Hello Everyone!!

This week I’d like to introduce the stuttering community’s very own, Stephen Greene. Stephen is a Social Care Worker, passionate about disability services. He is also the Former Chair of the Irish Stammering Association and currently serves as a Stuttering Peer Support Leader in the ISA. Stephen is a powerful stuttering advocate and does a lot of awareness and advocacy work on social media. You can follow him on his Instagram!

“I’ll get by (I’ll even thrive) with a little help from my friends”- The value of peer support in stuttering

Please excuse me adding these three words to the above line from the song from the Beatles but I feel it encapsulates my experience of peer support. For this blog I’d like to delve in to the value of peer support to my own stuttering journey. First a little bit about myself, I was raised in a large family of nine kids, five girls and four boys in Dublin Ireland in the 70’s and 80’s. I started stuttering at the age of five and the awareness of stuttering and the supports available were pretty non-existent especially in a working class area of Dublin. I had therapy at this age but I continued to stutter and there was no follow up intervention.

At the start of my stuttering Journey, myself and my family felt alone. We had to make do and carry on with life. At school I would have been aware that I spoke different to the rest of my friends and during roll call I was the only one who was counting the other kids before it was my time to say “An Seo” which is Irish for “here” with me normally blocking on the “An”. This is probably my first memory of being anxious around my stuttering. My childhood and school years were filled with many happy memories but it was also the formation of the masking and avoidance of my stutter to fit in to a so called fluent society. During this time and into adulthood what was absence was I was never in the company of other people who stuttered. There was one girl who was a year ahead of me in secondary (high school) and I was so sensitive to avoiding my own stutter I could not even be in her company, to hear her stutter would revel many of the feelings that I had suppressed deep under the surface in myself.

Fast forward many years into my early 30’s. I had a successful job that I loved and a loving family of my own, Life was good in many aspects but I was as Joseph Sheehan would say I was a “talking museum” of the crutches and mannerisms I had employed to conceal my stuttering from the world. I had this feeling of being inauthentic because I was hiding this stutter that had been part of me since five years old. My crisis point came in work in a social care setting while taking a phone call and I blocked particularly hard on a word at the start of the conversation and the listener mistakenly thought I was a person with an intellectual disability who was in my care. I regained my composure and informed her that she was speaking to the person in charge. I had then decided that I didn’t want my stuttering to be the elephant in the room that no one was talking about especially me.

Something had to change as daily avoidance behaviours aimed at controlling my stammer ended up limiting a life that I was living and I found it hard to shake the feeling of not quite being authentic. I remember sitting down with my wife and talking about how I needed help. I found out about a support group being run by the Irish Stammering Association.  Looking back it took courage to make that first step, to meet other people who stammer, to go to a place where the one thing I was trying to hide would be openly discussed. After ten minutes of that meeting my fears dissipated as I felt a sense of community, of understanding and empathy. 

The beauty of peer support is that you have people at different stages on their stammering journey and some with different perspectives. This peer support gave me the foundation for when I decided to go back to speech therapy and a better understanding of where I could go on my stammering journey.  After completing my therapy with Dublin Adult Stuttering (Avoidance Reduction) I took more of a facilitator role within the support group and helped to develop a support group facilitator guide for our association.  This was influenced by the National Stuttering Association from America.  During this time with the support of the Irish Stammering Association I took up the role of the Chair of the association.  This would have not been possible if I had not been involved in peer support. 

One of the areas that I feel really passionate about is that peer support is only as good as its vision for continued improvement. We in the Irish Stammering Association are very lucky to have  dedicated people in various different roles which now provided support to children, teenagers, young adults and adults and parents  across many different mediums from drama workshops, employment and advocacy groups, support groups, awareness days to mention but a few.

One of the areas that I have been focused on and which came about with the use of the zoom platform during the pandemic is the ISA Speaker Series. This new series came about through the belief of connecting peer support with clinicians and professionals who work in the area of stammering research as well as prominent people who stammer in the stammering community. We have had excellent meetings with Dr. Scott Yaruss and Dr. Gerald Maguire, Hope Gerlack Houck as well as our Dr. Mary O’Dwyer. During these meetings we were able to link stammering research with the experience of stammering and our members found the meetings insightful and thought provoking.

Through peer support we can achieve so much, as an individual and as a collective. If you are a person who stammers, a parent of someone who stammers, a clinician, an ally of someone who stammers I urge you to get involved. We are better together. I will not only get by but I can thrive!! With a little help from my friends. That’s the value of stuttering peer support.