World Congress
For us to love each other we must first know each other. We come to know each other through communication, the purpose of which is communion. Traditionally, we think of stuttering and cluttering as impairing this communion. Disfluency prevents us from sharing ourselves with others by distorting our message and increasing the effort it takes for us to speak. This need not be the case. Our disfluencies are as much a part of us as any other attribute. For others to know us deeply, they must also know our stuttering and cluttering. Likewise, for us to know others, we must know how they react to us – all of us – including our disfluencies. In this talk, I propose that by stuttering and cluttering openly and sincerely we are able to share more of ourselves with others and therefore enter into a deeper communion than would be possible if we hid our disfluencies. Stuttering and cluttering introduce vulnerability into our conversations that would be absent had we been fluent. This vulnerability, when reciprocated, allows for intimacy. We know from recent research that the less spontaneously we speak and the more we conceal our disfluencies, the more they negatively affect us. By embracing our disfluencies, we not only lessen the negative impact of stuttering and cluttering but we also increase our ability to know, and therefore, love each other.