through her eyes. I think my parents did try a lot of things and I don’t think it was in the vengeful way that I always see. I think the way I chose to see things is definitely holding me back.
My mother was OK with this talk and actually supportive. I told her that I feel she still has feelings of embarrassment about my stuttering and she said, “I don’t worry about you, in my eyes you have made it, you are successful living a life and that’s all we wanted for you.” That was a shock to hear. Maybe I don’t get that I have already arrived in some ways in the work that I have done. I think I have refused to see that. I also realized that I don’t want to spend the rest of my life talking about my stuttering – there is more to life. I think I am too attached to my stuttering.
Sometimes I think it is a way to shield myself from my true feelings and relations to people. You are so busy thinking and being obsessed with stuttering that you don’t need