I Have a Voice

knows what to do as a result of understanding your communication. But when they are uncertain what you mean, or do not know how to respond, it is then that you need to become clearer in your use of language. You need to fill in the gaps, give examples, talk about movies rather than snapshots. So when another person says, “I am flawed”, this kind of language is just the merest indication there is something they don’t like about themselves. You don’t know how precisely they think they are flawed, or what you are supposed to do about it. The person has somehow reduced a huge amount of information about themselves into one word, “flawed”, and then identified themselves with this one word. If you want to intervene, then you must first recover some of the supporting thinking that led to the abbreviated description – because as it stands, there are no clues about how you could help them change anything.

Representing an action or process in terms of a single noun or adjective is called nominalizing. Nominalizations leave out a great deal of information: the single word “life” could represent a whole lifetime’s experience; “worthless” or “foolish” (see Figure 2.3) are labels which the person applies to a complex cognitive analysis of behavior. This way of using language suggests how words both gain and lose meaning, and what we can do to change a particular meaning. “Stuttering” and “blocking” both refer to ongoing behaviors. By analysing the strategy the person is using for blocking or stuttering, what the person actually does, it becomes possible to change the strategy they use. They need to recover the “missing” information – the specific details of their strategy – in order to intervene and make adjustments.

Exercise 2.1: Recovering the evidence

Choose one of your favorite descriptions that you tend to believe about yourself. (You may identify with some of those in Figures 2.1, 2.3, 2.4 above). Now ask yourself these questions:

How have I come to identify myself as flawed, worthless, timid, or whatever? What is the story behind that?

What are the specific things that I do that I am defining in that very abbreviated way?

What kind of movies am I making that define me as being flawed?

How am I talking to myself so that I define myself as being flawed?

Answering these questions will begin to recover the story, the sequence of behaviors you engage in. By finding the meaning behind the words, the strategies and processes you use, you can then reorganize or edit them to produce you what you would rather have – fluency in speaking.

The words you use become associated with the feelings – they act as triggers for a particular state – and through habitual use get grooved into the muscles of your body. They feel real, and for some people, such feelings are the evidence for knowing something is real. The stronger this link between word/label and bodily feeling, the more challenging it is to alter.

Now we have another way of working: focusing on the words someone uses to talk about their experience. When a PWS tells you the way things are this provides an opportunity to find out how exactly they have constructed their model of the world. The good news is that it is always possible to undo the “realizing” process by examining the structure of the experience the words refer to. By bringing the strategies and stories into conscious awareness, it is possible to reorganize the strategies, to edit or rewrite the stories the PWS is using for knowing when to block and stutter.

You can also alter the meaning of – reframe – those contexts which they perceive as fear or anxiety producing. How you change the meaning of a limiting behavior, and how you re-create a model of the world so that it serve you better is covered in the remaining chapters.

Chapter Three Changing Points of View The nature of communication

Given that blocking has a cognitive component, then we can begin to explore ways of changing that blocking behavior by changing the way the PWS communicates.

Why do you communicate to others? This is not a trick question. The answer is that essentially you communicate to other people because you want them to do something. You establish an outcome or intention which involves them changing in some way, and then do whatever is necessary to try to achieve that. Even in the most friendly, laid-back situations, you want other people to listen to your stories and respond to them. There is a huge difference between communicating to another person, and talking to the furniture; in the former case, you expect some kind of response.

You communicate because you want to change the world in some way. Therefore it helps to be clear about what exactly it is that you want to happen, what exactly it is you want to be different. That is why this chapter covers creating well-formed outcomes, because every act of communication implies some kind of purpose or outcome.

An over-riding concern for the PWS is to be fluent. But not always. They may say that they want to be comfortable with themselves even though they stutter. I hear this a lot: “Bob, just get me to where I stop beating myself up because I stutter.” “Just get me to where I am OK with myself and not so overly anxious because I stutter.” These people seem to know that once they get to where they are comfortable with themselves even though they stutter, the main issues are resolved. Their conversational outcome is the same as with “normal” people.

There is a saying: “You get what you concentrate on.” If you think about the horrible things that could happen to you … well, you know what? They do. Therefore part of the changing of your behavior is changing the content of your thoughts. This means paying attention to what comes to the forefront of your mind, and noticing whether you are counting your blessings or on the