Hello everyone!

I’d like to introduce a very good friend of Myspeech, Christopher Anderson.

Christopher Anderson, a person who stutters and writer, is a longtime member of stuttering self-help community and, this October, he self-published his first book on stuttering, Every Waking Moment: The Journey to Take Back My Life from the Trauma and Stigma of Stuttering, which examines his through-life journey to self-acceptance from first stutter to fatherhood. He is also an award-winning subject matter expert on national security for the US Government in Washington, DC, where he lives with his family. For more, check out his website.

Learning How to Stutter

By Christopher Anderson | 19 October 2022

I’ve stuttered since I was five years old. My stutter was silent for most of my life, hidden deep within behind voiceless and repetitive attempts to make sound. The act or thought of speaking was so unbearable that I didn’t even try. I surrendered all control to my stutter as I looked on helpless, failing to say what I desperately wanted to say. 

This was how I lived for over twenty years of my life—trapped in an endless state of what my life could be like if I didn’t stutter. But, never once did I think about how I stuttered. 

Looking back on these challenging years, my thoughts were too preoccupied with making it through speech therapy session and program after the next. From roughly five to nineteen years old, I was a VIP member of the fluency-shaping therapy rewards program passing through school-based, graduate clinic, intensive clinic, private, and back to graduate clinic therapy, along with a two-week stint wearing the famed Speech Easy delayed auditory feedback device. As a child coming of age, it’s not surprising that I failed each effort to fix it. 

Think about that for a minute. All I ever really knew was that I had to keep trying to become fluent, not give up, and, when one attempt failed, I tried another until I was rendered helpless on the verge of leaving college for adulthood. I wasn’t living. I was merely surviving to make it to the next day. 

Stuttering was a dark cloud that threatened my every waking moment asking repeatedly when the storm was going to start and end so I could get on with the life I wanted to live. 

Until I decided to fight my way into the life that always existed just beyond my reach, impossible to imagine even, one step at a time. 

This cliché holds true, I can assure you. At 26 years old, I woke up into a life of possibility having emerged from a series of life-changing, earthquake moments that allowed my stutter to become my priority. I was forced to confront its control over every part of my life because I had nothing left to lose. 

I never really had the chance to understand how stuttering influenced everything I did until this point. Throughout my life, there were glimpses of who I could be and I wrestled with the desire to be who I was on the inside in public, but the focus was always on the physical act and sound of my stutter, rather than what was happening inside that prevented me from choosing how to live. 

So, I started taking the steps to do what I yearned to do for so many years. I started dating, took more risks to seize opportunities in my dream job, sought support from others like me in the National Stuttering Association, found Avoidance Reduction Therapy for Stuttering (ARTS), and, finally, forged lasting resilience by learning how to become an Ironman triathlete. In a few years, what I chose to do while focusing on stuttering therapy—in ARTS—gave me the momentum I needed to breakthrough. 

And, slowly, suddenly, and surprisingly, the way I stuttered and my relationship changed from life impeding to the force that leads me through every moment. I didn’t eliminate or cure my stutter, and it’s still a large part of the way I talk. But, the control it once had over who I am and who I become has been marginalized, forever. I do not hesitate because of its presence. Instead, I use it as a means of social connection, my guide into the unfamiliar, and the lighthouse towards which I head into my now hopeful future. 

Learning how to stutter, and the powerful force it can become, has nothing to do with the physical act of stuttering or focusing solely on it through speech therapy. 

Instead, I’ve found that to learn how to stutter is actually to understand where it fits in with the other, equally important parts of who I wished to be. From this perspective, the chase for fluency fell away and my drive to become a person who stutters in everything I did became my goal. 

In this effort, I took each moment of stuttering and reflected deeply on what happened in real life, not what I imagined might happen. I stuttered, failed forward into the next opportunity to stutter, tried again, and again, and again—for years. And, you know what? I became a stronger, more self-competent, and capable communicator, with less and less fear of how I stuttered. 

Learning how to stutter was truly understanding the process of changing my relationship with it.

I was so interested in the process of change that I turned the spotlight back on my journey to illuminate the many steps in my journey to self-acceptance. And so, I started writing the stories of my life with stuttering until I had what looked like a book. But, it was still missing something. 

I wondered whether I could write honestly about what it meant to achieve self-acceptance of my stutter as a way to help accelerate the journeys of other people who stutter. It’s true, we all experience stuttering in our own unique ways. However, we who stutter all pass through the same stages—childhood, adolescence, and adulthood—and similar experiences, such as school, dating, job interviews, marriage, and parenthood. 

Thus, in my book, Every Waking Moment: The Journey to Take Back My Life from the Trauma and Stigma of Stuttering, I explore my life from first stammer to fatherhood, and then share a step-by-step analysis of the phases of change that I passed through to transform my relationship with stuttering. It is a progressive memoir that provides a deeply honest and vulnerable walk-in-my-shoes perspective. 

I hope that those who stutter will find my story relatable with their own, and feel that there is always someone walking alongside them as they confront life with stuttering.  

As the dedication reads, “For those who stutter, may the journey seem less uncertain.”