I write in response to the article ‘The “gift” of stuttering’ (July 28). Although it is laudable that an awareness group called The Stuttering Association of Malta is to be established, I wholeheartedly wish that it be a group that promotes education of the real possibility of improvement and, hence, freedom from the condition. A client wrote to me just days ago: “... a positive outcome will really change my life; it would make everything so much easier for me.”

Let me assure you, stuttering is an unwanted ‘gift’ and one that cannot be resold on eBay.

Stuttering is a hindrance and, potentially, a pronounced stutter can hold a person back.

“This is who I am...” is a pronouncement from the 1950s and 1960s when stuttering was treated with huge doses of valium with the aim of slowing the person down and, by implication, their speech too. Yes, I agree, that is unbelievable today.

A person is not his/her stutter, as the article purports to say. The stutter is formed of a situation, a circumstance of trauma (often relatively mild), depending on the disposition of the child, and the heightened emotions amplified by an adult of position and authority.

Bernice Gauci is quotted in the article as saying that, aged 10, “her teacher asked her to read an excerpt from a book aloud in class. She started reading and [got] stuck on a word.” The male teacher told her: “Go on say it”.

The stutter is formed of a situation, a circumstance of trauma

The severity of the instruction to a child who is stupefied in the moment and so utterly ‘stuck’, creates such extreme ‘fear’ as to literally st... st... st... create a stutter and an ensuing emotional tsunami of ‘shock’ so enormous that the child begins to repeat the speech pattern and comes to believe: “this is who I am” or, rather, “this is what I do”. “I am a stutterer” or “a stammerer”.

This is not true. And I can report how often I have met with clients who, in their 20s and advancing in their career, so wish they could sell their ‘gift’ on eBay.

Often, such young men (for stammering is more often experienced by men), discover when in deep relaxation that, at age 10, when their teacher had asked them to read, each had ‘created a stammer’ to get out of reading in class.

For these young men, what had seemed like a ‘clever’ strategy to escape reading in class has become a habit of speech.

What interactive hypnosis can do is to take the young man or woman back to the moment in class, to support their young 10-year-old, together with a wise coach, and so gently support their younger self to read free of the speech impediment.

The child now gets to hear himself speak the word he had previously got stuck upon, lucidly and smoothly, and so gain freedom to move forward to speak in a way that allows his true gifts to shine.

Stutterers, keep the ‘humility and creativity’ the good doctor speaks of but ditch the stutter or, at the very least, research hypnosis and therapy as a way to improve your speech.

Deborah Marshall-Warren is an interactive hypnotherapist.