REMOVING EMOTIONAL SCARS
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We seem to recognize that all children, in learning to walk, will occasionally fall. We say "he fell" or he "stumbled." We do not say "he is a faller" or he is a "stumbler." However, many parents do fail to recognize that all children, in learning to talk, also make mistakes or "nonfluences"—hesitation, blocking, repetition of syllables and words. It is a common experience for an anxious, concerned parent to conclude, "He is a stutterer." Such an attitude, or a judgment—not of the child's actions but of the child himself, gets across to the child and he begins to think of himself as a stutterer. His learning is fixated, the stutter tends to become permanent. According to Dr. Wendell Johnson, the nation's foremost authority on stuttering, this sort of thing is the cause of stuttering. He has found that the parents of non-stutterers are more likely to use descriptive terms ("He did not speak"), whereas the parents of stutterers were inclined to use judgmental terms ("He could not speak"). Writing in the Saturday Evening Post, January 5, 1957, Dr. Johnson said, "Slowly we began to comprehend the vital point that had been missed for so many centuries. Case after case had developed after it had been diagnosed as stuttering by over-anxious persons unfamiliar with the facts of normal speech development. The parents rather than the child, the listeners rather than the speakers, seemed to be the ones most requiring understanding and instruction." Dr. Knight Dunlap, who made a 20 year study of habits, their making, unmaking, and relation to learning, discovered that the same principle applied to virtually all "bad habits," including bad emotional habits. It was essential, he said, that the patient learn to stop blaming himself, condemning himself, and feeling remorseful over his habits—if he were to cure them. He found particularly damaging the conclusion "I am ruined," or "I am worthless," because the patient had done, or was doing, certain acts.