Why I Blog

Monday night in my NPCC Small Group, Marla was asking a few people in the group what motivated them to start blogging. Dorky Dad blogs as an outlet for some of his social and political angst. My wife uses her blog as a sounding board for ideas and goals she sets in her aspiring writing career. I have never stated why I started this blog.

Flashback to another Small Group meeting about this time last year when our group had just formed. We were doing prayer requests and I had a long-term prayer request that I my life had been very blessed due to my involvement in the therapy at the PFSP in Norfolk, however I have never given anything back in return. My prayer request was that I did not know what to give back. Yes, I give some money to the EVMS foundation when I can, but what I really meant was I have never given anything back to the stuttering community as a whole.

Occasionally I will search the internet to see what is new in the stuttering community. I am always running across people with negative comments regarding fluency shaping programs. Some comments are actually from people who have had experience with fluency shaping programs, though most are from people pushing their own method, device, agenda, etc. Fluency shaping does not seem to be a therapy sexy enough for most people in today's society who want the miracle cure, magic pill, etc. It seems like the only positive thing I ever read regarding fluency shaping was published by people actually running the programs themselves - hardly material that people can evaluate as being unbiased.

Recently I came across John MacIntyre's blog. John is someone who has just gone through a fluency shaping program in Canada. I found his blog to be very interesting, but what I thought might also be of value to some people would be the same type of account, but from someone who had been through therapy many years before. Possibly the main point of my blog I would like to make is that you can have success with the program many years down the line, and though it does require significant hard work, that hard work can be leveraged for tremendous results.