Mentoring and Counselling
My mentoring work in primary schools in Peckham and counselling training at Goldsmiths College helped me look at stammering as first of all, a relationship between the body, the spoken word and the social world we encounter.Children who stammered, very quickly picked up the idea of using the drums and then a part of their body to feel or touch, when they were going to stammer, enabling them, in turn, not to. The children flicked their words out with their fingers with a certain amount of attitude and good spirit.
It didn't feel at all controlling and because it started off with the drums, the thing I taught the children was not at all metronomic or robotic. All the children I worked with who stammered, wanted to get rid of their stammer. It was upsetting them. The work we did together helped them get through the school day.
The children's skill at embodying their speech caused me to think about the meaning of speech and stammering from a more thoughtful viewpoint that coincided with some of the therapeutic studies I was learning at college.
I began to understand that if I viewed speaking as an " out here " experience, one to do with the speaker, the object he/she wants to name and not an " in there " phenomenon, to do with the mechanics of the body, then the pain people who stammer suffer from, could also be understood and helped from this same perspective. To put it, like I might for one of my lecturers, stammering became a phenomenological problem, not a physical one or only a problem in the mind.
