Exercise 3.4: Changing foreground and background Overview
Think of the next time you will likely block.
Freeze the movie and locate the picture.
Step back and look beyond the picture of the block and see the resources in the background.
Ask the PWS to think of the next time they are likely to block. In all probability, they will create a picture of the person in the particular context.
Ask them to freeze the movie, and to notice where in reference to their eyes do they see that other person in their context. Is that picture in front of them? Is it down or up, to the right or to the left? In all likelihood that picture will be right in front of them and it is the only thing they are looking at.
Now ask them, “What are you not seeing?” What? Notice what you are not noticing? Yes, that is exactly what you want them to pay attention to: what in that picture they are not seeing. Because they are so focused on that person and the particular context which they are afraid will trigger their blocking they do not see anything else. Ask them to step back from that image to get a different perspective on it. From this position ask them to notice what they can see behind the first image. What is beside it and beyond it? What else is out there that they were not seeing at first?
Focusing on something to the exclusion of everything else is called foveal vision. In order to step back, you engage your peripheral vision. So step back, be aware of your peripheral vision and see everything around that original image. Not only look to each side, but look to see what is behind the picture of the block. Allow your awareness to go beyond the image of the block. What is back there?
Figure 3.3: Alternating frames
(Based on ‘My Wife and My Mother-in-law’ by cartoonist W.E. Hill, published in Puck in 1915.)
In every picture, image, and movie that you are seeing, some things are in the foreground and other things are in the background. When we foreground problems they become bigger and more challenging. When we foreground resources we become more skilled, competent and bold.
What do you see when you look at the picture in Figure 3.3? An old woman or a beautiful young lady? If one of these answers surprises you, look again.
(Hint: The old woman’s nose is the young girl’s chin. You need to foreground the young woman’s nose in order to see her. In doing so, you background the old woman, changing the bump on the old woman’s nose to the young woman’s complete nose. To see the old woman, foreground the young woman’s necklace and perceive it as the old woman’s mouth.)
You see either the old woman or the young woman. You can’t see both simultaneously. It’s similar to the way fluency and fear are competing concepts. If what is in the foreground does you no favors, why not put that in the background and replace it with something more useful? Once you are aware that you have a choice, you can see which you want to see. When it comes to blocking or stuttering, knowing that both options are available to you, which do you want to see in the foreground of your movies?
Consider the PWS who had an image of himself as a scared little kid who froze in the presence of authority figures. When he froze he blocked. He had another image of himself as a resourceful adult who always spoke fluently. When he saw the scared little kid, guess where the adult was? The scared little kid was in the foreground and the mature fluent adult was in the background. Foregrounding resources
What resource states would help you foreground your behaviour of choice? Which resources would enhance your performance as you go on stage in the theater of your mind? You choose. Because you have already experienced states such as faith, courage, relaxation, presence of mind, feeling centered, being whole and so on, that means that you can have activate them as resources whenever you want them.
CASE STUDY 8
Jack provides us with an example of acceptance:
Jack told me during a phone consultation that before he called me he was becoming anxious about the call. He was worried that I would be thinking that he should be further along with the fluency then he was. So, again, we hear a person who blocks worried about what the other person may or may not be thinking about his or her speech.
By the way, people who block do not have a monopoly with such thinking. The PWS should take heart as they have a lot of company in the so-called “normal” world. Caring too much about what others think is very common. It is a part of being human – we probably all do it to some degree. During childhood we learn how the world works and that includes predicting what other people are going to do. And we are often expected to be a certain way for our parents or our teachers. However, we can never achieve “perfection”. This is also part of being human, because if we were perfect we would never learn anything worth knowing about ourselves.
Jack told me that in some areas he was much more fluent. And that when he did stutter that wasn’t as important to him as before. He was coming to the point where he was giving himself permission to stutter without feeling bad about himself. Indeed, he said, “It is really not blocking; it is more stumbling.”
Here we have an example of how speech improves once the person accepts their experience and then relabels or reframes it.
However, he said, in some contexts he works up a lot of anxiety
