Stammering: An Invisible Handicap
- Manan Dhuldhoya
- 2 hours ago
- 5 min read
Editor's Note: The writer has received permission to name all individuals mentioned in this piece.
Of the nearly 50 years that I’ve been alive, I’ve been different people for varying lengths of time. I was a naturalist-in-waiting for a few years before I turned 10. I was a mostly reluctant student for around 20 years and a (failed) bassist for most of my youth. I’ve been a writer for nearly 25 years now. Since last year, I’ve been a fiancé. But, of all the different people I have been across my life, there is one I have never stopped being – a stammerer.
My parents told me that I began stammering as I started speaking. What they didn’t tell me, until I was much older, was that they took toddler me to a few doctors to understand exactly why I was doing it. The first was a paediatrician whom I clearly remember. They took me to her when I was around 3 and had started speaking in sentences. That is when my parents realised that my pauses, gaps, and repetitions were not just the expected struggles of a toddler learning to speak. Dr Parekh, as Dad recounts, smiled at me, turned to them and told them something that would form the bedrock of how they approached my stammering and, in turn, became the main reason I didn’t grow up with the traumas that stammers often endure (more on that later). She told them the best way to handle this would be to not handle it. Just let him speak, she told them, and don’t ever correct him or finish his sentences. Let him grow up unburdened with the confusion of whether he’s speaking ‘wrong’, Dr Parekh told my two new parents in their mid-20s in the fairly unsensitised social landscape of late 1970s India.
That said, my parents not only heeded her advice but also adopted it as the foundation for raising their firstborn, which I believe is the main reason I’ve grown up unencumbered by the embarrassment and shame that shapes the lives of most other stammerers I’ve met. How? Because, unlike most stammerers I’ve met, I did not grow up thinking I spoke wrongly. I just spoke. I’ve seen so many parents flinch when their child stammers, especially in public. But mine? They just waited for me to finish, however long it took. And while the outside world was often cruel and made me feel like I stuck out, I came home to an environment where I wasn’t different. Here, I fit right in.
Two decades later, I was preparing to join the workforce. It was then, for the first time in my life, that I felt insecure about my stammer. Stammering while speaking in a classroom was one thing, but to stammer while presenting in a boardroom filled me with dread. I spoke with my cousin Aayesha, an audiologist, and she set up an appointment with Maya Sanghi, the then Head of Audiology and Speech Therapy Department at the T N Medical College & B Y L Nair Charitable Hospital, Mumbai.
I’ll never forget my first session with Maya. We chatted before she made me speak into a mirror, so that I could see my facial tics when I encountered letters or words I had trouble with. Then, as we finished and I got up to leave, she smiled and told me that this would likely be our second-to-last session. Dumbstruck, I asked her if I’d offended or upset her. She smiled and said that when stammerers start speech therapy “this late” in their 20s, the main work is undoing the trauma of years caused by laughter, pity, and unsolicited advice. I clearly didn’t suffer from any of those problems, she said, so the only thing I needed to learn was techniques to help ease it out. This would take only one more session, Maya said. My experience with therapy is something I have previously written on here at Inspire the Mind.
Every day since then, I’ve given thanks that my parents raised me as they did. It enabled me to make a career as a copywriter, a job based on my ability to pitch and sell ideas to colleagues and clients. Now, on behalf of other stammerers to whom fate has not been as kind, I’d like to share some advice based on my own experience that will help make life immeasurably kinder for us.
Don’t Complete Our Sentences
We know you mean well, but this makes us feel helpless and incompetent. Useless, even. Instead, wait, however long and trying it might seem. It’s longer and more torturous for us to know what we want to and not be given the time to say it than it is for you to wait for us to say it. Also, we’ll never forget the kindness of patience.
Don’t Look Impatient
Speaking of being patient, please mean and look the part. We see the rolling of eyes and the curling of lips, and that often makes us stammer more as we try to force the words out before we feel we’ve lost you.
Don’t Think We Don’t Notice
A lifetime of being laughed at because of the way we speak attunes us to hearing the unspoken. The softest snigger, the suppressed smirk – you’re not as good at hiding it as you think you are. And it cuts us to the quick, especially if you’re someone we care about.
Don’t Throw Us Into Public Speaking
Did you watch The King’s Speech? Stammering in public is our collective nightmare come to life, but it is one that can be faced and overcome. I’ve had clients and colleagues come to me after I’ve made a presentation to learn how I was able to face one of our worst fears – presenting our ideas to an audience and risk coming across as underconfident, only because we stammered. This leads many of us to diminish our public personalities and even choose careers out of the limelight. So yes, we’d love to give a toast, as I did at my sister’s wedding. Just let us know in advance, please?
Don’t Suggest Cures or Hacks
Roll marbles in your mouth, meet a healer/guru, try this potion or that powder, pray to a god or godman – we’ve heard them all. The best help you can offer is the patience to let us share with you whatever is screaming for release inside us.
Don’t Lampoon Us
Would you laugh at someone who limped? Or was in a wheelchair? Then why not treat us with the same sensitivity? Children can be (unknowingly) cruel, and we grow up being laughed at by our classmates and peers. Films and popular media love to create characters who stutter to get a chuckle from the audience. This encourages a buffoon-like public view of speech impediments. Please don’t add to it.
And Please, Please Don’t Pity Us
We do enough of it for all of you. While a sympathetic clucking and “It’s okay” can help us in the moment, it’s not much help when we meet someone new. So, whether it is for a stammerer whom you know and love, or for someone you’ve just met, treat them with the kindness of attention that you’d treat anyone else who spoke ‘normally’. All we want is to know that the invisible impediment that we will carry our entire lives is not going to be an obstacle to how you treat us.
