About the presenter: Joseph Green Sheehan was born May 27, 1918, in Battle Creek, Michigan. He was a university professor, a clinical psychologist and and author. He began the Psychology Speech Clinic at the University of California at Los Angeles in 1949 and directed it until he died on November 14, 1983, in Santa Monica, California.

The following is an adaptation of Joe Sheehan's "Message to the Stutterer."

Message to a Child Who Stutters

When I stuttered, people often gave me suggestions. They said, "Relax!", "Think about what you are going to say!", "Slow down!"

I wish an adult who stuttered had told me the the reason this advice doesn't always help, is that when we do these things, we wind up trying to hide our stuttering. This makes us feel like a phony inside.

When we stutter, we have two choices:

    1. We can go ahead and talk, knowing that we are going to stutter,
    2. Or we can decide not to talk at all.

Of course, people want us to talk without stuttering. What they don't always understand is that before we can do that, we have to talk with stuttering. We have to learn to talk in spite of stuttering.

I wish an adult had told me that stuttering doesn't really hurt us when we do it. It only hurts when people treat us differently because of it. Even if we didn't stutter, it would still hurt if people treated us differently. There's nothing to be ashamed of when we stutter, and there's nothing to be proud of when we're fluent.

I wish an adult had told me that how we stutter is what really matters. We can either stutter in a way that is hard and struggling, or we can stutter easily. If we keep on stuttering easily, we might quit stuttering someday! Or we might still stutter sometimes. Either way, we will be taking it easy, and enjoying ourselves....so, everything will be OK!

So the next time someone gives you advice on how to talk, tell them "I'm stuttering as easily as I can right now!" In other words, "Thanks anyway, but I can take care of this myself!"

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