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From: Ryan Pollard
Date: 07 Oct 2008
Time: 18:23:22 -0500
Remote Name: 70.57.5.81
Congrats on a thought-provoking paper; it seems to have excited some lively discussion. As an okay stutterer who aspires to someday be a great clinician, this is a topic I’ve thought about a lot. I think the Joes make some excellent points about how stuttering, depending on the circumstance, can either be an asset or a liability for a clinician. It can provide one with a kind of instant, intrinsic empathy that’s tough for a nonstutterer to come by, but it can also throw up blinders if the clinician fails to see beyond their own stuttering experience of what worked for them. As for my own experience, I had a top-notch therapist who was not a fellow stutterer. In fact, precisely because she didn’t stutter, I think she was better able to challenge some of my supposedly unassailable (but actually just untested) beliefs about my own speech. At the time that was just what I needed: an “outsider’s” more detached perspective to force me to examine and change some of my somewhat warped views and entrenched defense mechanisms. So I guess that’s one example of how being a nonstuttering clinician can be an asset. Joe D, look forward to seeing you at ASHA!