Stuttering Spotlight- Olga Bednarski

Happy 2023!!

I’m honored to share Olga Bednarski’s story today.

Olga lives in Liverpool, UK and has stuttered for over 18 years. She describes herself as virtually free of speech anxiety! She works as a psychologist, life-coach, language tutor, and mentor for people who stutter. Olga is an author, she has a book out called “The Anatomy of Stuttering”. Check out her story!

TW: Mention of suicidal thoughts.

The ultimate journey of self-discovery. 

My name is Olga Bednarski. I have stuttered since my teens and well into adulthood until one day I decided enough was enough and made a solid commitment to claim my fluency, my self-expression, my freedom, and my life back. 

Now in my late 30s, I’m virtually free of stuttering and anxiety that accompanies it. I don’t think about speech as it is always there when I need it. 

But it wasn’t always so.

As a child up to the age of 11, I was beautifully and effortlessly fluent. I was expressive, cocky, and feisty. I never held back in conversations with my peers and was known for my sharp tongue. It all began to change in secondary school. The environment at the school where I studied was extremely competitive with adult-like expectations placed upon students. I was growing up in Estonia, in the 1990s, during the period of Perestroika. Life was very challenging for most people at the time. Many didn’t make it. Physical survival (food and shelter) was the primary concern that severely eroded relationships among people. Everybody grew increasingly distrustful, fearful, and sometimes even plain brutal towards each other. 

Although I was only 12 or 13 at the time having practically no idea what events unfolded around me, I could feel the toxicity and tension of the atmosphere around me which influenced the way teachers related to students as well.

Individuality was suppressed and unwelcome. Students were expected to be submissive, agreeable, and quiet. The educators maintained strict discipline by employing fear and a range of emotional manipulation techniques, some resorted to bullying. This was the normal way of life, nobody cared about your feelings or the fact that it might be traumatic and rob you of all confidence.

I remember how I began to hold back and hesitate before rising my hand as an incorrect answer would mean drawing unwanted attention and becoming a laughingstock.  The fear of expressing myself grew stronger in me every day. I was growing increasingly quiet and awkward, eventually earning myself a reputation for being of “low intelligence”. I became fearful of speaking, painfully concerned of others’ opinions. Even at times when I felt like screaming inside, I held all my emotions in, blocking them out of my conscious awareness so as not to feel the pain, humiliation, injustice, and confusion. I could hardly stand up for myself. The funny thing was that nobody believed I stuttered “for real”  as I spoke fluently with my friends outside of school. 

Nobody knew what stuttering even was. Nor that they cared. They thought that I was faking it to get special treatment and a better grade. I was blocked, cornered, disconnected, and had nowhere to turn to for help. That’s how I started stammering. 

During those four years at secondary school, I morphed from a confident, sociable, and bubbly child into a quite, withdrawn, anxious, and stuttering teenager.

By the time I graduated from school, the mentality of stuttering put deep roots inside of me, robbing me almost entirely of my former happy and confident self, robbing me of joy. I was full of insecurities and stuttered out of control desperately trying to conceal it. My default emotional state was that of terror. I had distorted self-perception, the outlook on myself, and the people in the world around me.

As the years progressed and I entered adulthood, life became even more complicated. In my early 20s, I held a string of dead-end jobs, which eroded my self-belief even further. I wasn’t of a tough background, even though I grew up during perestroika, and often struggled to cope. I felt alienated. Like anywhere I went, I didn’t belong no matter how hard I tried to fit in. My innate sensitivity made me emotionally exposed and vulnerable. 

In retrospect, I was the perfect victim of predators and bullies and could easily be deceived or even exploited. Only God knows how I avoided the trouble. My guardian angel must have been there looking after me all along! 

Until my mid-20s, I somehow survived, and got by hiding behind the shield of my fake persona of the quiet, withdrawn, and awkward individual. People thought I was strange, and I struggled to make friends. I felt isolated. Nobody knew what went on in my soul. Being naturally sociable and expressive, but accustomed to suppressing my true personality since my teens I wanted to scream from the rooftops. Being heard is what I desperately craved. It was my biggest dream only I didn’t know how to break through my imposed alienation and fear.  

I felt locked inside my head. Like my personal torture chamber, it was full of fear, insecurities, doubts, and hopelessness. I felt like a freak. By the age of 27, I slipped into vile clinical depression. I hated myself, felt like a stranger to myself, isolated, and had suicidal thoughts. My artificially silenced (gagged) existence was now unbearable!

If it wasn’t for my partner, who took my hand and lead me to the doctors that diagnosed depression and prescribed antidepressants, you probably wouldn’t be reading my story right now.

Antidepressants didn’t heal my stuttering but helped alleviate a great deal of internal tension, both psychological and physical, that built up over a decade. The tension was due to me pretending to be somebody I wasn’t. Being a fake is the most energy-draining activity. It’s a killer! And that, as you know, was my lifestyle. Although temporary, antidepressants provided much-needed relief. I felt like the dark cloud of depression and grave thoughts were lifted for a while. I could now glimpse my former, long - forgotten playful and sociable personality.

I loosened up, stop being overly withdrawn, gravely serious, and lived less in my head. For the first time in my life, I began to question what was really happening to me, why I could be fluent with certain people, in certain situations, and then in others, my throat would get obstructed making me breathless and incapable of uttering a single sound. Intuitively, I never believed what I experienced was precisely stuttering, at least not genuine. 

I was more inclined to believe I was simply extremely shy, and socially anxious to the degree that I panicked when faced with new people and speaking situations. I began seeking the answers. I began exploring and reading. The one book I found was about shyness and how to overcome it. The information in the book made great sense to me. At the end of the book, they were details of speaking clubs one could attend. I embarked on the quest to beat “my shyness”. My knees shook as I walked into the Liverpool speakers club for the first time. Everywhere I looked I saw faces, they look judgemental. I saw eyes, they scrutinized every detail of my being. 

I perceived people, all fluent, as perfect, superior and myself as inferior and defected because of my suffocating anxiety and blocked speech. Liverpool speakers club turned out to be a life-changing experience for me. The very important door I was courageous enough to open although not without hesitation, it was my first serious step towards ultimate freedom. 

The club was frequented by people who stuttered. They attended and honed their public speaking skills there. I met a couple of them, Peter Daily and Bennett Quinn. Both sounded very confident and outspoken about their speech impediments.  Both were members of the unconventional speech course that helped them, as they claimed, gain control of their speech. They spoke about it and without any hesitation, I signed up. During the course I met a great number of people, I don’t think I have ever met that many people in my entire life of 27 years.

I was overwhelmed, my problem exposed yet somehow, I felt liberated. I felt like I escaped in the prison of my speech anxiety by facing my fears head-on. Looking my stuttering monster right in the eye and not budging because I was no longer hopeless, no longer afraid, no longer alone. 

Experience on the course proved to me that there was a way out and that I was not alone in fighting this battle for freedom of self-expression. I felt inspired by other people’s progress and very determined to overcome my speech anxiety, beat my inferiority complex, and become a great public speaker the dream that did come true big time. 

My journey toward freedom began 12 years ago. It took me places I would have never expected to go. I discovered a great deal about myself along the way. I learned that all the traits of me that I suppressed all these years were indeed my greatest strengths. All the things that triggered and then kept the stuttering mindset going, blocking my progress, intoxicating my life, and holding me captive of my irrational fears, false beliefs, and attitudes towards people and the world in general.

Stuttering is a systematic problem held together by the intricate web of erroneous beliefs, irrational fears, a plethora of false ideas, attitudes, and perceptions about oneself, people, and the world. We unconsciously absorb and integrate those from people and the environment in which we grow, develop, and mature. Our societies and environments shape us, mold us, and teach us the core principles of life, the good and the bad, ultimately forming what is called the map of reality, or the frame of reference.

We refer to the frame of reference every time we are faced with life situations and when we have to make decisions regardless of how trivial. Depending on the contents of our frame of reference, we react differently to situations. 

For example, you might be terrified of making phone calls, or, if your inner frame of reference tells you otherwise, you might not even blink at the thought because there is no fear, there is no emotional charge, no anxiety. The reactions we produce even in identical situations heavily depend on the frame of reference, on the map of the world that we carry inside of us as it is known in hypnotherapy.

Over the last 12 years, I have undergone a gigantic personal transformation from a person who could hardly say her name, to becoming a language tutor, public speaker, and giving talks on many speaking platforms, authoring my book “The Anatomy of Stuttering” on mechanics of stuttering, and helping others restore the freedom of self-expression. 

I still don’t believe there is a cure for stuttering. There is no cure, as speech anxiety is not a disease. Stuttering is an emotional problem that is triggered by the loss of connection with the authentic self. What there is a gradual way out of stuttering, the liberation of the voice you have always had within you. The voice that was never lost, only blocked. You return to freedom by altering your core beliefs, understanding your psychology, exploring the inner emotional landscape, and reconnecting with one’s feelings (as opposed to attempting to suppress comfortable or painful ones).  

Ultimately, restoring harmony with oneself, other people, and the world in general. 

I did it, you can do that too! Don’t you ever doubt it! 

-Olga Bednarski