Hello, my name is Nikolay. I am 27 years old. I have been stuttering for 24 years.
The cause of stuttering was fear. As my mother told me, when I was 2.5 years old, a rooster attacked me and I was very scared. At 3, I started repeating myself a little. No one really paid attention to it, because my father also stuttered quite a lot. Everyone thought that I was repeating after him. But the thing is, I have a brother. He is 2 years older than me. And he didn’t repeat himself at all.
Already in the second grade I started going to speech therapy several times a week. There were exercises for articulation and relaxation. These exercises had to be done every day. But my brother really liked to joke about my exercises when I was doing them at home. So I abandoned all of this after a while, without even having time to feel any improvement.
Until the 8th grade, stuttering did not cause me any serious inconvenience. I could, albeit with a little repetition, but easily enough recite a poem from memory in front of the class or read something out loud.
Before the 8th grade, my old class was disbanded - and I found myself in a completely different environment with classmates unfamiliar to me. And then the real nightmare began. Although there was a boy in this class who stuttered like me. But as a newbie, I became an object of ridicule. Answering at the board, I could "mumble" for 10 minutes. And when the teacher got tired of it, I, without even finishing the assignment, sat down. It was at this time that I realized I was a stutterer, it was at this time that I withdrew into myself. I had only 2 friends-classmates. All the others became absolutely uninteresting to me.
At home, when I couldn't pronounce something normally, I was immediately advised: "Let's sing." My brother no longer laughed - during my repetitions, he looked away and silently waited for me to finish pronouncing the word. And when I needed to stop by to say something to someone I knew (there were no phones), they usually wrote me notes so that I wouldn't stand in front of them and mumble.
After finishing school, I entered a university. Again, there were only strangers around me. In addition, I lived in a dorm, and went home only on weekends. I was glad that there were already grown-up guys at the university, they treated my problem humanely. But out of habit, I tried not to stand out, communicated mainly only with my roommates in the dorm, and even then I did not really “open up” to them. In addition, hormones played even stronger at that age. I wanted to meet a girl, I wanted to give love to someone, but alas, the fear of communication was deeply ingrained in me. And the more I tried not to stutter, the harder it was for me to communicate.
And so, in my first year, I found a miracle cure for stuttering, what I had been looking for for so long, what made my speech smooth and without hesitation without much effort. Alcohol. I had never drunk alcohol before, but it turned out that it could help me. I began experimenting with doses. Beer and vodka were both a sedative and an antidepressant. Whenever I was in a bad mood, and I was in one very often, alcohol helped me. Whenever I wanted to talk normally, without mumbling, I drank alcohol. Under the influence of alcohol, I kissed for the first time. I also lost my virginity drunk. And that suited me. The only thing I didn’t like was that in the morning I was alone again, because all these girls were only there for one night.
I don’t know where I would be now if it weren’t for my mother. She saw that if I wasn’t stopped, there would be trouble. She started looking for doctors herself. First, I found out that a certain psychotherapist treated stuttering with hypnosis. I heard positive reviews about this doctor. I made an appointment. At the appointment, they were supposed to determine whether the main condition for treating stuttering with hypnosis was met. The patient had to want to be cured. This condition was not very clear to me, because I believe that if I came to the appointment, I want to be cured. And are there any people who like to stutter? I didn’t like the fact that the appointment was paid even before the treatment. But I was ready to do anything to be cured. And so we went together to the House of Culture, where all those wishing to be cured of stuttering had gathered in the assembly hall. Everything was organized like some kind of performance. We were seated so that there was at least one empty seat between those sitting. The patients of this psychotherapist, who had already passed the selection (proved that they wanted to be cured), came out on stage. They were lined up. The doctor came out on stage and asked several people to read aloud several rows from the book. It was audible that almost everyone had a hard time doing this. Then the main part of the performance began. During which I personally had goosebumps. I can’t describe in detail what happened – I don’t really remember. But the point of the performance was to show the newcomers the power of hypnosis. Then the same people who had already read the text were given the opportunity to read it again. The difference was obvious. Only one man, who initially stuttered very badly, repeated himself a little after hypnosis. Those who had a less severe illness read easily and smoothly. They left the stage.
Then they started calling the newly arrived stutterers onto the stage. We had to prove that we wanted to be cured. The idea was this. Several patients were standing on the stage, and a hypnotist would approach them one by one from behind. He would put his hand to the back of their head – and the person would start to fall on their back, and they would catch them. I don’t know what happened to me. Maybe I was so afraid that I wouldn’t succeed, and we were all told to stand still. Maybe the reason was (I found out about this later) that all people are suggestible, but not all are susceptible to hypnosis. In the end, they “weeded out” me and a few other guys – they said that we didn’t want to be cured. And they asked us to leave the hall.
When I went outside, I was truly in mourning. I had only one thought: I will always be a stutterer. I started bawling like I hadn't bawled since I was a child. I couldn't stop, my head was filled with the worst thoughts.
Gradually I calmed down, but as they say, "the sediment remained." I began to get used to the idea that stuttering would be with me for life.
But my mother did not stop there. She began to look for new methods of treating stuttering. And after six months, she told me that there was another enemy - a psychotherapist. He does not treat with hypnosis - he has other methods. I turned to him without much hope. His method consisted of a combined effect of suggestion and taking strong sedatives. After a month of treatment, the degree of my stuttering changed from severe to mild. It was easy to communicate, stuttering manifested itself very rarely. It was at this time that I defended my diploma and became a specialist.
But there was another problem. In my soul I remained an insecure person. There remained a feeling that I was inferior, that I was a "victim", that I was so poor and miserable. During conversations I could speak fluently, but the feeling of inferiority remained.
Perhaps because of this, perhaps because of something else, but stuttering gradually returned to me. The difference from the state before the treatment was that I realized that I can speak fluently, I can not stutter. After all, if I could speak without stuttering during the defense of my diploma in front of the committee and several dozen spectators, then in any other case I can do it too. This attitude helps me a lot. In addition to this, I again began to do breathing exercises, relaxation exercises.
Now I am preparing for the wedding, I adore my girlfriend. And she accepts me as I am. Stuttering only bothers me sometimes. I tried your wonderful program SpeechCorrector. Speech became more fluent. Moreover, I adjusted it to different values of sound delay from 50 to 150 ms. The result is equally good.
Thank you for such a wonderful program. For stuttering treatment I recommend the SpeechCorrector program. It is very important to believe that it helps – and then there will be a result. You just need to practice regularly for some time.
Good luck to everyone!