Some meanderings about what makes PWS try therapy?

Most of the PWS I have met have been very intelligent and getting on with their lives and successfully too. They may feel that stammering has held them back but doing something about it is a challenge and requires disruption to the way they have organised their lives.

My ideas about stammering have only been tested once and that was successful in that after 5 sessions the client could speak his name, answer the phone and hold a conversation without stammering. A situation which has held for over a year now. He tells me that when he has the occasional lapse he knows how to deal with the situation. The sessions cost him nothing apart from time and there was no homework, just insight.

I have worked with several PWS who felt in enough crisis to do something about it . They seemed to gain insights into their thinking and how they stammered but life caught up with them and after 3 or 4 times the sessions lapsed.

There is a world of difference between someone who doesn't want to be poor and one who wants to be rich. They will stop trying at different points on the continuum of making money. Keeping a sense of crisis is difficult and can be exhausting especially when there is no immediate improvement in speech.

Starting again is not actually restarting because the person will start from a different point of view or context. It is renewing the re-learing of speech. To see things as a journey is a useful metaphor and it is worth noting how far one has come.

Stammering emerges and so does normal speech. To change the way things emerge the necessary conditions need to be assembled and organised and this takes time. I tend to give mayself 5 sessions to make some impact.

And there is no one approach: if one is in the cat skinning business one should at least know a few ways of approaching the job. Change often takes effort but the journey can be interesting and fun.


As I read in one article in the BSA site: anyone can help a PWS to stop stammering for a week. My cred is that, given the chance, that week, 18 months ago, has lasted till now. Fast cures like NLP ( I have a practitioner cert. ) are very unlikely to provide long lasting change in a session: good for recent onset phobias, not generalised fears where the person has built up a structure to explain the problem.

I make time to work with PWS because stammering interests me. One problem I have is that apart from the client mentioned above I have no continual history of success and folk don't want to waste their time. I cannot promise to resolve anyones speech difficulties. I do expect to have a significant impact on how speech emerges, in a reasonable time and to provide some personal insights along the way.

Maybe I should call what I do insight therapy.