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Are you one of the many people who suffer with the speech impediment known as stuttering or stammering? Does your stutter/stammer cause you to become very frustrated at times? Have you attended speech therapy in the past in the hope that it would help improve your speech? I am a person who has overcome a stutter and I now help other people to achieve fluency. In this article, I write about the frustrations and emotions that people who stutter have to deal with.

When I had a stutter, it created many different forms of emotions within me. The stammer was not exactly something that I was proud of; this is why I was less than eager to discuss it with other people. My family, especially my parents, even to this day are unaware of most of the difficulties that stuttering caused me, during my time at school and in my late teens. I rarely confided in my parents as to how bad things were for me. I was not the type of person that liked to talk about their problems; especially when it came to the stutter. I would instead just go to my bedroom and attempt to forget it.

I also felt rather sorry for myself. I feel that I am a good human being; I am kind, I am honest, I am loyal, I am friendly and I am caring – I could therefore not understand why I had to have this most frustrating of speech impediments. There were many people in my class who in my opinion deserved to have the stutter much more than I did, however in truth I would not wish a stutter on anybody.

Having a stutter made me feel less of a person than that of what I considered to be normal people. I was not able to socialise with the ease as what everybody else seemed to, and had many traumatic experiences in the classroom when attempting to read out of a book for example.

I was, at times, able to speak as fluently as the next man, despite the fact that I had this annoying stammering problem. I could not understand why I was able to talk to person A but not person B. This caused me many frustrations.

When I was about sixteen, I started to drink alcohol. This helped my speech in a massive way as I was able to speak fluently when I was under the influence of alcohol. This showed me that it was possible to “stop stuttring”.

Speech therapists and negative national associations, have for years attempted to convince me to accept my stutter and have told me that there is no cure for stuttering. How can this be right, if I was constantly drunk, I would be fluent, there is a cure in itself. Of course it is not right or healthy to be constantly drunk but I am sure you know what I mean.

I found certain tasks very hard to accomplish when I had the stutter. I especially found it difficult to talk on the phone. I look back now and can not believe that I coped with working in an office environment for six years, at a time when I had the stutter. I remember traveling to work feeling sick in my stomach through the stress and fear.

Ordering drinks and food at the bar, introducing people to each other, attending meetings and job interviews were other aspects of my life which were made all that more harder by my inability to talk fluently.

My advice to people who have a stuttering problem is to not give up, believe in yourself and your own ability to one day achieve fluency. Do not listen to negative people who try to convince you that there is no cure for stuttering. Most of the people who say this to you will have never had a stutter and will have no idea how our brains work.