Bob utilized my beliefs in Jesus by having me “bring the negative thoughts into the presence of God” which forced me to apply my faith and belief in an all-powerful God where, to her, each of those thoughts can’t possibly reside. After we had completed this technique Bob utilized The Trans-derivational Search technique by having me remember the first time I felt the anxiety related to stuttering. My first memory of feeling the anxiety was with my mom. From my experience, my mom was unhappy with my stuttering and as a child I could easily detect her dissatisfaction with my speaking ability. Bob reframed this memory which effectively removed the impact of those past perceptions.
The results
So the question is, “How did this work in the following days after the 45 minute call with Bob?” Well, I kept track. The following Monday and Tuesday at work I had nine occasions where anxiety set in. Eight of the nine times I used the technique Bob used during our consultation session, and the words flowed as smooth as butter. However, one time I encountered a block that just came out of nowhere: no warning, just Wham!
The progress was amazing but now I wanted to ensure that the surprise blocks would not happen any longer. So I scheduled another session with Bob for the following Wednesday evening. We spent an hour on the phone that evening working through an issue that I had no idea had buried its roots into the foundation of the stuttering. It had nothing to do with stuttering per se but everything to do with the anxiety behind the stuttering. The issue came up while Bob was trying to determine what specifically I was doing to trigger the speech block. I had indicated that my biggest challenge was speaking in front of groups as opposed to one on one conversation.
We uncovered various feelings associated with speaking before groups such as feeling outnumbered, out of control, vulnerable and exposed. Becoming fully conscience of those feelings caused only a minor amount of discomfort. However, the feelings behind those initial ones were not as easy to deal with. As Bob worked with me to discover the “other” thoughts they eventually came screaming to my conscience mind. My mind immediately began an internal war of “to tell” or “not to tell”. After what seemed like a very inappropriate amount of hedging around in response to Bob’s question, I came to the conclusion that if I ever wanted to be 100% free of stuttering I was going to have to step out on a limb and reveal what I have refused to discuss since my youth.
So what was this childhood thing that reinforced the stuttering? Well, like too many other children, while I was growing up I experienced some traumatic events. I knew I could skirt the issue, hang up, and continue having a certain level of problems in my speech or I could meet it head on and overcome the stuttering. The two issues had intertwined and the trauma reinforced the stuttering.
An important point to make is that one of the great things about Neuro-Semantics is that it is not necessary to discuss the specifics of a given situation. (Because our mind works more from structure than content, the NS Practitioner usually needs very little content to assist the client in resolving the issue. See my article “Seven Keys to Personal Change” and Michael’s article “Why Introduce ‘Meta-Levels’ to Modeling” for more information about structural change.) I never had to reveal much more than just the high level aspects of the trauma. But I did have to be prepared to deal with the thoughts in my mind. That is not always easy. However, in terms of John Harrison’s Stuttering Hexagon it had to be effectively “reframed” in order to get all the points on the hexagon positively biased. Those blocks which just came out of nowhere probably would never have gone away without effectively dealing with all of the issues behind the anxiety and fear.
So for the remainder of the session Bob utilized specific Neuro-Semantic techniques to help bring about desensitization of the memories relating to the childhood issues. By the end of the session we had discovered that while anger toward the events surrounding my childhood was very apparent what was even more significant was the anger I felt towards myself as a child. In essence I blamed myself for the events of the past. The session came to an end and we set up another appointment for the following week.
What is interesting is that after this session the speech blocks totally disappeared. The issue had not been completely resolved but apparently enough had been dealt with to cause the blocking to disappear. I still had the “thoughts” of being a stutterer and occasionally I would get the physical sense that I would stutter or block but I never did. In essence the physiological aspects were still present which Bob later explained was a result of the muscles still being neurologically programmed (another point on the Stuttering Hexagon). I am not sure but I would venture to say that the stuttering may have eventually returned if we had not taken the time to deal with the anger I felt toward myself as a child.
Before I move to the third and final session it would be good to mention that during the three weeks that I had been having phone consultations with Bob I was also reading Games for Mastering Fear (2002) written by Michael Hall with Bob Bodenhamer. While reading it I eventually came
