I began stuttering at age 5. I ranged from mild to severe with blocks that sometimes kept me from speaking at all. I am 23 years old now, and I live in Jakarta, Indonesia. I don’t really like to talk about my problems with strangers, and I don’t feel comfortable yet putting my name and face on SAA, but I DO want to share my story, because I do want others to benefit as I have from SAA and its methods. So, I will confirm my story via email or Skype with anyone who doubts that my story is true and SAA has lots of emails from me that prove it. My first language is Bahasa-Indonesia, and my English is a work in progress; so, SAA wrote my story, but I revised it and I approve it as it is written here.
I’m in college now, studying computers. Until I found Lee’s book and SAA, I had never had any therapy. I found Lee’s book via Facebook and read it in February 2017, and I emailed him a month later and we began Skyping. Our Skype connections weren’t good and our calls dropped a lot, we struggled to communicate in English anyway, but we kept trying. Some weeks we couldn’t hold a connection long enough to talk and we had to quit. We missed many weekly Skypes, but we kept trying. I read aloud an hour a day, and I tried hard to use the Crutches, and I did 30 minutes of auto suggestions daily. From March into August, we probably had about 8 good Skype sessions. Every month, I stuttered less and less, and I thought about it less and less.
Now, I don’t think about stuttering much at all, and no stranger has identified me as a stutterer for well over a month. I still don’t talk as much as I would like to, but I’m not stuttering any more than the average person and not enough to embarrass myself, and I continue to get better every week. I feel a freedom about speech that I never felt before. Lee and I still try to Skype weekly but we still miss lots of weeks, and we don’t need to talk so much now anyway. I still want to become “the best speaker in my group”, as SAA puts it, and I would like to be able to help other PWS who live in my time zone, and I do plan to keep doing auto suggestions for the rest of my life, and, by doing that, make myself into the best person that I can be.
I’m proud of the fact that I was able to help SAA a bit. I found that, if I smiled every time I spoke, it was much easier for me to speak; it sort of took off the pressure. I told Lee about this, and he loved the idea and SAA made it Crutch #12. If you stutter, try smiling when you speak; it helps a lot. Think of me in Jakarta when you do; I’ll be smiling back at you.
I here give a million thanks to Lee, SAA and all of its founders, and I hope that you, if you stutter or fear speaking at all, will turn to SAA for help, because SAA DOES help and its methods really work.
D. A., Jakarta, Indonesia August 2017