What is the essence of nature and stuttering mechanisms?
There is a very good example in world literature that helps to understand the nature of stuttering. Alan Marshall in the book "I Can Jump Through Puddles" describes one woman who had long and ugly hair on her chin. The people around her wondered why she was not shaving it off. And the thing is that if she shaved it off, she would have recognized the fact of its existence. This would require the courage to admit your lack, to meet with something unattractive in yourself.
This comparison allows you to understand one aspect of stuttering. Stuttering (in the vast majority of cases) is trying to hide his flaw, deny, reject it, throw huge efforts so that no one understands that he stutters. He is constantly struggling with his stutter.
That is, a stutter denies the fact of stuttering. This also manifests itself in the fact that a stutter during a speech makes a lot of effort to hide it.
How will a person deny the fact of the existence of his hand? He will hide his hand, disguise it, he will feel fear that someone will understand what he is hiding, he will be constantly troubled. The more he will hide his hand, the more attention he will pay to it, the stranger he will look in the eyes of others.
A similar situation with stuttering. The more a person tries not to stutter, the more he begins to strain, which subsequently increases stuttering. A person cannot think of something pointlessly. If he thinks of breathing, it is the thought of breathing; if he thinks about not breathing, then this is also a thought about breathing. If a person thinks about his stuttering, this is a thought about stuttering, but if he thinks about not stuttering, then this is the same thought. Also, the stuttering state is highly charged emotionally. Anxiety, fears and other negative emotions accompany a stuttering person.
These thoughts lead to some very interesting conclusions. The most important, in my opinion, is that it is useless to fight stuttering. It only strengthens it. I really want not to stutter, but it is with this very desire that I create and strengthen stuttering. Is it not paradoxical?
This probably plays one of the key roles in the fact that in a stuttering person, after midlife, speech problems usually begin to weaken. At this age, they are simply already moving away from the implacable position that was before.
If stuttering is painfully perceived by a person, he may have a desire not to speak or speak as little as possible, i.e. Do not expose yourself to such unpleasant sensations. He begins to move away from the very situations of speaking, thinking about how to say less or not at all, closes in on himself.
This phenomenon is called the "log paradox" and is described by V. Levy. If the log lies on the ground, then it is very easy to go over it, if you lift it by a meter, then it is more difficult to go, but if it is 20 meters, it is simply impossible for an untrained person to go. In the latter case, a person begins to think about how not to fall. That is, he directs his efforts to thoughts about the fall, thereby programming and shaping those awkward movements that will prevent them from passing through. The same mechanism is relevant when stuttering.