I tried drugs to beat stuttering, and they not only didn’t work, they almost killed me. I’m Mike. I’m 38 and I live in New York. I’m married with two kids, and I have a B.A. in Economics, and I’m a Business Analyst for a large company.
My story starts like most, but it accelerated into a nightmare. I began stuttering around the age of five. My parents said I spoke fine until I started going to school as I had a lot of anxiety and did not want to be there. I did not really notice it but unfortunately kids especially at that age notice any little thing and hence used to bring it up to my attention and then it just got progressively worse.
I started speech therapy shortly thereafter and while it helped, it never really stopped my stutter as the hope was that I would eventually grow out of it. I dealt it with it by avoiding anything that I knew would cause a major incident and while avoidance worked most of the time, I had days where I needed to introduce myself or speak to a group. This is when I would have a major incident which would cause a relapse in the sense of my speech would then be terrible for about a week after the incident. I attended speech therapy on and off in High School and then stopped going. Therapy always helped me get back to a point of mostly fluent but never fully especially in those certain situations. In other words, I felt better myself and speech when I wasn’t pressured, but, under pressure, I still stuttered. Speech professionals advised that stuttering had to be accepted because it was incurable.
So, I went ahead into my adult life still trying to avoid those pressure situations as much as I could which kept my speech at bay but as I had to start going on interviews it would prevail it’s ugly head like it always does.
Then disaster hit. I started self-medicating myself before job interviews with drugs that helped with my anxiety and I somehow managed to do well enough to land my current job. Unfortunately, this was not a permanent solution as I started taking these medications often too much and wound up in a detox program in 2015. The side effects and after effects of my drugs were worse than my stuttering. My attempted solution had become my biggest problem.
I managed to come off everything and while I attended group meetings for a while one of the group members had a stutter as well. I felt his pain and we spoke about it here and there as his stutter was mild as well but I knew exactly what he was going through on a daily basis.
I call my stuttering “mild” because I only stuttered under pressure, and most of the time, I wasn’t under pressure, but, when I was, I couldn’t communicate at anything close to a normal pace. I had a serious problem that was then plain to see. I guess that it was more or less a classic case. I felt pressure mainly when talking to authority figures, groups, job interviews and on the phone. Otherwise, I didn’t stutter enough to be identified as having the problem. That’s fine, until it wasn’t, because, when I felt the pressure, the stuttering wiped me out.
After coming out on the other end (by stopping the anxiety drugs), I went back to what I always did well, avoiding any pressure situations I could at all costs. I decided to go back to school to finish my degree as I now have two children and I need to get a job making more money. I finished my degree last summer and started going on the job hunt knowing I was going to have to do one of my most feared activities and that’s job interviews.
I landed my first job interview last summer and I bombed it. I was a stuttering mess. This put me back into a relapse speech wise where for about a week or so I could barely speak fluently even to my own family. That’s the thing about stuttering. It snowballs on you.
I said well maybe if I just keep doing these job interviews, I will do better and be less nervous. So I went on another interview about a month later and same thing I was a complete bust. Panic set in.
That was it. I started to google speech therapy, and, thank heavens, I found Lee, and saw one of his books he wrote Stuttering & Anxiety Self Cures. Amazon had the audio version for free so I started to listen to it. Lee was making so much sense about how this is all in the mind and we need to reprogram as I have always felt like how can I read a 100 pages out loud perfectly alone yet get on a call or a pressure situation and stutter.
So I went ahead and bought the book as well as the short course and joined WSSA then reached out to Lee himself asking if he was available to skype. He graciously said yes and I skyped with him for a couple months. My speech since skyping with Lee as well as doing my daily affirmations and reading aloud has never been better. I have not had a job interview yet but any other pressure situation I have encountered I have passed with flying colors.
I haven’t had a bad incident since before I got Lee’s books, around four months ago, and at this point I feel that I know how to avoid stuttering anywhere.
WSSA has hundreds of ex-stutterers and that fact alone tells anyone that its program and methods work. On top of that, its program is incredibly inexpensive. The main point is that it works. Since it has worked for me and so many others, odds are that it will work for you too. If I were you, I’d get Lee’s books and join WSSA. Why spend your life stuttering when you can beat it and talk like everyone else.
MIKE, New York, June 2023