Behnaz Abolmaali noticed in the first grade that she spoke differently than other children. However, as she grew up it became progressively difficult for her to express herself, and resources were nonexistent in Austin to help treat her speech. Abolmaali had a stutter.
“I knew I needed to use the experience of stuttering, I mean it was too powerful,” Abolmaali said. Abolmaali attends UT to study speech pathology, after graduating in 2008 with a degree in English.
Before Abolmaali came to UT she had years of speech therapy by therapists who were not trained in stuttering. Therapy that she received focused on fluency shaping and left out in Abolmaali’s opinion the most important part of speech therapy, emotions. “Speaking is a very emotional activity and you need to focus on the life impact and negative views that people who stutter face,” Abolmaali said.
At the age of seventeen she attended an intensive stuttering program at the University of Utah which is where she first met others who stuttered. The program dealt with the fear and shame that commonly follows people who stutter. The participants made phone calls to people, and went up to strangers and talked about their stuttering. “I came to realize that I stutter, it is ok, this is a challenge that I can work,” Abolmaali said.
Abolmaali worked for the Daily Texan for 6 semesters, tapping into her writing skills, and gaining courage to make “cold calls” when interviewing people.
Since returning to UT to start her undergraduate work in speech pathology, Abolmaali founded and is the current president of the Austin chapter of the National Stuttering Association.
The Austin chapter had an open house November 8 where the public and speech pathology students were invited to hear a panel of six people who stutter share stories about living with a stutter.
Hayden Lambert, 19, is a member of the Austin chapter and attended the open house. “I like feeling like you have a place to go where people know what you are going through,” Lambert said. Lambert also said that most people have fairly positive reactions to his stutter “at least to my face.”
During this event panel members shared stories of receiving speech therapy as children, and the realities of the harsh world people who stutter can face. “It is like someone had covered your mouth and you weren’t able to speak anymore after that. I am thinking about every word I am saying a hundred times over and it takes every part of me to get a sentence out,” said Rosanel Morales, a member of the panel.
“At the National Stuttering Association meeting it is not a place for them to be taught, it is a place for them to share,” said Dr. Courtney Byrd, a speech pathologist and UT professor.
Although Dr. Byrd is not a person who stutters, she is an active member of the Austin chapter. In 2006, Dr. Byrd opened the Austin Center for Stuttering Intervention and Research where she conducts research on patients to find the causes of stuttering, and in return the center provides free services for children and adults who stutter.
“We know the stutterer knows exactly what they want to stay,” Byrd said. Although many people think that when people stutter they do not know what they want to say, Dr. Byrd’s research shows the opposite.
According to Byrd, ideas such as a parent can cause a child to stutter or telling a child to slow down when they are talking fast are misconceptions that can be harmful to children who stutter. Dr. Byrd suggests for parents to slow down their speech and the child will follow at the same pace. “It allows more time for linguistic planning and less pressure on motor execution,” Byrd said.
Byrd explains that the reason people stutter is that there is a mismatch in the “individual speech sounds segments that compromise the words they say and also the amount of time it takes to say them.” She also notes that while children may be able to become fully fluent the reality for adults who stutter is that they will never be fully fluent.
“The goal is to have struggle free speech, which is not always stutter free speech,” said Byrd. Adults are different from children because therapy focuses on learning to accept their stutter and leave feeling empowered that they can feel at ease when talking.
Geoff Coalson, a doctoral student in speech pathology, has a stutter and was one of the panel members at the Austin chapter of the National Speech Association meeting. Coalson believes that therapy for adults should be more about acceptance and acknowledging that a stutter does not have to hold a person back.
“There has been so many times when people who stutter sit in the back of the class and have not said anything ever. Now we don’t have to do that, we can speak up,” said Coalson.
