by Pamela A Mertz

Created on: May 22, 2009

I have to share this. It's a story that needs to be told. It brought tears to my eyes as I heard it, and as I wrote this. I had a great real-time conversation with Shaun. Facebook and email is great, but sometimes, you just have to talk to someone in real time. Shaun was the first SLP graduate student I let work on me three years ago. We clicked! It was her first time working with an adult who stutters and it was my first foray into dealing with being very covert.

I had just joined this group called fluency council, but I didn't really want fluency. I wanted to begin the journey of finding me, and she got that. That's why she is going to be a great SLP. She already is. She gets it.

We try to stay in touch, but it had been a while since we had talked over the phone. We treated ourselves to an hour.

She is currently working as a SLP in a middle school, and has three kids who stutter on her caseload. She told me a little about how these kids didn't know much about their stuttering when she started with them at the beginning of the year. It seems their previous school therapists didn't have much experience with stuttering. (Surprise, surprise).

One kid was having a particularly rough time, not only with his severe stuttering but his dad's attitude was not positive. Dad was concerned that son wasn't trying hard enough, and voiced to Shaun the lament that his son would be doomed because of his stuttering. He wouldn't get a good job, what would happen to him, and so on. The son was picking up his dad's shame.

Shaun goes on to tell me that she spoke to dad about this, how his son was picking up his dad's cues and was beginning to internalize shame himself, despite the gains he was making in therapy. What courage it took for her to say this to dad! Shaun shared with dad her experience working with ME. She told him some of my story. How my early experiences with my dad being so negative and critical set the stage for my very painful journey. Shaun gently encouraged dad to see the value in his son's stuttering and asked him to consider that among his child's many gifts, maybe stuttering was one of them. OMG, I was getting goosebumps just listening to this.

One of the gains the kid had made was getting up on stage during a bullying assembly and participating in a skit. He role-played how it might be bullying for a kid to be made fun of for stuttering. This kid was 11 years old. Shaun shared that the whole room, peers and teachers, erupted into huge applause for

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