Just after my wife and I watched the new hit movie, “The King’s Speech,” a friend asked me if I enjoyed it.
“No, I suffered through it. But it was a great movie.”
I have been a stutterer since the age of six. Every time King George VI puffed his cheeks helplessly as he tried to get out a word, I felt the frustration and pain.
We stutterers know all too well “Bertie’s” fear of situations that would force us to read a text publicly or speak before a group. Most stutterers fear the telephone because we cannot control the dialogue. We remember painfully the innumerable occasions when we had all the right words in our heads but could not utter them. We groan as we think of all the well-meaning friends and family who tell us—as they told the British king—to take a breath or just relax. If we could, we would!
Famous stutterers include Moses, Demosthenes, Churchill (whose problem “The King’s Speech” alludes to), Marilyn Monroe, Oral Roberts, Carly Simon, James Earl Jones, Tiger Woods, and John Stossel. Eighty percent of all stutterers are males.
Like most stutterers, my disability started when I was very young. My mother feared I would flunk kindergarten because no one but she could understand me. Somehow I passed. But then in first grade my teacher put me in front of the class to help me enunciate. My panic developed into stuttering, which I would be helpless to manage for the next thirty-two years.
Stuttering often turned school into a nightmare. Fellow students looked at me quizzically and mockingly. In high school, one considerate lad asked me publicly why I could not talk like everyone else. I was glad to take Latin and Greek, so-called dead languages because reading them was important—not speaking them. But I dreaded French class every day, when I would sweat rivers of living water down my sides as the recitation exercise made its way up and down the rows until it came to me. Everyone sighed because they knew I would take so much longer than everyone else, while I tried to force words from my uncooperative mouth.
In college I had to join in class discussion because the University of Chicago prided itself on small classes with lots of conversation. Sometimes, with the running start seen in “The King’s Speech,” I might be fluent for a few sentences. But invariably I would grind to a halt, utterly tongue-tied before an intractable consonant.
I was humiliated when my grad school advisor recommended speech therapy. How did he know? Strangely, many of us stutterers are in denial. But the speech therapy I received there made no real attempt to cure me, instead trying to help me accept myself. It was a waste of time.
Other speech therapists adopted something like the psychological theory used by the King’s therapist in the movie—thinking the cause of stuttering is childhood trauma. Attempts to help me talk through my supposed traumas did nothing for my speech. Later in life it dawned on me that many non-stutterers had childhood trauma, and many stutterers did not, or dealt with their traumas in healthy ways.
As a Christian, and then Christian historian and theologian, I wondered for many years where this fit into God’s providence. Luther’s famous line has been helpful: “A theologian is born by living, nay dying and being damned, not by thinking, reading, or speculating.”
“Alienation,” “bondage” and even “damnation” pass from abstraction into vivid resonance when a stutterer takes the gospel seriously. Not of course in the fullest sense—for I know that in Christ I am no longer a damned alien in bondage—but I experience in my own speech moments when the alienation and bondage of those outside Christ are given typological expression, as it were. I have the words but cannot speak them, just as they may know dimly what is right and true but cannot approach it.
Yet stuttering can also point to redemption—by the very humiliation which it fosters. There is nothing like feeling helpless when trying to get out a word to help a person feel utter dependence on God. More profoundly, it can show how God uses even the devil’s work to redeem his people. The apostle Paul struggled with the “thorn in the flesh” which first came upon him when he preached in Galatia (2 Cor. 12.1–10; Gal 4.13). Some have speculated that it was an eye disease known to be common in that part of Asia Minor that intermittently damaged eyesight and disfigured the face so that the sufferer looked repulsive. Perhaps this is why Paul says that despite his “bodily ailment” the Galatians did not “scorn or despise” him, and in fact “would have gouged out [their] eyes” for him (Gal. 4.13–15).
In an oft-missed aside, Paul says of this thorn that it was a “messenger of Satan” meant to harass him (2 Cor. 12.7). But God used it to keep Paul “from being too elated” by his extraordinary revelations, lest pride keep Paul from experiencing Christ’s secret “power” (v.9). In other words, pride over the blessings of God would have kept Paul from experiencing the power of the messiah. So God enlisted a messenger of Satan—just as he enlisted Satan to test Job—to keep Paul humble and thereby open to a deeper work of grace.
I learned a kind of humility when from time to time I would feel like I was at the bottom of a pit whose walls were smooth and greased and lacking handholds. When I first heard the gospel message that Christ comes to save those who cannot save themselves, I could relate.
Then when I started the therapy that set me free from stuttering’s bondage, I learned another kind of humility that was another “type” of the gospel. For twelve hours a day over three weeks at the Hollins Communications Research Institute, I was taught to breathe and talk all over again. But in order to do so, I had to admit thousands of times that the way I had been pronouncing each sound was wrong. I had to become like a child and accept continual correction.
Today stuttering still works to check my pride. Like everyone else, I have accomplishments that if misinterpreted can give me a puffed head. Perhaps we writers and professors are especially tempted to think of knowledge as more important than love. But when I fail to use what I have learned and lapse into old stuttering habits, I am reminded of how fragile my fluency is. Often it reminds me of my moral fragility as well.
But then when I reflect on Paul’s thorn in the flesh and the way God outfoxed Satan to keep Paul close, I take a fiendish delight in the ways the demon of stuttering has drawn me, too, closer to God.
Gerald McDermott is the Jordan-Trexler Professor of Religion at Roanoke College.
Comments:
Speech therapy helps her, with techniques to increase her fluency, but I'm starting to think she'll have to deal with it all her life. And God will give her the grace she needs, I'm sure of it.
You wrote:
"And God will give her the grace she needs, I'm sure of it."
Yes He will. Abundantly.
Your daughter will learn to live by faith, because over and over again she will be faced with situations she doesn't have the self-confidence deal with because of her stuttering. She will have to place her confidence in God, putting those situations in His hands and doing the best she can. Everyone needs to learn to confidently put their lives in God's hands and live by faith. Stutterers tend to learn to do this quicker than most because they have no other choice.
Not that continually having to step out of the boat and walk on the water towards Jesus isn't stressful. It is. Sometimes we sink. But then maybe God is letting us know, like He let Peter know, we need to increase our faith in Him. Your daughter will develop a huge faith in God and will eventually pretty much get over stuttering like myself and many others have, but she will have learned so much along the way about God's trustworthiness. Sadly, many never learn this lesson. One of the reasons God allows evil, I think, is to display His power to bring a much greater good from it than would have taken place otherwise. Your daughter will do great and good things for God, as He will for her.
God bless,
Harry
†
Sixty five years later, I stutter only once in a great while. And even then I think I do it to get attention. It works.
I think I should add that seeking God for his grace is always necessary, espeically for us stutterers, but that as for all diseases and disabilities we should seek help where God provides. In other words, get good therapy if there is some. Unlike all the therapies I got that were based on the psychological model, the model used at Hollins really works. But a person needs to be a mature teenager or older for it to work. So I would recommend Hollins to your daughter, Grace, either now or perhaps in a year or two.
Thanks to the others for your comments.
Don't you think, even though it may appear that there is a treatable neural-physiological element to stuttering, that overcoming it is essentially a spiritual matter? How is it that some have, for the most part, gotten over it without ever having used the methods of the Hollins Institute?
You are quite right about the fact that we should seek God's help where He provides it, and that if that provision is a method of therapy that seems to work, then we should by all means avail ourselves of it if that is possible. What should those do for whom that is not possible?
I think there is hope for stutterers who are unable, for whatever reason, to use the methods of the Hollins Institute. I think that because I have lived it. It can get better.
What I am saying would apply to stutterers who have moments when they can speak as normally as anyone else. This indicates to me that there is nothing physically / "mechanically" wrong with them.
Everyone stutters to some extent, especially when they are small. It does not become a problem for children whose attention isn't drawn to it; they will continue to stutter occasionally all of their lives, and this won't be noticed by themselves or anyone else. This is because they are not self conscious about it - they are not attempting to avoid doing it.
Learning to speak is like learning to walk in that we all do it very clumsily for a while, although learning to speak is a much more complicated and lengthy affair than learning to walk. This quite natural clumsiness in speaking leads to one becoming a "stutterer," I believe, for those who have become self conscious about their inevitable, occasional stuttering. They fear doing it.
This fear, I think, is where stuttering becomes associated with emotional trauma that has made us seriously doubt, in some way or another, our adequacy and worth. It is a fear of what is really a quite natural "clumsiness" being seen by the child as brokenness and disfigurement that is being exposed to others through his speech. It is a fear of his misconception of himself as a “freak” being revealed to others. It snowballs from there, one's anxiety about this making the problem ever worse.
What is humility? It is accepting who we are. It is realizing that we are what we are, and that the high or low opinion of us that others may have does not change who and what we really are one bit. Realizing our true worth is the beginning of the cure. My true worth, yours and Grace's daughter's was revealed by God, who found our worth such that He was drawn down to Earth and up onto a cross to avoid losing us forever. Realizing that, letting that truth sink in deeply, accepting and rejoicing in such a mighty love – and letting that heal us, is the beginning of the cure. I believe the cure for stuttering is more spiritual than it is a matter of neural-physiological therapy, even if that may have some benefit of which one should avail himself.
I don't think drawing attention to a speech defect is what causes all stuttering. Did it cause some? Perhaps. But like many afflictions of this character, its etiology is complex.
Will recognition of our true worth in Christ and the speech defects of non-stutterers help us? No doubt. Will it cure us and every other stutterer? Probably not.
I went through years contemplating all these things, praying and getting prayed for. To no long-term avail until this Hollins approach.
I don't doubt, Harry, that these things have enabled you to get free, or mostly free. But I would hesitate saying the cure is always more spiritual than mechanical.
I think cases of stuittering vary greatly. Just as there is no one cause, there also is no one cure.
But is the cause and cure usually a combination of spiritual and physical things? No doubt.
The recognition of “the speech defects of non-stutterers,” as you put it, is not what is helpful; it is the recognition that occasionally stuttering a little is not a “defect” at all. It is a quite natural occurrence that takes place even among those who are considered to be normal or even eloquent speakers.
I don't think, from a Christian perspective at least, that we want to think of even significant stuttering as a “defect” as much as we want to think of it in terms of the result of God's providence. Consider God's conversation with Moses, whom you mentioned in your article was a stutterer:
Moses said to Yahweh, “But, my Lord, never in my life have I been a man of eloquence, either before or since you have spoken to your servant. I am a slow speaker and not able to speak well.” “Who gave man his mouth?” Yahweh answered him. “Who makes him dumb or deaf, gives him sight or leaves him blind? Is it not I, Yahweh? Now go, I shall help you to speak and tell you what to say.”
- Exodus 4:10-12
God has a loving reason for willing all that He wills and for allowing all that He allows. Our stuttering is in God's providence. We must accept that and deal with it the best we can. The ironic thing is that the problem subsides the more we stop fighting it and just accept it as His loving providence. God didn't tell Moses He would cure Him of stuttering. Basically, He asks Moses to trust Him and rely on Him. That is great advice for everyone. Learning to do that is life changing. It turns out that one of those changes is the alleviation, to a very large extent, of the problem of stuttering. God gave Moses Aaron to speak for him, not because He originally intended to do so, but only because Moses continued to protest. If He gives some the Hollins Institute and that helps, that is fine; I can't help but wonder whether or not that is His intention for all stutterers.
The conscious attempt to avoid stuttering, and mentally making a mountainous disaster out of failing to avoid doing so when in reality that happening is a mole-hill in the grand scheme of things, exacerbates the problem. In the same way, seeing yourself and the possibility of your stuttering as it really is in the grand scheme of things greatly diminishes the anxiety that causes the stuttering in the first place. How does one get this realistic and very helpful, humble perspective? Spiritually.
The more we love, the more we become focused on others, the less focused we are on ourselves and how the way we speak appears to others. This too greatly diminishes the anxiety that is at the root of stuttering. How does one become less self-centered and more charitably other-centered? Spiritually.
Humility, charity and the recognition of one's true worth regardless of what one considers one's “deficiencies” are obtained spiritually. These are huge factors in alleviating stuttering. We agree that “the cause and cure usually [is] a combination of spiritual and physical things.” I am just stressing that the spiritual dimension appears to me to sometimes be the only necessary remedy, and is probably a huge factor even when it is not the only necessary remedy.
We need to learn to praise God for all He does, including making man dumb or deaf, giving him sight or leaving him blind, and for allowing some to suffer being “slow of speech," realizing, as was the case with Moses, that God has His reasons – loving reasons – for doing so.
God needed an extraordinarily humble person to do the job He assigned to Moses. As we read in Numbers 12:3, “Now Moses was the most humble of men, the humblest man on earth.” In God's providence Moses' stuttering helped him become who God needed him to be to accomplish his task. Not just stutterers, but everyone, needs to realize that we are each here for a purpose, and that what we might consider our God-given or God-allowed “defects” may be instead the key to our fulfilling that purpose. And we shouldn't be surprised if accepting that makes things much better. To refuse to accept that is to doubt the goodness of our Father in Heaven.
I stuttered so bad as I child I was sent to a speech therapist as well. No help there for me, either.
I always assumed my stuttering was due to emotional trauma I experienced as a child, and that everyone else who stuttered did so for that reason. So, your belief that that is not always the case got my attention. I wonder if there has been a survey of stutterers that would indicate how frequently they believe their affliction is associated with childhood trauma. I suspect that those who don't attribute it to emotional trauma might think that because of their thorough suppression of the trauma they experienced as a child. Do you see that as a possibility?
I am pretty much over stuttering now and even do public speaking occasionally. (Although there was I time when I would have walked over hot coals barefoot if it would have gotten me out of speaking before an audience. ;o) I still have a humiliating relapse every now and then and can entirely relate to your painful experiences in school and as an adult. The possibility of not being able to speak at a crucial moment is still there and is indeed a factor in keeping one humble. I don't know any stutterers who feel they are completely cured of stuttering. Neither do I know anyone completely cured of pride. Although I think stutterers may make more progress in that area than most. ;o)
A buddy of mine, when we were debating about something, if I had had a particularly hard time getting out what I wanted to say, would smile and counter with "Well, that's easy for YOU to say." ;o) I think being able to laugh at yourself helps.
Public reflections such as yours on one's experience with stuttering are very rare. Thanks for sharing your thoughts and experiences.