Saturday, January 09, 2010

Social Anxiety oil on neurobio fire


The Australians have taken up Social anxiety & Stuttering. The Onslow group, and the Craig group have written paper on the topic. And I believe that their work on the social anxiety aspect of stuttering is very important, especially in the treatment of people who stutter.

Let me be crystal clear. I certainly view social anxiety as a consequence of stuttering and not the cause of stuttering. And the source of our abnormally high level of social anxiety is not neurobiological like for many people with social anxiety disorder.We instead have built up belief systems about stuttering and individually learned memories to stuttering events that led many to suffer social anxiety related to their stuttering. There is no doubt in my mind that the shame and fear associated constitutes a significant part of the psychological and social handicap that we experience and modulates the frequency and severity of stuttering events.

The good news about social anxiety is that you can get rid of most of them, unlike the neurobiological abnormality in our speech systems or the resulting stuttering and associated learned behaviours. We can lastingly change our false beliefs, and we can loose our shame and much of our fear to stuttering. The vast majority of people who stutter that I met have overcome much of their shame and fear that they held as teenagers, but many are still stuttering. It is a sad fact that increases in fluency are extremely hard to maintain whereas a reduction of shame and fear is typically long-lasting. Why? Because we have a normally functioning shame and fear system (unlike what some crackpots are telling us) that linked stuttering events to emotions of shame and fear because our and our surroundings' belief system said that stuttering event should be moments of shame and fear for us due to our personal failures of speaking normally. Change the belief systems and there is no shame and less fear, and our shame and fear system does not associate stuttering events anymore with fear and shame!

We should never forgot the social anxiety part when explaining stuttering to people. Yes, the underlying cause is a neurobiological abnormality leading to a suboptimal performance, and I want to remind everyone that I was and still are running around for years getting that into people's mind. But we should not loose sight of social anxiety and learned behaviours associated to stuttering events: the psychological mal-adaptations are the oil on the simmering neurobiological fire! With fire, oil is nothing. Without oil, the fire is small.

3 comments:

Harry said...

Hi Tom,

You say :
"Let me be crystal clear. I certainly view social anxiety as a consequence of stuttering and not the cause of stuttering."

...and then late add :

"There is no doubt in my mind that the shame and fear associated constitutes a significant part of the psychological and social handicap that we experience and modulates the frequency and severity of stuttering events."

Isn't this a contradiction? So, the fear and shame modulate the frequency of our stuttering, and yet you do not beleive that it is the cause?
Surely, it causes some of the stuttering. Take away the fear or shame (eg. when we speak to an animal, or a baby, or to ourselves), and most of the stuttering disappears.

Tom Weidig said...

No, it is not. Makes perfect sense! ;-)

1) Without the neurobiological deficiency, we would never have started stuttering in the first place.

2) Without the neurobiological deficiency, we would have far less difficulties controlling our speech fluency in a demanding speaking situation.

The neurobiological basis started us stuttering and keeps us stuttering or forces us to exercise control so not to stutter.

But the psychological and social aspects modulate the frequency and severity of us stuttering!

Tom Weidig said...

Just to be sure, when I talk about causes, I mean the real underlying causes.

Not triggers or proximal cause.

Check out this wiki page:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proximate_and_ultimate_causation