Presiding local NSA meeting

Today I presided the local NSA (National Stuttering Association) meeting. We have a relatively big gethering today,7 people altogether. Five of us are old members. Two new ladies came and both of them are future Speech Language Pathologists. One is a juior in colledge and another is a PhD student who came to the US 3 months ago.At first we did the thing as usual, introducing ourselves around the table. Everyone did a very good presentation about themselves. Everyone shared about their experience. Alan shared his experience with a variety of speech therapies, especially Holland speech institute. He and his son went there for speech treatment. Both of them got completely fluent for about one year after the treatment. However, both of them crashed after a year of success. Holland Institute is well-known for its three week intensive course. During this period of time, the student need to learn speaking from the beginning. It is a way of reconstruction of person's language. At first, the speech would be very slow, about a sylable per second. Then the speed of speech increases with more practice. However, students need to maintain the slow talking style all the time. This is the toughest point. In everday life, people want to be natural. We are not willing to change the way we talk. This is why a person can be completely fluent in the clinic, not much improvement in the real speaking situation. In the real situation, people tend to be nervous, anxious and stressful. All the techniques learned in the clinic will not be able to put into use. Chuck emphasized his experience of the two NSA national conferences. He attended the 2005 conference in Chicago and 2007 conference in Atlanta. He told his story of stuttering. He told us that before the NSA conference, he did not openly talk about his stuttering to anybody, even to his wife. He feel so embarrassed to talk about it. After the NSA meeting, he completely get rid of this feelings. He could talk to anybody at any time about his stuttering. During the last couple of meetings, he stuttered very little. I was almost unperceivable.Caryn, the college junior talked about her story. She started to stutter at 8 years old. She is a covet stutter. Everybody knew she was a person who stutter. However, she never admitted to other body that she stutters. Last year, she was visiting a speech language pathologist and she got interested to be a speech language pathologist. I told her that a person who stutters could be a excellent speech language pathologist on stuttering. I told her that I might want to pursue a career as a speech language pathologist. Her natural language is very cheerful, most of the time she is fluent. Some time she has some hard blocks. She told us that she was in a MTV documentary, where she talked about her story. She went the Atlanta NSA conference too.I did my introduction. I feel that I did quite well. I did not feel nervous. My language are relatively smooth. My tone is very good, shows my confidence about the subject I talk. I talked about 20 minutes without stop. When I am talking every one is listening attentively. I really feel that I will be total fluent in the near future if I keep my current altitude and practices. I prepared to talk about stuttering hexagon and improvization activities. However, we were running of time. I will preside the next meeting again to introduce the concept of stuttering hexagon.