Stuttering therapy has a history of sometimes doing more harm to clients than good. The reasons for this are varied and complex, but often boil down to leaving persons who stutter with the impression—or even the conviction—that it’s not okay to stutter, and use of specific management skills is the central metric of success.

In this session, we discuss how SLPs can avoid causing unintended harm, and instead, help clients uncover their own solutions by guiding them through a process of learning and self-discovery.

We explore how counseling around shame, acceptance, and self-advocacy can help integrate the use of management skills into a holistic therapy framework.

Learning Outcomes: You will be able to: 1. Identify ways that SLPs may unintentionally reinforce clients’ fears about stuttered speech 2. Employ counseling techniques that help clients explore why they may or may not want to change how they speak 3. Help clients situate stuttering management skills within a larger framework that includes acceptance, self-advocacy, desensitization, and subjective well-being.

Target audience: speech-language pathologists and graduate students

Ryan Pollard, Ph.D., CCC-SLP, BCS-F is an assistant clinical professor at the University of Colorado Boulder. He has taught graduate fluency disorders and counseling courses for over 12 years, and has published and presented in the areas of counseling, fluency disorders, health care equity, and disability studies.