Jaymie Horak [00:00:00]:

Hello and welcome to the very first episode of Stutterology. I am your host, Jaymie, and I have so much to share. I'm so excited. First, let's start with some of the basics. Let me tell you a little bit about myself and why I am doing this. I'll talk a little bit about what a stutter is. What are some of the things we're going to be talking about on this podcast. I'm going to go over terms.

Jaymie Horak [00:00:29]:

I'm going to try to make this first episode a little shorter, which can be challenging for me as I'm somebody who also has ADHD, and so I have tons of things that I want to share with you. But we will get there, so stay tuned. One of the things I do want to mention right up front is that I am not a speech language pathologist, although I do know a lot of speech language pathologists, and I obviously have a personal investment into given that I've done it for the last 25 years. So a little bit about me. My name is Jaymie. I am from San Diego, California. I now live in Portland, Oregon, and I am 31 years old. I started stuttering around the age of six years old, and I went to a private K-8.

And so I did do speech therapy. And I'd actually already been in speech therapy because I couldn't pronounce my Rs and I had to go through the school district outside of my school. I had the same 30 kids in my class from kindergarten to 8th grade. So the same people who were with me when I started to when I could not pronounce my R's were with me up through until my teenage years. So after that, I went to a public high school, and it was a huge high school. It had 3,600 people, I think, in those four grades. And I had come from a school of about 300 from kindergarten to 8th grade. So this was a pretty big change.

Jaymie Horak [00:02:10]:

One of those changes, of course, is that there was a speech language pathologist at the school and I saw her, I believe, once a month, did not have the best experience. We'll go over that later when I talk more about speech pathology and speech therapy. And then I graduated. I was still stuttering. My friends knew that I stuttered. It was really impacting my life. Another thing I'll go into later. So lots of little teases I'm dangling here while I'm giving you my backstory.

And I went to a private university in Southern California, and I let my stutter really be a defining aspect. I wasn't really talking to anybody in my life about it, but I was aware of it. The people around me knew every now and then it would come up in conversation, but for the most part, this was a burden that I felt I carried alone. As much as my mom had tried to help. It was still here, but I was still hoping that one day I would just wake up and it would be gone. Which is kind of funny to think from the age of like, I probably started having this mindset in middle school when my stutter actually was a little bit more of something other people noticed as well, something that started to feel like it was impacting my life. And now I'm, what, like 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23? So it's been a very long time, and yet I'm still hoping, I still have this thought that the goal is fluency, right? I can be successful if I'm fluent.

Jaymie Horak [00:03:55]:

It wasn’t until I was about 22… My friend who was going to my rival college, Biola, a different Christian university, I was at Azuza Pacific, and she texted me she had seen flyers around campus or her friend had seen flyers around campus and knew this guy named Morgan Lott, and he was doing his senior project. He was about the same age as me doing his senior project, about his stutter and his kind of ‘Hail Mary’ attempt at speech therapy. One last time to hope kind of with the same goal as me, right? It's going to be gone. I can be successful if it's gone. Anyway, long story short, that was a pivotal moment in my life when I began to think, maybe my stutter is not going to go away, and what am I going to do with it? So after I graduated, I started slowly, I was terrified, but I slowly got involved with the National Stuttering Association. I got a full time job, and my life, I feel like, started to begin. Then I continued to, although maybe not as severely as I once did. But I'm going to talk about why I think that is and why I don't think that part really made an impact on anything else.

Jaymie Horak [00:05:09]:

We'll get into that. And now here I am. I am 31. I moved to Portland on my own about a year and a half ago, and I never thought I could do a lot of the things that I'm doing now. I do presentations at work. I am very confident in a lot of areas of my life, especially regarding my communication abilities, which has led me to want to create a podcast. So one of the reasons I'm doing this is there's a lot of resources out there, about a lot more than my mom had in the yet. There's so much information, it's a little overwhelming for one.

It can kind of hard to know where to look. But also there's not a lot aimed at parents, that is by a person who stutters with the goal of kind of meeting parents where they're at. And my mom does not stutter. She raised me on her own. So a little bit about that. I was raised by my mom, and she had me and my younger brother, he's about two years younger than me. And I started stuttering at age six, and my mom panicked. She had no idea what was going on.

She didn't really know anything at all about stuttering. This was 1997, so she didn't have a computer, I don't think, at the time. But she's trying to reach out to these things, and she is getting information quite a lot, actually. I'll get more into that later. But she's got this child, her oldest child, who is stuttering, and this very confident young person. And now people are starting to react to the way that she's speaking. And so mom's kind of scared and obviously and looking into things, and everyone's telling her things like, go to speech therapy to make it go away, learn techniques to hide it, and one day it's just going to go away.

Jaymie Horak [00:07:12]:

There's a 75 or 66% chance I forget the exact number. But most childhood stutters do resolve themselves, right? So that's the mindset my mom had, and she was given so much information. When I was going through my old IEP stuff, I found things about the national stuttering association, but she didn't know really what to do. And we were very low income. My mom was raising us on her own. My grandparents were helping pay for private school, but only kind of. It was mostly my mom on her own doing her thing. And she was asking everybody in the family, including reaching out to my dad and also her mom: do we have any family history of stuttering? Everyone told her, no. (I'll get more into that later, because that's a funny full circle story there. I mean, not funny for my mom.) But she went everywhere, and nobody was giving her there's just not a lot of understanding about stuttering out there to begin with. And in the 90s, again, did not have the same resources, but now we have an internet where all you have to do is type what is stuttering, and you get thousands and thousands and thousands and thousands, if not millions of websites and information. And they're saying different things, and they're giving these ideas, and there's all these ideas of hears and speech easy devices and et cetera, et cetera. But the reality is one thing. There is no cure. Okay? If this is hard for you to hear, maybe pause, but I'm telling you this as a statement of fact.

Jaymie Horak [00:08:58]:

This is not my opinion. Anyone who tells you that there's a cure, anyone who says they can make your or your child's stutter or your loved one's stutter go away forever, is lying to you. And they're probably about to offer you something that if it doesn't cost money now, it will. So I want you to know that, and I want you to know that that's okay. This is the reason I'm making this podcast. Nobody needs to be fluent in order to be successful, in order to clearly communicate in order to take care of yourself, have a full time job, any of that, okay? Also, moms, dads, parents, guardians, it is not your fault, okay? They're not totally sure what causes stuttering. They do think it's something in the brain. It seems very likely to be very connected to neurodivergency.

So children with ADHD are significantly more likely to stutter. And that's just people who are diagnosed. There's been information out there in the past. There's a very old, outdated belief that still circulates that says trauma caused it. And maybe you saw something like this. So my mom saw me as this child who talked all the freaking time, couldn't pronounce their R's, but talked plenty and went to school one day, and the teacher called me out, put me on the spot, embarrassed me in front of the entire class. (Thank you, first grade teacher for that. That was really cool.)

And she did that to lots of kids. It was not just me, which is even worse, maybe, I don't know. Anyway, and then I started stuttering in that moment. This was a traumatic thing that happened to me as a kid, and yet I'm telling you, and it's proven that stuttering is not caused by trauma. So then why do traumatic events pull stuttering out? They're looking into that. But the idea is that it's already in you to begin with. Just sometimes there's something that pulls it out. Some kids start to stutter for no reason at all.

Jaymie Horak [00:11:20]:

Some people, when they're older, they hit their head, they get a head injury, they start to stutter. But no matter what, I want you to know that it's not your fault, okay? That's really, really important for parents to understand. And that the goal for your child does not need to be never to stutter ever again. So that's the point of this podcast. The point of this podcast is to reframe what the goals around children who stutter can be. I'm not telling you how to parent. I'm not telling you what things should be, what these should not be. But I am going to give you another option that maybe you have not heard.

Jaymie Horak [00:12:02]:

Speech therapists say if you're lucky, you have had this you've had a speech therapist who talks about the acceptance model, and that's freaking fantastic. I still think hopefully I have some insights to share with you as well. But you're already on a path of learning about this option. If you're not if this is the first time you've ever had anyone talk about a stutter without talking about it as this flaw to try to hear. I am so excited that you're listening to this and I have so much to tell you. And this is really good news for your kid. And maybe that's hard to see right now. Maybe your kid is in a rough place right now, or your loved one or your friend or you.

But I can tell you that this model this idea of acceptance based therapy with speech and not needing fluency, lack of repetitions to be a thing is a game changer, at least for me.

Now pause - that was a lot. I'm going to give you a second.

We're going to switch gears now. I'm going to do a little housekeeping. So if you do need to pause after that, I understand. That was a pretty emotional little spiel there. I get really excited and I hope that energy is infectious in the long run.

But it can be a little overwhelming at first.

But I do want to do some housekeeping before we get into anything.

Number one is what is a stutter? You've probably already researched this, otherwise you wouldn't be listening to a podcast called Stutterology. However, I'm just going to give you a little bit about what some of the websites maybe will say, not say so. According to places like Stuttering Foundation, national Stuttering Association, most speech language pathologists, a stutter is essentially that what I just did, it's disfluent speech, but it can look a few different ways. The most common one, the one we hear about the most, the one we see about the most, the one that fluent people do the most is the repetitions that you just heard. That's going to be this right there. It's going to be those usually first part of a word.

Not always, but typically. Typically people have certain sounds that they stutter more with. Could be a variety of different reasons for that. It's not always true and it's what we see in the media the most. It's what people see in cartoons, what Porky the Pig does, right. Good and bad representations, mostly bad. We will get into that. That's the most common.

One of the other ones we see a lot is blocks. Blocks are very misunderstood because people don't think about that when they think of stuttering. But a block is extremely common and most people do a little bit of both. Some people will mostly just block. This is still considered stuttering. This is still just fluent speech. This does not mean there is something broken with somebody's mouth, okay? One of the things this happens a lot in for me is my blocks are typically about half a second to 2 seconds long. Occasionally not longer.

Although a lot of people's are. Mine's usually pretty short. And you would think, who's going to notice that in speech? The answer is everybody. We don't even know we're doing it. We're not even aware. But when there is a pause at all, we read into it and that's usually a good thing. That's how we understand each other. The problem is with a stutter there's no reason in the conversation for it.

It just kind of happens. So when I say hello, my name is Jaymie. I have had and many people who sit there have had people ask, oh, did you forget your name? Because why else would you pause briefly before sharing your name unless you had to think about it? Because you blocked. So that one's a very misunderstood one that I can't wait to talk more about as well. Another option is prolongations. So this is both a speech therapy technique, but it can also be a way that stuttering manifests. This is going to sound kind of like that. So it's going to be the prolongation of a particular sound.

Not that the person does a particular sound every time, but like in their word, one sound is going to be prolonged. So those are the types of stuttering I've already talked about. Causes, cures, no known cause. There is a genetic component, but they really don't know much about it yet. There's been a large research trying to figure this out. No cure. There's things that help. There's things that a lot of techniques, therapists, a lot of times speech language pathologists will have what maybe is called a toolbox of some different options.

Jaymie Horak [00:17:33]:

Not everybody who stutter wants to pull from the toolbox. As you can tell, I'm stuttering pretty openly and we're going to get again more into that. And then the other second part I wanted to come over, number two was some of the terms I'm going to be using in this podcast. So we've already gone over the stuttering. I've been talking a lot about Speech Language pathologists. Another acronym, the common acronym is SLPs. So I'm going to be using SLPs a lot. And that just stands for speech language pathologists.

These are people who have graduate degrees in speech pathology. Kind of a fun fact about that is that there is no actual requirement about stuttering unless the school decides it. There used to be like a national, I think, requirement, maybe state in California, I'm not sure. And they removed this requirement where you would have had to talk as a graduate student to people with different issues. Not issues. I shouldn't say- Reasons to go to speech therapy, right? So ‘fluency’ being one of them. There's other reasons people go to speech therapy. However, it is no longer required that you get a variety. So somebody can go their entire time through grad school studying speech language pathology, maybe have one course on fluency if they're lucky. And a little chapter on stuttering.

Jaymie Horak [00:19:01]:

Now this is not true for everyone. There's a lot of SLPs who know a lot about stuttering and they're awesome, and I plan to have some of them on this podcast. However, it's not a requirement and that's dangerous. And we're going to talk about why because I keep saying that. So hopefully you're really excited.

Another term I'm going to use is PWS stands for people who stutter. This is just the person first language around stutterers. So if you know anything about disability communities, disability rights, or really anything in other worlds too, we tend to use a lot of person first language.

So instead of saying a stutterer, we're going to say a person who stutters because I'm a person first and my stutter is secondary.

And speaking of the word secondary, that's my last term for you guys today. And then I'm going to do a pause. I'm going to give you a break. But a secondary is going to be exactly, I guess what it sounds like a secondary thing. So a stutter is about your speech. It's about the disfluencies, it's about the repetitions blocks, prolongations. A secondary is all of the stuff that comes with that.

So maybe lack of eye contact would be considered a secondary. Oftentimes a secondary is something that somebody who stutters has done to try to kind of push through their stutter and it kind of happened to coincide or maybe work once or twice and then it just kind of picks up. So these are also things like touching your face while you're talking, while you're stuttering, maybe covering your mouth even. Obviously that makes things significantly harder to communicate. This could be rocking back and forth. This could be shaking a leg. There's also stims, which is people needing to kind of get their stimulation out. But it's very connected.

There's a lot of overlap with secondary and stims. But secondaries are going to be all of these little extra things, maybe talking in a slightly different voice. We'll talk more about it. You'll probably hear and see, maybe not see, but hear some of it on this podcast. Yeah. And then one of the other things I also wanted to mention, there's a difference between the techniques that a speech language pathologist has and the techniques that a person who stutters may or may not pick up. So we're going to be talking about both pretty often. So I just want you to be aware that some things like prolongation and I have to go look up the other things I'm not sure will be speech language pathologist toolbox.

These are things that you've either learned in grad school or learned on the field or from their employer about how to decrease the negative communication impacts or potential negative communication impacts of stuttering. There's also a toolbox around avoidance techniques which is going to be when somebody who stutters starts to avoid speaking or at the very least avoid stuttering. This does not actually help, especially not in the long run, but even in the moment we're going to talk about why avoidance techniques are important for any speech language pathologist to have. You should always ask if your SLP knows anything about avoidance techniques. This is going to look like asking you or your child or loved one to call cold call maybe while they're in the room with you and cancel your gym membership or something. Because normally I would do literally anything to avoid this. I will pay for a year of the gym sooner than I would want to call. I mean, I've worked on that and I have found other ways to cancel gym memberships as well.

Jaymie Horak [00:23:10]:

But that's the idea, right? You're avoiding situations. You're avoiding maybe your name, certain words and I have a lot to say about that. Very exciting. But that is also something that speech pathologists can and honestly should know a lot about. Now the other flip side of this are techniques that people who stutter kind of all accidentally do. It's kind of funny because you don't even know really, one that you're doing it, or two, where you even learned how to do this and then you talk to other people who stutter and we're all doing it, right? So word swapping is a big one. I am talking about something and la la la. And then I'm going to get to a word and my brain automatically already knows this is a stutter word or my brain goes danger and I just swap the word out in conversation.

Nobody's the wiser, nobody else knows that I just change the word. So instead of I used to do this a lot with the word, if you can see why. And so I would a lot of times say, oh that's so interesting. Oh that's so interesting. And it was so habitual I didn't even know I was doing it. Actually, when I started to accept my stutter and try to do less avoiding, I would catch myself after the fact. So I would say, oh that's interesting. And then I would pause and say, actually no, well yes, but it's funny.

And I would get through the word and the other person would be I have absolutely no idea why they just had to change the word from interesting to funny. But here they are. Also, that was kind of funny that I didn't stutter on it when I was speaking as somebody else, but neither here or there. Either way, those are the types of things like word swapping. Another big one is like this sounds clinical and there's clinical versions of this and I'm not using the right phrase. I'm going to call it breath work. That's not right. Breath work is a real thing and people say it's helpful, blah blah blah, probably, I don't know, I don't do it.

Jaymie Horak [00:25:32]:

What I do though is I unintentionally change my breathing pattern in a sentence because for some reason the way you go into a stutter can impact how it's going to sound. It's also why a lot of people will do UMS, and uh, not because really it's even a speech thing but just not yet ready kind of need to get themselves to fall into the word as opposed to just saying the word on its own. This maybe sounds really confusing and that's okay. You don't need to be an expert of it. Just know that there's little things that your kid or your loved one or you are doing that you did not learn in speech therapy that you have learned just in conversation. And a lot of times we'll say people who stutter. People will say that people who stutter have higher IQs. I'm a little biased on what I think about IQ tests and the systemic privilege in that.

Jaymie Horak [00:26:31]:

But the point is, a lot of times people who stutter will have a very large vocabulary. I'm not really one of them, but a lot of my friends are. And if you've read books by people who stutter, you're like, I don't know what any of this means because they don't even know because it's so commonplace. They're swapping in words. So you need more word options. The more word options you have, the better word swapper you can be. Although, as we'll talk about later, this can affect communication more than a stutter itself would. Okay.

Jaymie Horak [00:27:07]:

How are you feeling? I hope that wasn't too much for you. I have briefly touched a lot of the little things we're going to get into my backstory, what stuttering is, some of the terms around stuttering, if there's a cause, nothing known for sure. If there's a cure, there is not. And what my goals are with this podcast, I'm really hoping I'm offering you something that can improve the quality of life. This stuff that I'm going to be talking about, it doesn't even need to just be applied to stuttering. So maybe you don't stutter, but maybe you're going to be listening to this and thinking, wow, this can apply to something else in my life. A lot of the things that I feel towards stuttering, I first felt about my body image. Growing up female in this society, especially in Southern California, means I had a lot of thoughts on my body that were not great and were not helpful.

And as I learned little things slowly to start to accept that the best part of my body is that it's mine and it lets me feel things in this world. It lets me touch things, it lets me smell, et cetera, lets me walk. For me, these things that my body permits me to do is the beauty. And I was able to take some of that and apply it probably more efficiently to stuttering. My stutter is fantastic, and I'm going to talk about why because it's actually pretty cool. The things that I have learned that my stutter taught me that my stutter has opened doors for. We think of stuttering as a hindrance, as a problem, as something that is ruining my entire existence. Yes, I thought that for a very long time.

And in hindsight, I didn't have to think that. And I accept that about myself. I accept that that's my journey. And I'm hoping that this podcast saves people from having to do that as long or as long as they could. Not necessarily. Maybe you're older than me and you're listening to this and you've been thinking away about it for a long time. Better now than never. Better now than five years from now, and better now than tomorrow.

So on that note, I'm really excited for everything I have to share. And if you have any questions for me, if there's anything you want to hear me talk about, anything that you're confused by, anything I say that maybe doesn't make sense, or maybe I stuttered and you couldn't make sense of it. I'm going to try to do a transcription for this and put it out there as well, because I personally don't really like listening to podcasts. I prefer written word, so I'm going to try to do things like that as well. But if there's anything you need, you can follow me on Instagram. My handle is Stutterology.

The conversation is diverse - Ezra and Steff discuss challenging traditional speech therapy approaches, the use of speaking strategies when working with kids who stutter, the need for mentorship and support for speech-language pathologists, the wonders of the stuttering community, and Steff’s use of acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT) in the speech therapy setting. 

Steff also shares lovely stories of working with children who stutter, highlighting the importance of respecting their agency and involving them in therapy decisions.

About the Guest
Steff Lebsack is a speech pathologist based in Colorado. She has her own private practice and is a professor. Steff has an extensive background in medical speech pathology, having worked in hospitals for over 12 years. She has a particular passion for treating individuals with stuttering and communication differences in acute care and ICU settings. This has led her to develop a deep interest in bioethics and medical autonomy. Steff aspires to pursue a doctorate in public health and bioethics after completing her PhD program. Outside of work, Steff coaches the girls' cross country team with her high school teacher and coach husband. They have two young children and enjoy the busy and active lifestyle that comes with their family dynamic. You can learn more about her services at https://www.lebsackspeechtherapy.com/ 

Other resources mentioned in this episode:  MySpeech - https://myspeechapp.org/ Franky Banky - https://www.frankybanky.com/

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Please note that this episode is intended as educational content and not as a substitute for professional advice. If you have concerns about your individual child’s unique needs and speech, it is recommended to seek guidance from a licensed speech-language pathologist.

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Resources for Episode

Advice to Those Who Stutter, chapter 6 written by Joseph Sheehan: https://www.stutteringhelp.org/message-stutterer

Courtney Margulis (formerly Luckman)'s blog post, "Treating 5% of the Disorder": http://courtingcourage.blogspot.com/2016/08/treating-5-of-disorder.html

Nina G, stuttering comedian, author, and disability advocate: https://www.ninagcomedian.com

--- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/stutterology/message Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/stutterology/support