As a speech and language therapist and researcher, Mark Ylvisaker inspires my work. Mark was both a speech and language therapist and philosopher, and someone who passionately devoted his life to working with people with brain injury. Back in 2007, he said “in the absence of meaningful engagement in chosen life activities, all interventions ultimately … Read more
Dom: ‘Post brain injury life is about staying busy and in touch with the world. To that end one of the things I go to is a group set up by my counsellor Cathy that we tentatively call ‘Culture Club’. No, we don’t sit around and discuss Boy George! Once every two months a group … Read more
When I say to people sometimes that I see my stammering as a positive in my life, they can find it a strange notion. Normally people can only envisage stammering as a negative concept. My stammering is my natural pattern of speech, and having a stammer does not limit my speech nor hinder my conversations. … Read more
“Iain, I’m going to be submitting a business case for promotion to manager in June. I normally stammer on my name which then knocks all my confidence, especially when meeting someone for the first time. Also, my fear of stammering often stops me from contributing to larger groups. These are going to be increasingly important … Read more
How can we help people who stutter come to understand stuttering as something other than the negative opposite of fluency? We can begin by exploring with them the mechanisms of ableism that position those with disabilities as inferior. People do not exist in a vacuum. Discourses that give meaning to our world pre-exist our births. … Read more
We all start out with dreams and ideas about how our careers will go. It’s hard to foresee when, where or why the forks in the road will come, but it is almost certain that they will. This blog post explores two key ways in which supervision helped me to negotiate a fork in the … Read more
Supervision. The word invokes many different thoughts for me. The many supervisors I have had, and the many people I have supervised. And the formality of the word. I got a bit stuck when trying to move past this, so I read through multiple blog posts about having one’s communication shaped, ‘therapyed’ or embraced. These … Read more
Martyn: “Do you ever read poetry?” Me : “No. Of course not.” Martyn: “You might try it sometime. David Whyte1, something like that.” It had been just a short conversation but, as usual, his intuition was spot on. I’d been discussing with Martyn Brown, my Executive Coach at Ashridge2, my progress towards becoming more of … Read more
Cathy and Sam invited me to discuss the Did I Stutter Project, a recently launched disability activist project for stutterers by stutterers, created by myself, Zach Richter, and Erin Schick this summer. Put most simply, we are a group of stutterers who want to be heard on our own terms, with two main goals: 1) … Read more
It took 18 years of living with my stammer before I finally decided to seek help in the form of stammering therapy with Sam at intandem. So, why did it take me so long? Well, the answer was because I did not want to admit I had a stammer. By pretending it wasn’t there meant that it … Read more