Living With Stuttering Means Learning To Accept It

All this week WCCO Radio reporters are exploring the world of those who stutter, as part of National Stuttering Awareness Week.

Here, WCCO's Susie Jones looks at some of the therapies used over the years to help those with the condition in Part 3 of our series, "Speech Interrupted".

MINNEAPOLIS (WCCO) -- Erin Bodner remembers what it was like when she stuttered as a kid.

"Because of my fear of stuttering and having other kids view me as different, I really avoided talking a lot," she said. "I just remember physically struggling to get the sounds out, sometimes even straining my neck into ways that maybe would help get the words stuck out of my throat."

She's done speech therapy all of her life, and only when she learned to accept the stuttering did it start to dissipate.

Early treatment for those who stuttered often involved barbaric methods, such as trying to talk with marbles in your mouth, as portrayed in the movie "The King's Speech."

The methods King George used in the film to stop his stammering -- mouth exercising, breathing -- all treat the physical part of speech, not the emotional part.

Some of the earliest treatment for people who stutter was developed at the University of Minnesota. Early speech therapists, who stuttered themselves, understood it from the inside out.

"They realized a lot of the behavior that you see when somebody is stuttering is actually them trying to stop stuttering," said Linda Hinderscheit, a speech pathologist at the University of Minnesota.

She says early treatment involved trying to get rid of old behaviors used to manage stuttering.

She says treatment today starts with acceptance and allowing the emotions to come up when stuttering starts.

Bodner knows she'll always stutter and has come to accept that it's no big deal.