Did you know that approximately three million Americans stutter?
Stuttering is a speech problem that can be embarrassing and cause low self-esteem. It mostly happens in children, but it can persist into adulthood. Four in five people struggling with stuttering will grow out of it, while one in a hundred adults will continue to stutter.
If you are struggling with stuttering, you may try every stuttering treatment that you know to cure the problem. It can be frustrating to try all methods to cure stuttering without any success.
Have you tried hypnosis for stuttering to see if it will help you deal with your problem? Keep reading to figure out whether it is ideal for you.
What Is Stuttering?
Stuttering or stammering means you have issues with some aspects of your speech. For instance, it could be that you mention particular sounds for long, or you repeat certain sounds, e.g., b-b-b-bus. Sometimes you may be unable to let out the word at all. One of the most iconic voices in Hollywood, James Earl Jones, used hypnosis to overcome stuttering, meaning there are many ways hypnosis could help you reach the stars (see ‘Self-Hypnosis for Success‘).
Types of Stuttering
Developmental stuttering: this typically happens in the early stages of development for children when they are developing their language skills.
Acquired stuttering: this type of stammering is also referred to as late-onset. It is rare and occurs in older children and adults due to underlying issues such as stroke, neurological condition, or head injury. It can also be a result of some medications, drugs, or trauma.
What Causes Stammering?
Stammering can be associated with the unconscious mind or mental health. You may realize that your speech problems seem to persist when you are angry, stressed, over-excited, or anxious. Additionally, you may notice that when you are conscious and trying hard to be fluent, it becomes hard to stop stuttering.
As children grow, their language systems catch up, and they grow out of their stuttering problems. Some people may not experience a stutter. However, the fear of stuttering can lead to interiorized stuttering.
Interiorized Stammering
This type of stuttering happens when you have a strong negative feeling about your stammer. You could be speaking fluently but avoid situations that you think can cause you to stammer.
You might try hiding that you have a stammer and that you have negative feelings about it. In such circumstances, you might find yourself rehearsing a speech over and over to avoid stammering.
With interiorized stuttering, what you see on the surface is just a tiny part. The shame, guilt, and fears beneath can be overwhelming. This can make you withdraw from social interactions and lead to anxiety, stress, and low self-esteem.
How Does Stuttering Affect Your Life?
Stuttering can be overt or covert or severe or mild. Either way, stammering can affect your life by affecting your confidence – see ‘Hypnosis for Shyness‘ – and make you conscious of speaking with others.
Stammering can be stressful, which can cause anxiety which will lead to depression.
Hypnosis for Stuttering Therapy
As mentioned earlier, stuttering can result from various causes, including extreme stress or emotional or physical trauma. If stammering makes you stressed and anxious, hypnosis for stuttering is an effective solution.
Hypnosis for stuttering looks at the psychological aspects of your stammering and seeks to address any underlying issue.
Hypnotherapy helps to get you in a deep state of relaxation. While in that state, it is possible to bypass the conscious mind (critical thinking) and use your subconscious mind. The consciousness consists of the automatic negative feelings and thoughts that make you stammer.
Speech therapists will use analytical hypnotherapy to help you explore when your stuttering starts and analyze what happens and why it causes you to stutter. The therapist will then use speech therapy techniques to help you change your beliefs about the situations and improve your speech. The hypnotherapy sessions will help you eliminate stuttering by dealing with the triggers that cause you to stammer and desensitize your reactions to the triggers.
Hypnotherapy enables you to develop strategies to deal with social situations and other triggers that cause you to stammer. If you are suffering from anxiety or stress or low self-esteem due to stammering, hypnotherapy will help you deal with it.
As mentioned earlier, hypnotherapy puts you in a state where you can feed your subconscious mind with positive suggestions. When hypnotized, you realize that:
- You start becoming comfortable with specific words and sounds that were giving you more stress
- You gain more control of your behaviors, feelings, and emotions. Thus, you can control the stutters even when you are nervous or angry
- You become more comfortable with certain situations that previously made you stammer. You become more confident such that you can say anything
- You enjoy your life more
Self Hypnosis Techniques for Dealing With Stuttering
There are various hypnotic techniques that you can use to deal with stuttering. These include:
Regression
Age regression is one of the techniques a speech therapist can use to deal with stammering. When the client is in a hypnotic state, the therapist will help them regress.
If the stutters began when the individual was a child, the therapist would help them regress to that age. The session will allow the person to relive their childhood, including the limitations that come with it. Perhaps the person was ignored, teased, or bullied. This can make them afraid, and they may not get words out even when they want to speak.
Stuttering can result from the fact that the person was struggling to say what they wanted.
The therapist will help the individual realize that the bullying or teasing happened when they were children and powerless. The therapist then helps them realize that the situation is different. They can say no to harassment and don’t have to hang around bullies or people who make them insecure. They are now wiser and more mature and don’t have to accept any situation that makes them uncomfortable.
In other words, the therapist will help them realize that they no longer require stuttering as a defense mechanism.
Visualization
Visualization or imagery is a vital technique in dealing with stammering. The idea is to develop an interaction around visuals or imagery and then send them down the throat to heal it.
This technique enables the therapists to develop symbolic realities and fantasies where the individual’s issues heal.
Hypnotic Triggers
One reason why therapists ask their clients questions during the session is to get information. For example, you may realize that you don’t stutter in some situations. The therapist can make use of some hypnotic triggers.
It would be best to come up with hypnotic triggers for stuttering and not stuttering and then combine the two. Then you should fire up the ability of not stuttering and stuttering together so that one wins over the other. Ensure that the non-stuttering part is built up well.
The Dreaming Arm
For every milestone that you make, you should try to make it unconscious as quickly as possible. Thus, you don’t have to give thought to your stutters and instead just talk.
The best way to achieve this is by using the dreaming arm. The technique works by creating a hypnotic phenomenon, such as an arm levitation, which is relatively straightforward.
You should then attach some suggestions to the activity, such as when you lift your arm, your unconscious mind will think about you being a confident talker, natural breather, natural talker, non-stutterer, and a smooth talker. The unconscious mind will internalize the hypnotic phenomenon so that it becomes natural.
You can also attach the phenomenon to the times in the past when the individual would stutter. The reason for attaching the resources to the past is that, even if they fix the issue at present, they can recreate it by remembering the past when they stammer.
Remembering the past events may undo all the gains that an individual has put to overcome stuttering.
Post-Hypnotic Suggestion
In each hypnosis session, you need to reinforce the idea that the arm levitation represents the unconscious mind practicing speaking freely. The therapist may discuss the possibility of leaving their client with a post-hypnotic suggestion.
For example, at night, while the individual is sleeping, their unconscious mind can pick one of the dream sequences, lift the arm, and put it down as a dream healing. This will maintain the gains that you achieve with the individual. This minimizes the risk of the client breaking down again.
Hypnosis Downloads
Hypnosis Downloads is an excellent choice if you want to get the best hypnosis recording to help you deal with stuttering. Clinical hypnotherapists with years of experience in hypnotherapy developed the program. They record the programs in a state-of-the-art studio, which ensures the audios are clear and high-quality (see best audios for hypnosis).
If you get stuck while using the hypnotic programs, the company has a dedicated support team ready to help you out. It also allows you to give your suggestions and experiences with the program.
Final Thoughts
Stuttering can be embarrassing and can cause one to have low self-esteem. Luckily, a speech therapist can use hypnosis to rectify the problem. There are different techniques that the therapist can use to deal with the situation, depending on several factors. Hypnosis for stuttering is an effective method worth checking out.