ShrimpHog47

Stutterer here. I’ve been taught many circumvention and prevention methods if you would like me to share

I have had a stutter nearly all my life. Not a typical stutter that anyone has the capacity to experience, I mean a condition that is chronic and always present. As there isn’t a singular cause nor cure, I’m sure it was caused by my teacher. When I was 5 in the summer going from kindergarten to first grade, I moved across the state. The first year of making friends, everything my little 5 year old brain knew, gone. Starting over after your first year is already hard enough. I was always an energetic kid and I talked a lot trying to make new friends (which, looking back, was likely a subconscious attempt at replacing the friends I lost already by moving) and fit in to this new school. This led to me talking too much for my teacher’s liking, and during some instructional period where we were supposed to be quiet, I guess I was talking or something and the teacher walked down the aisle of desks and bent over to get up right next to my ear and do the mad whisper thing and for the first time in my life I had been truly scared of an adult. Just that the teacher flipped so easily on me (she was usually nice and pleasant, although she was middle-aged and for sure a worn soul that was a little more rough around the edges) is what made me so afraid.

I went home that day perfectly fine, but the next morning when I woke up at 0630, I couldn’t say anything coherent whatsoever. No whole words came out, I was stumbling over everything uncontrollably. I was mortified that I literally lost my ability to speak and my parents were beyond confused about what was wrong with me. I tried over and over but I had never felt so much embarrassment and shame before, and broke down crying. I wrote out what I wanted to say to my parents explaining I couldn’t talk. I didn’t speak for nearly three months. At all. I would go to school and literally didn’t speak because of how ashamed I was. My teacher caught on pretty quickly due to me being completely out of character, energetic and bubbly snd cheery one day and dead silent the next. Toward the end of the year I guess I was making good enough grades to be considered for the GT program and took the test and got in the following year in second grade.

I’m not really sure what happened in between that point of taking the GT test and second grade but shortly after I started it is when I both got put on ADHD medicine (starting with Vivance which made me puke, and next Adderall which I stayed on for the following 5 and a half years until about halfway through 7th grade; I forced myself to stop using it because of the side effects) and was enrolled with the school’s speech proficiency coach to help me control and mitigate my stuttering. I quickly learned to manage it and slowly worked my way back into not being completely self loathing when I spoke (since those three months in first grade passed I would force myself to talk and just power through the stutter up until I learned other methods of controlling it) to my classmates and my teacher, who was a fresh out of college redhead who was in her mid 20s. She was the complete opposite of my first grade teacher, always eager to help and make things enjoyable, and went the extra mile with the job. It was because of her and my GT teacher and the speech proficiency coach that I became comfortable talking again even if I had frequent obstacles.

Fast forward to today, I’m 20 now and have been graduated from high school for nearly 2 years now (a couple weeks away) and have been in the Marine Corps for almost a year and a half. I still have the stutter but after 14 years of dealing with it almost nobody notices until I get nervous where it becomes much more obvious. I don’t handle public speaking very well, or at least when all eyes are on me. Being in the military, the idea that you’re constantly being evaluated isn’t an uncommon thing, and that builds pressure to not screw up what you say when those people ask you to speak. I can get through the talking part just fine but I can’t control my body’s natural response of becoming flushed and palms sweaty and my heart beating much faster, which I fully realize after I sit back down and am left to my own. Is that any sign of any of the two disorders coupled with my stutter? Does the stutter have a tendency to cause such a disorder, and is it really that bad, considering my body reacts that way despite my brain saying I’m fine, that it would be considered a disorder?, or is that degree of nervousness typical for most people already?