TRANSCRIPT
I would like to share my thoughts on having a mild speech impediment. I’m 51 years old, and I actually didn’t even realize that I had a mild speech impediment until I was about 40. I found it out through, guess what, YouTube. People pointed out that I couldn’t pronounce certain sounds properly sometimes on YouTube videos. Now, I don’t know if my speech impediment will even show up here in this video because it comes and goes. I notice it comes out more when I’m tired. It comes out more when I’m speaking quickly and unconsciously. When I’m more conscious of it, now I tend to enunciate my words more carefully.
But the letters that I get wrong are S’s and F’s and th’s. I get asked all the time, “Why did you quit being a therapist?” I was a therapist for a little bit over 10 years. It was a job that I loved. I was so passionate about it. I gave my heart and my soul to it. Sometimes I’ve noticed it on the telephone also when I’m calling, talking to someone I don’t know. They don’t understand what I’m saying. “Oh, did you just say something?” They think I said an F instead of an S.
And it’s, um, I’ve been teased for it on the internet. You could call it internet bullying. “Oh, why should we take you seriously? You can’t even pronounce therapy correctly.” And I know it does hurt a little, but I would say overall I kind of don’t care. I think if I’d been teased about it when I was a kid, or especially when I was in high school, I think I’d have more of a complex about it. I think I would associate it more with myself in a negative way. Now, it’s sort of like I’m an adult. After what I’ve been through already, this is really the least of my worries.
I even kind of like it sometimes when I hear it. Also, it helps me that I’ve had some friends along the way who have much more visible speech impediments. The reason that I think that really helped me is that I actually never even cared that they had this. I just took it as this was part of human variation, like having a different eye color or having freckles.
I had a friend when I was a kid, a boy who had two different color eyes, and I remember thinking, “Cool!” Or here’s another one: I have two uvulas. I’m not going to open my mouth, or maybe you won’t be able to see it, but in my mouth on the inside, most people have one uvula. I have this rare variation that I have two, like two little punching bags, and it’s called bifid uvula. It’s just part of human variation. I kind of liked it when I was a kid. “Ooh, I figured it out! I have two uvulas!”
Well, I guess I consider my alternate speech pattern to be part of this. I like to talk about where it came from, where I think it came from. Does this apply to all people with speech impediments? I don’t know, maybe. Perhaps that is my, actually, my split uvula, my double uvula connected. If my mouth somehow wired differently, maybe that’s it too.
But I think it goes back to some really terrible things that happened to me very early in my life when I was learning how to speak, when I was learning how to pronounce my S’s and th’s, my thousands and foods. I was tortured back then. I don’t know exactly what my parents did to me. I know my dad did hit me once, but I don’t know that that was it. I think it was a nanny. I’ve talked about that nanny who tortured me in ways that it’s lost to history. I don’t, I wouldn’t even know how to find her. I don’t even know her last name, and I just know that she tortured me.
I later told my mom about the fact that she tortured me, but I didn’t tell my mom what actually she did a little bit. That she would leave me in the house, and I’m sure she threatened me and made physically tortured me. I really don’t know. I can only speculate, but I think it’s connected. I think I had some crushing blow, and I think more realistically, crushing blows that happened to me psychologically when I was learning how to form those letters comfortably.
I think it thwarted my process. It thwarted my speech development. At some level, when my guard is low, when I’m tired, maybe even overwhelmed, those hurt speech patterns come back. It’s like a post-traumatic expression. It’s like it’s just a sign, a little notation. “Oh, something happened to you back then when you were learning these things, and you didn’t quite learn it right.”
Now, when I’m more conscious, when I’m more centered, when I’m more awake, I can think more clearly and say those words and talk about therapy more clearly so that people can more clearly know what I’m saying. But I think that at other times when that unresolved trauma bubbles up to the surface, it’s like this is one way that it expresses itself.
I do wonder if that’s true with others. I imagine, oh, they could do a scientific study and ask people, you know, who were considered to have these so-called speech impediments, you know, did you have a history of early childhood trauma? Did you have a history of having trauma while you were at that developmental stage of learning how to pronounce this word or that word or this sound properly? And people might say yes or no.
But here’s one thing that I think makes this very difficult to study, and that’s that a lot of people have no clue what happened to them when they were young. They don’t remember it in any conscious way. Their body remembers it, and I think sometimes that’s the interesting thing. Their body, for instance, their speech patterns could be the actual memory. That’s the expression of what happened to them, the marker, the reminder.
But in terms of conscious memory, who remembers? And so many people don’t even know anything about it that happened to them, good or bad, in their early childhoods, let alone the most torturous, horrible things that happened that they had to split off and dissociate, especially if it was done to them by their caretakers. Heaven forbid by their own parents.
So you could ask their parents, “Oh, were they traumatized as a child?” And their parents, maybe who were the ones who did it, who said, “Oh no, no, no, nothing bad. You had a great childhood. You just have to be grateful for all the good things that I gave you.” Whereas maybe the parents were the ones who were actually torturing them.
It was my parents who put me in the hands of this terrible nanny. They knew she was a rotten person. They knew she did bad things, but they didn’t care because they wanted to go to work, and they wanted to have someone who was low paying who would look after me. So they didn’t want to see. They didn’t want to know.
But as it happened, my mother later once just randomly came out with what I had told her, and I told her this long after this woman was fired. So I think it’s indicative of a lot of people not actually being able to consciously be the ones who can actually record what happened to them factually, so that they don’t even know.
It’s very hard to make this connection, but I would speculate that for a lot of people who had speech impediments, it does have some root, some deep and painful and ugly historical root in what once happened to them.
And then I’m going to say this also: what about healing? What about getting into the deep healing, the deep grieving about what happened then? Well, I would say conceivably this is the way to change an historical speech impediment if it is caused by this early childhood trauma.
But it’s really tough to get into this early childhood trauma. I think it’s hard enough for many people to heal any kind of trauma, even adult trauma, but let alone to get into the things of very, very early childhood, those deep and most painful feelings to access. That’s really, really tough.
I wouldn’t be surprised if my speech patterns are better as the result of all the healing that…
I’ve done, and I think I’ve even done some healing of this very early childhood trauma. But I think it’s the hardest stuff to get to, and that may be a part of why the easiest way to heal that trauma, you know, to heal the— the easiest way, perhaps, to open us up to being able to fix our speech impediments, if you want to call it something to be fixed, would be to heal that. But it may be the hardest to get to of all.
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