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From: Terry Dartnall
Date: 10/20/03
Time: 7:46:42 PM
Remote Name: 132.234.9.87
“How is it that you are able to avoid stammering, even when you are experiencing feelings of excessive fright and tension. It seems as though these feelings would inevitably result in stammering?”
I don’t really know how to answer this question. Either the fear isn’t that great, or my stammer isn’t that bad, or the causal effect of the fear isn’t that bad! Or some combination of those things.
I suspect that my baseline stammer is fairly mild (fairly local, to be more correct – I have great difficulty with some words, but not with many). In addition to the stammer there’s a lot of emotional baggage: fear, inadequacy, guilt, the feeling that I’m an imposter and the fear of being found out. When I stammer those feelings rise up and become pretty intense. I once described this to my psychiatrist and he said, “That’s not a stammer you’re describing. That’s panic attack.” But, well, it could be a lot worse, and the fact is that I don’t overtly stammer very much. Very little, in fact.
Terry