What is recovery?
When somebody has recovered from stuttering, he no longer thinks of stuttering all day long. He may not have perfect speech, but the rare disfluencies he has are not forced or struggling. He feels no shame or anxiety about the disfluencies. The ancillary movements and tensions have disappeared. He no longer has a need for avoidances and circumlocutions. He willingly takes calculated risks both in vocational and avocational areas. The brain of the PWS has been rewired to resemble that of the average person.
Review of basics
The REBTS consists of four threads of therapy:
1. Keeping the Person Who Stutters (PWS) motivated and become involved in his own therapy.
2. Teaching the client how to manage the unhealthy negative feelings of anxiety, shame, guilt, and feelings of inferiority by tracing down and disputing unhelpful beliefs. (This is directly taken from REBT.)
3. Teaching the PWS unconditional self-acceptance whether he stutters or not. The unconditional self-acceptance is based on radical acceptance of stuttering.
4. Training the PWS easy Iowa bounces so that they are overlearned. When these easy Iowa bounces are overlearned they help the PWS be able to keep the speech relaxed and forward moving even if the right brain is jumbled because of the emotions of anxiety, shame, anger and feelings of inferiority.
Changes in beliefs toward life in general and stuttering in particular
As you become involved in the recovery process, generally you will go through these stages:
1. Disbelief that you really can change your emotions about speaking and stuttering and disbelief that you can alter how you stutter.
2. Belief that at times you can change the intensity of your emotions and by elongating the blocks gain control of some your blocks after the initial “petit mort” period in a block.
3. Increased confidence and ability to decrease intensity of emotions before and during the block. Increased confidence that you can gain control of a block given time.
4. Confidence that emotions with effort and disputing of irrational ideas can be generally handled while talking and blocks can be gotten under control within reasonable time.
5. Greatly reduced need to consciously manage either emotions or the blocking, by allowing easy bounces.
6. State where the dysfluencies are without emotional upheaval, and without stress and tense struggling.
Scientific method, quantifiable measurement, evidence based treatment, and motivation
In order to scientifically demonstrate anything it is necessary to measure it. The input data may be subjective and self-reported. However, once a numerical value is assigned to a quantity it can be treated as a numerical value and manipulated as such. Below are a number of 5 point Likert scales and their interpretation. As therapy goes on, you will be able to see the improvement by periodically filling out the forms.
My Request
I have attached one of the scales that is currently used in stuttering research, the UTBAS (I, II, III). Could you, please, take it and contact me via e-mail, mail, messenger, and phone (indicating whether you have been exposed to Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy of Stuttering). In return I will provide you, if you desire one hour of free interpretation of data and consultation.