What is it about?
A freed voice isn't free of stuttering. It's free from shame. Read this personal narrative from an SLP who stutters, exploring five life stages and what they taught him about authentic communication, acceptance, and rethinking what "success" in therapy looks like.
Featured Image
Photo by Jametlene Reskp on Unsplash
Why is it important?
This article stands apart from much of the existing stuttering literature by centering the lived experience of a speech-language pathologist who stutters, offering a perspective that is simultaneously clinical and deeply personal. Rather than presenting outcome data or treatment protocols, it traces five distinct stages of one clinician's evolving relationship with his own stuttering — from unawareness and cure-seeking through concealment, acceptance, improvisation, and ultimately integration — making the case that a "freed voice" is not one free of disfluency but one liberated from shame, avoidance, and the weight of societal expectation. The article is particularly timely given the growing momentum of neurodiversity and disability identity movements, which are prompting long-overdue reckonings in fields that have historically pathologized natural human variation; in stuttering therapy, this means questioning whether fluency has been the right north star all along. For clinicians, the implications are concrete and challenging: SLPs are invited to examine their own assumptions about what successful treatment looks like, to resist the impulse to impose fluency goals on clients who have not asked for them, and to recognize that a client's therapeutic needs and readiness will shift across a lifetime — meaning that meeting clients where they are is not a compromise, but the intervention itself.
Perspectives
I hope this piece conveys that stuttering is not a flaw to be corrected but a dimension of human neurological diversity that deserves to be met with curiosity rather than remediation. The field has long defaulted to what I think of as "performative fluency" — interventions designed less to help clients communicate authentically and more to make their speech sound acceptable to listeners who are uncomfortable with difference. That is a burden we have placed on people who stutter for far too long. My hope is that this article contributes to a broader cultural and clinical shift, one where the goal is not to make stuttering invisible but to make the shame around it obsolete.
Professor Ginger G Collins
University of Montana
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: The Stages We Inhabit: A Lived Experience With Stuttering, American Journal of Speech-Language Pathology, May 2026, American Speech-Language-Hearing Association (ASHA),
DOI: 10.1044/2026_ajslp-25-00471.
You can read the full text:
Contributors
The following have contributed to this page
