A common thing people tell stutterers is to “slow down”. It’s also a common speech therapy lesson - although now it’s commonly referred to as “turtle talk”.

Regardless of how understandable this piece of advice was at times, it always rubbed me the wrong way. Discovering this passage from David Compton made me want to restate my thoughts on the subject.

I came across this passage from the book “Stammering” by David Compton, when he meets with a local Oxford speech therapist as he researched his book. He asks her why he still stammers sometimes. Note: this book was published in 1993 and our language has changed a bit.

“She smiled at me gently, and patted my hand, and suggested that if I still stammered now and then, the reason was simply that I talked much too quickly.

I didn’t press it, but I’d been hoping for wise words, profound insights, and it seemed to me at the time a pretty dumb answer. A one-legged man who falls over when he walks quickly doesn’t fall over because he walks quickly. Walking quickly is a normal activity. Nice ordinary people do it all the time. It may be the immediate cause of his falling over, but that’s only because the poor sod’s got something wrong with him. There’s an underlying cause.”

For me? Being told to “slow down” led me to not wanting to speak.

This has some complications to it - sometimes I did speak faster while mumbling, making it near impossible to understand me. But a lot of the time, stuttering at all led people to tell me to slow down. Just take a breath.

I attended a Catholic K-8; I always volunteered to read at weekly Mass and was rarely picked. Finally when I was chosen, my teacher skipped me during practice - she said we’d do mine last. Strange, I thought. When the other kids were done, she sent them back to class. Now I thought I understood - she didn’t want to waste their time with my stutter. Then she had me go up to the podium.

The Bibles used to read passages from during Mass aren’t your average Bibles. They’re huge and heavy, for one. They also remove the passages for the context of their Mass reading. Based on the date, you flip to the passage you’ll be reading if it’s not already there. (Sometimes you take a sheet of paper with you instead though. Depends.)

Assuming the teacher seemed to think my stutter wasn’t something she wanted the other kids to have to listen to, I was unbelievably on edge. I wanted to please this teacher so she’d let me read again. Before I ever opened my mouth, I was scared. Not to speak publicly, but to stutter. Before opening my mouth, it had been made clear to me that (from my perspective) that my stutter was not invited.

When you believe your stutter is wasting people’s time, is it any surprise you talk faster? You’re not just trying to get it over with for you. You’re trying to make sure they’re comfortable. That they’re not annoyed you’re wasting their time. Sometimes when I listen to videos of my younger self, I think I’m trying to outrun my stutter. It’s a race: me vs my stutter. May the faster one win.

Back to being a preteen practicing for Mass. Surprise of all surprises, I stuttered more than usual that day. Every part of my body was tense. I’d rush during my fluent spells because I anticipated the stutter. The stutter was all I could think about.

So the teacher told me to slow down. Ashamed, I tried again. I still stuttered, of course. She assumed I still wasn’t speaking slowly enough. Improved - but go slower. We practiced it a few more times - more than the other kids. She asked if I was sure I wanted to do this. I nodded, but I doubted I’d ever volunteer again.

I have countless other stories of being told to slow down. And it’s not like there was never any merit. I was speaking FAST. But too often, I was told to slow down just because they heard a stutter, and it was assumed this was why I stuttered. And if I’d slow down, I wouldn’t stutter.

So then every time I heard the words “slow down”, I associated it with the way my stutter burdened people. The way people didn’t want to listen to my stutter. Even if the person was trying to be helpful, it stung. I felt chastised (often because I was - Catholic school teachers aren’t necessarily known for gentleness.)

In college, I’d watch my peers present. They spoke fast. But they didn’t stutter like I did. It wasn’t fair, I thought. Why did they get to use more inflections, use dramatic pauses intentionally, be excited, and have more character? Why didn’t I get to do that too?

I wanted to be careless with the way I spoke.

A few years ago, I had a phone call with a grad student studying to be an SLP. I was excited and chatting quickly. Stuttering. I told her how much I hated being told to “slow down” and she said “Of course you do. Look how excited you are. Talking fast, being excited and animated- it’s a part of who you are. Being told to slow down was telling you to stop being yourself.”

Whoa.

Damn.

The insight HIT.

Being told to slow down daily for my entire life? From my volunteering to read at Mass to telling my gramma about my day. No matter the context, the message I received felt clear: the way talk is a burden. Be someone else, someone smaller, someone calmer, and maybe I’ll listen to you.

So sure, maybe sometimes I really did need to ‘slow down’ in order to be understood. But could it have been said more accurately? Maybe instead of “slow down”, we can say “Hey, you’re flying through some of these words and I’d really like to hear what you have to say. I have time.”

Make sure it’s clear that if you do need someone to ‘slow down’ or repeat their message (and sometimes you do), it’s because you want to hear what they have to say. That their words matter to you. Focus on YOU wanting to understand, not on telling them how to speak.

For the record, I still talk quite quickly. Sometimes I stutter a lot; sometimes I stutter less. If I’m asked to slow down now, I typically assume it’s due to a comprehension disconnect. And I do. But it’s not to do with stuttering.