Stuttering

You Can Stutter with Me

My Journey with Stuttering

If I could just go back in time to 1991… I would tell my younger self that everything will be more than okay. Your life will be filled with many moments of stuttering yet it will make you 100% who you are today. You will find love, make lifelong friends and have a family of your own. You will grow up to help others find their non speaking and/or speaking voice as a Speech Language Pathologist in a field that you are so passionate about.

You will practice therapy with neurodivergent – affirming ways, with an open heart and from personal experiences. You will begin to stutter openly and say what you want to say. You will support your son who is going through similar experiences and thank him for reconnecting you to stuttering and the stuttering community.

“Your stuttering is like an iceberg. The part above the surface, what people see and hear, is really the smaller part. By far the larger part is the part underneath- the shame, the fear, the guilt, all those other feelings that come to us when we try to speak a simple sentence and can’t.” – Joseph G. Sheehan Ph.D. The introduction of the Stuttering Iceberg came from Dr. Sheehan (1970) as he presented the idea that there are many situational and social emotional components of stuttering (the bigger part below the water) than what initially meets the eye (the smaller part people see above the water).

Recently I have seen some amazing reframed icebergs to show the shift in mindset and acceptance of stuttering. Thanks @ninagcomedian for the inspiration and her visual (from her book Stutterer Interrupted:
The Comedian Who Almost Didn’t Happen) of the reframed iceberg to normalize stuttering and how people think of it.

On these 3 slides, I tried to show how pieces of the iceberg can change and that it’s an individualized step by step process. Over time more breakthroughs can be seen above the surface that remind us we are more than just our stutter. It also shows how stutterers are going through similar yet different experiences on their journeys.

So excited to see and be apart of the stuttering community that is making waves to create the iceberg we see now! I’m so thankful for that.

2025

This isn’t just any stage! This is where talent shined bright in July 2025 at Camp Dream. Speak. Live at Stony Brook University on Long Island.

So wonderful to see the campers showing off their talents and introducing themselves on the microphone! I had the honor to share in the day and speak as an Everyday Leader. This camp is an intensive treatment program for children and teens who stutter, developed by the Arthur M. Blank Center for Stuttering Education and Research. This program does not target fluency as an outcome.

Instead, the targeted goals include:
– Increasing children’s communication competence
– Improving how they feel about their ability to communicate
– Lessening the influence of stuttering on their overall quality of life
– Increasing their positive perception of their ability to establish peer to peer relationships
– Enhancing their leadership skills.

I’m so grateful to have had the opportunity to speak about stuttering, share my journey and I even reconnected with an old speech friend from college! I wish I had a place like this to go when I was their age!

Be the main character and star of your story!

Follow me for more at @youcanstutterwithme on Instagram