My speech therapy: ARTS

Happy Friday!

It’s a crisp fall morning here in Olney, and I’m currently sipping my hot cup of English Breakfast tea staring at my October calendar desktop background (courtesy of TheEveryGirl), realizing how unreal it is that it’s November already. It felt like September was crawling by and October was over in a flash. Staring at my calendar has made me reminisce (is it too soon to use that word? It was just October less than 48 hours ago!) on all the events that went on this past month. My mother-daughter road trip, celebrating MD’s homecoming, sister’s bridal shower, and Halloween festivities all within a matter of weeks! On top of all those commitments, I coached cross country practice every day (I’m a volunteer coach for my high school’s team), picked up a few shifts at work, applied to lots of jobs, worked on publishing this blog, aaaaand had weekly speech therapy! Phew, what a busy month it’s been!  Somehow during all the craziness I was able to make speech therapy one of my top priorities. Lots of great things have happened in speech this past month, so I thought I’d share what exactly my speech therapy is all about & some successes I’ve had!

I’m in what’s called Avoidance Reduction Therapy for Stuttering, otherwise referred to as ARTS. ARTS is based on the idea that:

The true heartache of stuttering isn’t the stutter, but the fear of stuttering – Sisskin Stuttering Center 

Instead of making fluency the goal of speech therapy, we focus on self-acceptance (I wrote “we” because I’m in a group therapy program). The premises is that when we stop fighting our stutter, we can communicate more freely without worrying about other people’s opinions & say everything we want to say, when we want to say it. When we can communicate freely, we’re not struggling to hide our stutter anymore. And when we’re not struggling, our stutter decreases! It’s like desensitizing to your greatest fear; the less you try to resist it, the less scary it becomes, and eventually you aren’t scared of it at all. It’s an innovative approach to speech therapy and is slowly getting introduced to practices throughout the country. This ABC news video from my therapist Vivian Siskin’s website sums it up pretty nicely.

Some examples of my successes from ARTS are: Decreasing my fear of making eye contact during a moment of stuttering, and reducing overall feelings of shame from open stuttering.  Keeping eye contact with someone while I’m stuttering can be hella awkward. I think almost everyone, even those who don’t stutter, can agree that eye contact is uncomfortable and a little awkward. Staring down someone to the depths of their soul (a wee dramatic, but sometimes that’s what it feels like!) while I’m being my most vulnerable self is SUPER intimidating because I’m ashamed to have others see me struggling so much. I’ve spent years avoiding eye contact with people and I’ve probably come across as socially awkward (then again, everyone has those moments) because of it. However, thanks to this therapy, I have finally been getting more comfortable maintaining eye contact during moments of stuttering! It feels SO good to not hold back and say what I want to say directly to my audience.

In addition to making eye contact, actually showing my stutter (also referred to as open stuttering) has been really hard. About 75% of the people that I know had no clue that I stuttered until I told them. I was so afraid to stutter around anyone that wasn’t my family or closest friends. It wasn’t until starting this therapy that I became a confident communicator. After accepting the fact that I’ll always stutter, I started working on changing my speech pattern so I could stutter in a more fluent way (oxymoron, right?). Basically, instead of stuttering on one sound at the beginning of the word, I stutter through the word. The result is forward moving speech rather than getting stuck on the first sound. This too is hella uncomfortable and sounds weird to others, but it does wonders for my speech pattern. I’ve progressed a lot in allowing myself to show my stutter and be okay with it. Having free & joyful communication is something I honestly never thought I would have, and I’m so grateful for ARTS!

I only went over a general summary of what ARTS is, there’s so much more to it! If you want to read more about it, check out this website which belongs to the fabulous Vivian Sisskin of UMD, the genius behind ARTS. Stay tuned, because my next stuttering post will be about my experience speaking on an ARTS panel! I met so many cool people who stutter as well as some highly intellectual speech pathologists.

Time to reheat my tea and give my typing fingers a rest. If you made it to the end of this post, thank you so much for reading! Have a great weekend! xoxo