Fireside chat with Jonathan Brooks

good evening everyone good evening from Scotland and um this is another H podcast of the emce stuttering and we have a guest Our Guest today is Jonathan Brooks uh who has very kindly agreed to speak to us a bit about Jonathan first of all Jonathan is a first year doctoral student at the University of Oxford and an aspiring academic his main research interest is in the philosophy of psychiatric medicine with an emphasis on staming disorder specifically his research will consider how the uh conceptual tools of philosophy might be utilized to offer a more holistic and meaningful conception of stammering disorder that avoids the pitfalls of reductive conceptions personally someone who has lived with an overt stammering disorder that has become far more covert in recent years and hopes to use his personal live lived experiences with stammering to enriches research and that that is quite an that's quite an introduction and I I I I want to welcome you I'm very for the holistic methods um because I think stammering is a as a holistic disorder it's not just physical it's not just emotional it's not just mental but but all aspects are involved and we have to treat and Tackle every aspect um could you tell us more about yourself first of all um so I suppose we basic fact about me is I'm from the southwest of England a city called Bristol it's where I'm born and bred and um I suppose I'm here to speak a bit about my experien a stammering disorder and I suppose um as a kid I was always quite enthusiastic about speaking in fact I led the line I love to perform I loved the attention of people looking at me and um I'd say around Primary School time for those in the UK that's around the age of well in particular This was um around year six in my primary school so for those you know um from the UK this is around 12 years old um I began to become a bit more conscious of the fact that the way I spoke was a bit different to those around me um and perhaps I can get into the story a bit more depth later on but essentially that's when um something was was different about my story something was different about my experience of my speech and my experience of socializing with others where my life got a bit more complicated um in this way where I began to become a lot more um socially anxious and self-conscious and my story has very much been um something of a a battle or at least a a stress or or um strained relationship with speech that has at some stimes meant that I've um Shi away from speaking and other times meant I've tried to overcompensate so for example at school um it's interesting so I was just talking about my final year of primary school by the time I got to my final year of my secondary school I was the head boy um and uh part of my responsibility was to lead assemblies so I would speak in front of my entire school um twice sometimes three times a week and I think part of my desire to to take that sort of position was partly because I wanted to prove to myself and to others that I was um verbal that I could speak that I could not just um speak but that I could perform verbally and um under under the pressure of being in front of an audience and these sorts of um ideas were kind of I think behind to my motivation to even apply for the position um and I think like most people who um what least most people might experience you call themselves persons who St there have been ups and downs it hasn't been a constant Journey there's been um twists and turns and um as you mentioned in my introduction It's Kind led me in my research to um sort of trying to to put this part of my life story under the microscope a bit more to work out um what is this thing we put s order I'll stop there that's really interesting had had a similar story when I was younger I felt my speech was different but but you know you don't give these things names you don't know what stammering is you know what stuttering is I just knew that my speech was halting hesitating like uh um were like a faulty car engine and wouldn't it wouldn't go smoothly and and I and I felt that I had to ended up using a lot of force when speaking effort and and I start avoiding speaking when when I had to make phone calls in those days we didn't have mobile phones we had actual phones with um landlines and phone boxes I used to ask my brother and my sister to make phone calls for me and they they and and I felt inferior for years because I couldn't make phone calls and I got a free that that I wouldn't be able to function in adulthood and and and um and yeah felt and and I felt really ashamed of myself and and and and family members tried to well they insinuated that I I am inferior and and you know and and they always the common theme in my family and extended was that that you know um that Assan wouldn't be able to survive on his own and and I believed that because when you keep hearing that from from from childhood you you you you believe what you hear so I completely understand that and I just want to ask about your head boy experience as an assembly how did that go for you in speaking to the school um well they that's a great question um so I remember um how I felt applying to the position in the first place it very much felt like I wanted to challenge myself and also prove myself as I said um and I think when you're applying for a position um it's somewhat theoretical because you're imagining yourself in that position sure but um it doesn't compare to the moment I found out okay I've been selected amongst my peers to fulfill this position and um then there was a moment of sort of Celebration my parents my family were proud of me um and I felt quite honored to have been selected but then when it came down to um the dayto day um what comes to mind is it's like trying to build a house without a foundation I think this Ro sort of increased the pressure on me and showed me personally how much weakness there was at the foundation of my self-confidence um how vulnerable I was to the opinions of others um you mentioned your family certainly in this context it was my peers I really cared about what my peers thought about me um what my teachers thought about me and I think all of this weight and I suppose even the recognition of my weakness my underlying Stu I don't know whether to describe it's like a moral weakness a lack of courage or um certainly for me it felt like it was almost a a weakness in a medical sense there was something really wrong with me why can't I be like others who um would take on this role and would probably find the public speaking to be a bit scary but all right and then would probably struggle more so with the organization for me the organization wasn't too hard but the prospect of speaking publicly in front of my whole school was more than daunting it felt like walking a plank it felt like putting myself in a position where I could literally well not literally I suppose totally die I could be um yeah I suppose it was I couldn't see it I didn't have the almost the capacity to see um speaking front of my school is something that was an opportunity for me to succeed so much as a opportunity to fail um and it was as though my two options were either I perform really well in which case I am sort of sufficient or satisfactory or I don't perform perfectly well in which case I'm a failure so really skewed toward like a really negative bias and um certainly with my own worst critic anything I anything I um I misspoke or felt like um it was I'm thinking about now there's so many levels to this so there's sort of the level of perfectionism regarding the content of what what I'm saying am I making sense my being coherent there's perfectionism at the level of um maybe execution of um the sounds of the speech um I want to say in terms of am I repeating um am I staming at all um so maybe I should say repetitions was the kind of for me the the staming symptom that was sort of most frequent or getting um yeah sort of just stuck in our petitions with the sound then there's also um almost emotional emotional perfectionism some people tell that I'm nervous can they hear my voice shaking and I need to get all of these layers um in alignment to make sure that they're all sort of um in check for a perfect performance do that at least twice a week sometimes I speaked my whole school twice a week then to my um year group once a week and then at the end of each half term it speak to the entire school and also to the the parents um and you could imag IM with all of that sort of weight the DAT leading up to each um time I spoke I would be rigorously preparing going over my words making sure that I know exactly what I'm going going to say I would even choreograph jokes I'm going to put in um because um I wanted to come across as where I was being spontaneous and um I wanted to present the image that I was this great aitor this great speaker um again to reach this this almost impossible standard and it meant that um I had a lot more sleep this nights just really focusing on um these performances um and last point I'll make about this is sort of the the cycle I was in I I only ever felt as good as my last performance it wasn't as though if I were excellent nine times and I were to be less than excellent the the 10th time I sort of be fair minded and say you know what John that wasn't your best but you know what look at this other man times you did so well so on this time there's a bit of Grace um for you it was more so on that 10th time I've been exposed now they see what I truly am that the weakness that I've been spending all of this time trying to to bury and to hide in some in some sense um that the mask has been lifted and they can see that I'm not like them I'm not as good as they are I have this um feedback this deficiency and um that was it was no way to live and um that was a a large part of my experience so um so that was your experience in school when you were in high school and that was in Bristol yes yes yeah and um were you ever made fun of by other other children or laughed at or teased or bullied that's um brilliant an irony in the story um I was only ever tease once and um that one occasion I don't think anyone really forgot something wrong with my speech so much as it was a moment of diseny so this was around um I was around 14 years old I'll say my age rather than the year um even that this is an international audience not everyone here's from England so I was around 14 years old and um I was ining arguments and I remember sort of getting passionate wanting to win the argument and um the eagerness and the Pion caused me to um become this fluent and I think I was repeating on some sound like and um I think quite quickly the person I was arguing against saw that and took advantage and said well something like you can't even get your word out so your argument is clearly um false and then um context being i' already had the seed sewn in my mind a few years earlier that there was something on with the way I spoke so um for me I took that I sort of complim that he can see that thing that I suspected and I said to him in response um not my fault that I've got a stamina and uh I kind of threatened them to tell the teacher um suggesting that he was to bully me he to speak about the way that I spoke and I couldn't help speaking that way and um he sort of backed off and he was quite scared about being told off so he didn't really U pursue that any further so I kind of felt like I'd won the moment in that sense but in another sense that was a uh a turning point for me because that was the first time I sort of identified as a person who stands and maybe the first time I thought so this was obvious to my ears and being confirmed by those around me and I think that was part of I maybe was worth um beginning to differentiate between sorts of two types of symptoms here because there's the stammering behaviors themselves but you mentioned a word um regarding your family that I think it's worth really spending time talking about which is shame which is comes under sort of the psychological and psychos social aspects of um staming disorder that for me were the worst part so I could handle repeating at all being disfluent in a particular moment or I keep saying repeating repetitions of the ter that people send to use and um I can handle the behaviors but it's really the hardest part for me was the the shame and the fear the emotional aspects and the way that I thought about myself you might call those the existential aspects um the things that are kind of hard to quantify um but yes there was just that one that's your question back to your question there was that one moment where it was actually pointed out by a PE yet ited so much of my experience you it's quite disproportionate and um and that's why I would say that most of my experience of spaming is actually more so covert rather than overt it's it's the the attempt to hide the fact that I um might be disfluent rather than the disfluency of themselves rather than it being OB to others because I think if you ask any of my school friends now did Jonathan ever stamina they would say they've never heard it in their life which is um part of the irony of this um situation it's more so battling with those psychological and existential aspects of um staming disorder that's been that's characterized my you you know the more compassion I have for myself and people the more I realize that children even adults well they they will find something that's different and use it against you and that's just human nature and and and and we always looking for weaknesses and people and and for example it could be anything it could be you wear glasses or you know you're this and that or or um red hair or something like that and um but you know you know when I was younger right um I I remembered many instances which I couldn't read out in class I dreaded introductions when you know you go around the room and say say your name um read introduction in school in college in courses in University everywhere I I really read instructions and what happened was about two months ago I know I I I am U you know I I have a um I have a I I have a young daughter who who's now a year old I'm I I I took her to her class on a Saturday morning and it's a it's a class for um for very young uh children and so I took her to this class and we were all sitting on the floor the um the parents from the mothers or fathers or mother and father with with a baby so it was me as as my my daughter my as my wife couldn't come that day so then then the I don't know the the instructor or the coach of the class or the teacher said that we're going to go around and all the parents have to introduce their their children to the class and and I just had a flood of emotion and I thought when I was younger I was was so afraid of this situation now I'm 45 I've come full full circle now it's my my daughter when I was younger I I may have walked at the class and and need to use the bathroom but I said no I'm not going to walk walk out so all the parents introduced their their child to the class gave their name so um it came up to me I had to say my daughter's name um and I felt this intense speech block could say and I and I said said someone tell everyone something I have a stammer and I have always dreaded introductions since I was School uh College work whatever but now when it comes to my daughter um I'm I'm not I'm not going to let my fear um affect her education I'm not going to let her let let let my fear be become contagious I'm going to say her name so I had the block and I held it I held it um it felt like an eternity but I said it and everyone just applauded and and I can't say it felt good but but the fact that I hadn't made some excuse it it it it felt good actually um so well I don't know where I'm going going with this but I thought I should I should share this this story with you I mean um even though I'd hadn't overcome my my stutter my block I just felt some of the shame lift as I hadn't let let my fear affect affect my introduction of of my a daughter in her class so yes I thought I would I would share that see your thoughts on that no it's a really uh interesting and moving story actually um I think the first thing that comes to mind is um the question of what can overcome shame if if shame is one of the most difficult aspects of um glamoring disorder or I think um in America you guys call it stering um what overcomes it and I think one of the um at least so far as I've seen and I should add the caveat I'm just um this is my first VI of research of what do I know at this stage what um sort of in my thinking so far and it might may well sound cheey but I think love is something that really is um a powerful anti antidote to shame in the sense that um if I think about the direction that shame points me in I'm very much um thinking about myself and how I'm performing and how I'm going to underperform in the eyes of others and very much um I'm on this sort of mission this project of presenting myself well to others and it's very sort of inward looking and honestly I think I spend so much time suck in my head um and self-consciousness is definitely one of the the things that I found to be an aspect of my experience that's been quite difficult I'm always monitoring my speech um sucking my head to the exent that I can't really engage with my emotions how I really feel I'm more concerned about making sure that I I say the right thing in the right way whereas love is the direction of Love is outward looking I'm thinking about not um I can sort of do for myself but how can I um give to others how can I protect the person I love how can I um share something valuable um and it seems like the opposite of being so insular so self-conscious so um self-critical and um I don't think that's the only way to to to sort of reverse that direction of focus um I think there's maybe more neutral places to direct your focus as well you and I both um are friends with um Lee l and he um has many things to say in the way of sort um you might say therapeutic interventions or fears if you're comfortable that kind of term and one one of the things he recommends is that you sort of um focus on rather than the the sound you're trying to make focus on the emotion that you're trying to um speak with so maybe engage with the emotional will modulate your voice getting your mind I think anywhere away from focusing on yourself and um that that sound that you're struggling with um I think it's going to be moving away from the kinds of patterns that get you stuck in the cycle of staming behaviors and shame experiences um I can share my own experience not as um I don't know as uh nice as the one that you shared but um and I suppose there's some parallels we we'll see how it sounds but um I was at a conference this was this year during my first year of my doctorate and I wanted to raise my hand and and ask a question something I thought would contribute to the discussion but unfortunately I felt really fearful and I was worried about um how i' perform I thought um I feel quite nervous feel my heart beating my Palms are getting sweaty and I know um that when I open my mouth my voice is going to be shaking and I'm I might um not very fluent because I'm so nervous and um at this time I was going through some uh Speech Therapy that was trying to encourage me towards forms of exposure therapy which is to say sort of the thing that you you fear essentially give yourself a dose of that um in a manageable way I'm not do be all at once otherwise you can end up fortiz in yourself but um I thought maybe I can try to give myself a dose of the thing that I fear and maybe I I can kind of just accept the fact that I may well sound nervous but actually what I want to do is to contribute to this discussion and I want to grow um not just to sort of perform in their eyes and and um kind to continue the same cycle of being almost u a a slave to Performance but I want to actually kind of face this fear that I have and decide that I'm going to raise my hand at the risk of sounding in some way imperfect and I noticed that when I was able to face that and um focus more on the goal um than sort of the evaluations of me then the fear really lifted significantly I don't think it went away completely but it it reduced significantly to the extent that I was like of in a and surprised that wait wait a minute what did the be ago and um I think it just showed me really um the power of having a focus Beyond just this project of to make sure that I'm performing well and appearing and presenting well for others but if I can focus on something less sort of really self-centered I can focus on what I can give what I can show how I can um attain that goal then um or how I can get into my body more and experience that emotion or just something else to get out of your head I think that would go a long way I think that's really inspirational Jonathan I've got a question for you but um I'm going to see if anyone else has a question first I think we've got Alan and El kogan do either of you of you wish to ask Jonathan a question yeah so I I thought what you were saying about um uh love being the antidote to shame as uh very very interesting and yeah it's not and that that aspect of self-consciousness is definitely something I can relate to a lot and I was wondering if um and yeah so just wondering if uh you you were saying this is like I actually some something that you're um like is is is this a topic that that you're focused on in Phil in your philosophical research because because if so that that'd be very interesting to read up on but it's hard hard to IM imagine that as like a a very an an analytic topic I guess so yeah thank you for that uh great question Alan so um I'll start with the last part of what you said absolutely it's um love sounds so abstract it's a really hard thing to sort of quantify and empirically investigate with the usual methods of research that we might apply to stammering disorder especially these days um I don't know how much you know about stammering research but a lot of it a lot of where the money is going these days is into sort of neuroscientific hardnose research let's take a look at the brain scans and correlate that with different behaviors and lots of genetic studies looking at what what um are the um genes that would dispose you towards stammering behaviors and a lot of it quite far removed from talking about things like um love compassion uh though I would say um to the first part of your question what my rech my own research touched upon that well that's one of the things I have thankfully the flexibility to do as a philosopher of Psychiatry as opposed to a scientist because the scientists will be using more sort of often neuroscientific and biological methodologies and have to quantify things apply scales whereas as um as suppose of a philosopher the approach I'm taking is looking at the science of stammering the psychology of stammering the sociology of stammering and the philosophy of stammering so much as there is a literature which really there there isn't much at all um and trying to make sense of the various um these various perspectives I think they've all got something valuable to contribute um but I think uh unfortunately nowadays the research is very much skew towards the hard scientific approaches um and in particular what I find interesting um I haven't gone into very much yet one I hope to go into is self-compassion therapy which um actually is getting some fraction in in psychological research not with respect to stammering in particular but in general so um what's probably more popular is mindfulness meditation therapy I think that's really gotten big over the last several decades and um sort of within that space is an emerging L self-compassion therapy which comes from the same um roots with the mindness therapy but focuses on um showing love to yourself and um there are um two researchers particular um whose names might well come back to me throughout the course of this meeting but right now I'm drawing a blank and um the reason why it's quite encouraging to see this research is because they've been able to show for example that when you apply this kind of um self-compassion therapy we can show quantitatively that it has certain results on people's um so they'll measure things like sort of stuff efficacy which means how how um able you feel or rather how um how you feel about your ability to go and do things do you feel like you have greater ability or less and questionnaire days basically can show that actually when you um focus on a person's ability to sort of love themselves you might think and this is sort of um the maybe uh I miss describe this you might think that if you tell a person love yourself and you're great as you are that they would encourage them to be sort of more lazy and sit back and think yeah I'm great so no need to really do anything or to to change because I'm great as I am but actually what you find chrisan NE the m just him that's to me I think that's another example of um well um sort of your focus um determining your success I kind of knew that if I didn't focus on trying really hard to focus on the main that it would come to me which is part of really what self-compassion therapy teaches it's more so about being open than trying really hard but um yeah so what they actually find is rather than um people getting sort of more lazy more comfortable is that actually when you tell a person or teach a person to um love themselves they actually you feel a sense of um vulnerability decrease you feel more empowered to go take that risk because actually you have that safety blanket that your value isn't on the line your um your value isn't in the hands of others to determine you feel more empowered to go and do that speaking engagement or to go for that qualification um I won't speak much more to that um because I'm again I'm sort of get started in my research and um but absolutely it's something I hope to incorporate in my understanding of staming disorder why it develops and how to um what therapeutic interventions to use in order to amate the symptoms H so how how do you think um self comp because the the first thing that I thought of when mentioned self compassion slash self-love is that like cuz um before it was like the reason why um love being being an antidote to shame is that it seems that love is inherently outward facing but but then when when we talk about selflove that well now that seems interesting because it's like well now we're back to this uh this in inward basing mechanism or or at least so so it would seem perhaps that's a great question I think you do quite well on a philosophical for like my own um I think the best way to try to um try to resolve the Paradox because it is something of a paradox but um if you can imagine yourself as rather than sort of one unitary thing but you can actually have a relationship with yourself so I mentioned the term for example existential earlier on so our first I'll describe sort of a uh I'm not very compassionate relationship with yourself and then how um a compassionate relationship would look and how both sort of have that s of outward looking um focus yet it's turned in so um I mentioned the scene of me being at a conference wanting to raise my hand and the fear that I was going to sort of expose the fact that I was nervous by having a shaky voice and the fear wasn't um I should say that the fear was was wasn't that I was going to say the wrong thing in this case but it was more so that I would be exposed for having the shaky voice so that that tells me something about the Judgment of the behavior you it that of having a shaky voice my relationship with my shaky voice was somewhat judgmental I'm suggesting that there's something wrong or bad um maybe even disordered about having a shaky voice that um maybe signal to others that I'm not as good as as the rest of them so in some sense um I'm directing my attention towards this part of me that's out there my voice is something that goes out into into the room and and I'm judging it that's to have um a negative relationship with something that's kind of inward because it relates to me but it's been projected outwards whereas a self-compassionate relationship will'll see the fact that I've got a shaky voice and say actually I'm a human being I don't have to be perfect um maybe I have a personal history of staming and and that's the reason why I feel a bit more nervous about speaking but actually anybody can can have a shaky voice and it's not always to do with with being nervous and you might say actually you know what um even if you show this supposed form of weakness I still value you I still think that you address as much of a man or a good person or a moral person or what whatever you think about state so there is a bit of a tension there a bit of a paradox um but hopefully that that um helps somewhat but let me know if you've got a followup question because I think it's a a really good question yeah I mean I definitely uh I mean it's it's c certainly intuitive that self compassion is a good thing it can and it it can be healing um but it's still I I guess I was fixated on this whole inner slash out Outer thing and so but yeah we can table that I think so yeah and actually I think it's really helpful um that you ask this question because um as I mentioned I'm earli in my research so I need be able to think about how I can best respond to questions like this in a very clear and um coherent way so um I'll give it some more thoughts um maybe what I want to say is more so something like the first point that it's therapeutic to have an outward Focus such as um love for another and maybe that caveat of love for another helps to Res a paradox and if I maybe maybe I'm going too far to suggest that love is always outward Focus perhaps sometimes it can be inward focus and um then I wouldn't need to sort of uh think about how the self can also be can both the inner and outer and without being more straightforward way of making the point but um I really appreciate the question thank you yeah okay that was very interesting question from from Alan just from my own interest um question to Alan which part of the world are you from I'm I'm from well so I'm uh originally from Texas but I'm currently living in New York okay okay that very interesting oh you you muted yourself I mut thought I I muted myself what yeah the question uh what did I say now yes I've got a question for Jonathan now um what is your views on disclosure because what I because what I find is if I if I don't disclose and then I kind of start to block Etc then it's harder for me to disclose after after that and some sometimes I can't even say uh excuse me I have a stammer I can't even say that so I think for me if I'm making a presentation at the start I I normally just throw it in I've got a stammer if if you know if I hesitate slightly that's why and and to see what what your views would be on that so I think um a good starting point that I try to remind myself of when I think about these questions is um that we are human beings first and um by that I mean that there's a degree of complexity um that we need to always appreciate so I'm not a big fan of rules for all people for all times so I don't want to say um you should always disclose or or never disclose there kind of two things at least to to bear in mind first of all um where are you at in terms of your um Journey so um maybe it would make more sense to disclose for a person who feels less control over their speech or maybe a person who feels more um fear and shame around the speech perhaps it be more beneficial for that person and secondly um who um or rather how do you disclose because I wouldn't want to sort of become like too apologetic nor almost grel as though um I'm admitting this really shameful thing about me if the goal is to sort of um begin to build some sort of Pride within yourself I don't know if that would always be conducive to sort of be apologetic about how you disclose so um when I was receiving speech therapy my therapist um gave an example and she seemed really dignified in the way she disclosed or really Master fact even she didn't really make it a big she just said yes so by the way um and she was on her phone for this example by the way I thought so um just in case there's any gaps or silences that's what's happening and she wasn't saying oh sorry it was more this just the case that being said in my own experience I think I by default do become very apologetic and um I'll share this experience of disclosure that I'm currently working through so whenever I go to the shots um I do a form of disclosure which is actually um intentionally stammering and that's not me saying explicitly that I've got I stamina but it's me trying to um show that I stamina and sort of be okay with with showing that which again is a form of exposure therapy as I mentioned earlier on and um what I found is something really interesting which is that whenever I would voluntarily Stam I kind of um found myself in terms of my posture there where I was speaking shrink and um it was almost like I was embodying the kind of character that I think asur is the kind of person whose voice isn't as valuable the kind of person who probably isn't as um authoritative who is somehow like socially lower than others and I've really beeny trying to work on this the idea of like both stammering and being dignified to St with dignity to look a person in the eye and to do it um which um I can admit right now is for me quite a scary thing to do especially given that my history has been for so long to try to present this polished image of myself so um I think it's kind of just shown me partly um what's been going on beneath the surface I don't know have you um probably have come across the shean iceberg um mod yes yes I have so um be interesting to hear your experience but I I'll share mine briefly which is just that um I remember I remember writing out drawing out the image of the iceberg and then writing out all of the things that I associate with stammering um and um I suppose above the surface there were these behaviors but beneath the surface I remember all of these really horrible feelings of like shame and disgrace and disorder all all of these negative thoughts and feelings and it wasn't until I did that exercise that I began to realize oh so this is why I spent all of these years working so hard to um run and hide from these behaviors because I associate them with really negative things like stupidity immaturity I'm not really a man if I can't um confidently command the stage and speak and um in all of these ways I feel um less than and I think now also doing the exposure therapy um doing the voluntary stammering I can understand why I cannot put on this character because I've got all of these negative thoughts associated with stammering that kind of come to life when I do voluntary stammer and what I'm trying to work on now is is um that dignity aspect and kind of just being okay with the fact that I might well um present as a person who stand in that moment that that is that is really really interesting um you know I find when I'm doing a presentation always help helps me take some pressure off if I either disclose it or if I do like a voluntary stutter at the start and and I'm not even mention it and yeah Ju Just for the listeners you know the iceberg is know we only see 5% the physical stuff is just 5% and and the stuff people don't see is hidden underwat so um if we can tackle that i' uh I'm gonna finish off with a question I which I which I was asked to ask you from someone um who shared a research uh shared a research link from Oxford and since you're in Oxford I was asked to ask you the question uh so yeah so um it's in in a number of messages so I've Got to Now formulate what the actual question actually is the basically put um is stuttering uh is it genetic now um is it is it is it genetic and can we cure stuttering by uh by um by developing Therapeutics to counteract the genes or sorry or stimul ating the area of the brain which is under activated during speech does that make sense does make sense um really great question and um a lot to unpack but I'll do my best to do such a a large question Justice um I suppose the first thing to say is um spaming disorder is complex so yes there have been Gene studies that have shown certain correlations between gen and and stamar um and I'm not a geneticist so I I won't speak to that too much so much as to say that um it's not as simple as they found a stamar gene but it's more so there's various um genes that have been associated with stamar and has been corations made a sophisticate understanding of genetics and again I'm not geneticist but I understand is you have to always understand the relationship between genes which is the the biology and the environment um nowadays there also to talk about things like epigenetics which is to say um there's an investigation as to how environmental factors can actually activate genes and turn them on so it's not enough for example to put it in in simple terms you to have the most musical jees in the world if you never pick up an instrument and activate them so um sometimes we can sort of overstate the importance of genes and understate the importance of environment but even looking at dreams and environment isn't the whole picture because it's more complex than that you've got your biological Dimensions you've got your environmental Dimensions you've also got your psychological Dimensions so um I mentioned before um it's a good example um I mentioned before during my school time because I felt as though my speech was different there were times where I decided to overcompensate by um doing more public speaking for another person they might try to to shy away and actually my decision as to what I do in this context can actually contribute towards greater this fluency or less and I think um personally I found psychological interventions to be really helpful in terms of increasing my speech my speech fluency um and then there's also we can talk about existential Dimensions but I think that's really enough to to get a sense of how complex this thing is so the thing that you shouldn't be thinking is um this as simple as my genes made me do it or my environment made me do it or my psychology made me do it there's there's so much interacting that there are various points at which therapies can intervene and there are various points at which therapies do intervene there's various therapeutic um uh interventions on oper you mentioned also of zapping the brain actually um Oxford is uh kind of the Hub of the Neuroscience of saming I feel like I always need sort of cavat that's not um my area I'm not a neuroscience but um I've spoken with um the foremost NEOS scientist of staming disorder Kate wat she's based here at Oxford and um she's doing research at something called direct trans cranial stimulation which is zapping a part of your brain to try to increase your fluency it's this kind of research is in its um initial stages so um they've seen some success with other psychiatric disorders by schizophrenia believe and um a few others but this is uh something that's very much developing staring having said all of that um the thing that really interests me in terms of talking about CEs which by the way is something we need to Define in terms of the Cure it's the same for everybody something that really impressed me is um the fact that in most cases of persons who stamina there are contexts in which they speak completely flu so there's something that I'm going to be doing some research into called the talk alone effect which is um to say that there are contexts in which and like when you're talking alone in which you can speak completely fluently um and this is really bizarre right so if you have a disease um I don't know or even more simple than a disease if you if you've broken your leg or or your knee at the point of your knee it would be really weird if you could run really fast when you're on the football pitch but you are limping when you're on the road um that's not how um lesions bodily um breakdown tends to function but in the case of staming disorder um and this kind of speaks the nature of this thing it isn't that simple and it's because it's not just not just talking about bi problem um like a a broken knee we're talking about something that affects the entire person and it's there the I think what what he reminding sometimes is that it's not brains or gen that stammer it's the entire person that's done with is a person who saring how that manifests isn't even just in your mouth but part of your sing experience might be that you are tense in your body it might be that you have fears before you standing it might be that you well persons actually experience meanings you go into a context and you you make meaning or you interpret the context so um for example for me when I go to speak in front of my entire school I see that as a very daunting and scary context um given my history of Samar for another Samar they can go to that same context of public speaking and for them the meaning they make in that environment their interpretation is alas this is a context where I can hold the microphone I can speak and I won't be interrupted um all of these things speak to um the complexity of of staming disorder and in particular Hing on Hing in on the talk alone effect that tells me that there are the ability to speak is in you it's in the person the ability to speak um fluently without necessarily knowing the the mechanics of how you're doing it or knowing how how to um set your tongue to make aive sound or um how to do the right breathing technique there are contexts in which you can do spontaneously and I'd be interested in therapeutic approaches that want to take start from that reality and work on expanding the zones in which you are able to speak lently because there's a reason why in that context you as an individual find a place where you can speak fluently maybe it's because you feel confident maybe it's a place where you feel indifferent maybe it's a place where you're focused on loving another maybe it's a place where you're focused on a greater purpose maybe it's um it could be any sort of um number of factors um and that makes me hopeful that makes me hopeful that if I C you mean speaking fluently uh no matter what genes you have if if you're able to speak in at least some context why can't that be expounded um I can say from my personal story I feel as though I've got a lot more control a lot more Mastery over whether I'm going to stammer the thing I'm working on more so now is uh the experiential aspects um working on feeling shame and anxiety and Fe and those things have certainly been cured so um I should say in amongst academics it's kind of taboo to say that sparine can be cheered or it can be overcome um and it's for good reason I think a lot of the time and I'll try not to go on too much about this but I think it's because um it's really hard through current therapeutic practices to get a person to actually become fully fluent and I think after Decades of trying and trying they don't want people to feel um let down when they don't when they sort of promis to cure then they can't actually cure and I think there's also been in the in the background lots of Pride movements to deal with slaming the idea that you should accept how you are and that's come from other sort of social factors um other types of Pride movements that kind of come into the samaron space and um I think there's also been an increased recognition that the the moti aspects of staring disorder are not the behaviors themselves but it's more so the the fear and the shame and the anxiety and those are the things that a lot of sing therapy noway is wants to focus on more which I think is great nevertheless um I I do quite um firmly believe that all of the staming symptoms can be overcome um not that would be easy so it would require changing patterns and actually I mentioned the biological aspects the psychological the social the existential it would require probably doing work in um many of these areas um and maintaining the work too uh but um yeah I'm definitely optimistic based on all that I know um what i' say about that in in a very big nutshell yeah um one of my favorite quotes say acceptance does not mean resignation so like that one okay I think that's been a very interesting talk and we should definitely do this again um you know I know you have a very heavy workload research Reading Writing Etc so I I and and the viewers are very grateful that you uh that you gave us gave us us some of your time um um and and yeah so thank you very much thank you much for having me giving me a platform with which to I'm GNA stop recording now and then then we can have a two minute um informal de brief and and and and and yeah and thank you thank you