One day in speech therapy, I was trying to explain some recent developments in my speaking. I often like to explain what is going on within me using images or metaphors. This particular metaphor I chose to describe my experience of different speech "tracks." One of my therapists had once asked me if I stutter when I am singing, and I told her that don't. Most stutterers don't. She explained to me that, basically, the brain uses a different "track" for singing than it does for speaking. So if you think of it in terms of a mullt-lane highway, one lane is for speaking, while another is singing. That idea intrigues me, because I am often puzzled by the seemingly uncontrollable nature of my stutter. I often think of the mind, awareness, in terms of grooves or tracks. A habit is a perfect example. A habit can be described as a groove that has been developed over time, like a canyon. As is the nature of grooves, it is easy for my awareness to travel, to lie down, in the groove, for better or for worse. If you think of a bowling ball rolling down the gutter, you can see why it is difficult to create new habits--creating a new habit is tantamount to raising the ball out of the gutter. It takes effort, clearly.

    In speech therapy, we often discuss and work with habits--psychosomatic habits that have been laid down my entire life, and which my speech naturally falls into if I am extering any conscious effort. These are the tracks I mentioned earlier. Two fundamental ones are the emotions and history associated with my parents; simply, my mother track is much more fluent than my father track. I have observed this dynamic for years--I am generally more comfortable speaking with women than men, and the more like my mother someone is, or the more of my mother I am able to project onto someone, the better I speak with them (i.e. the more firmly I establish myself in that groove). The same for my father.

    These grooves are psychosomatic. Depending on which one I am currently inhabitating, my body feels different, my mind feels different, and my speech is different.

    What originally prompted the discussion of these tracks was when my therapist asked me about my experience using what she calls the "confidential tone." It is a tone of voice that we often use when discussing something confidential with someone--words are usually more enunciated and spaced apart, and the voice is softer. She suggested I try speaking with this tone, as we have both noticed that I am more fluent when I slow down, soften my voice a bit, and enunciate (even over-enunciate).

    As I practiced using the tone over the following couple of weeks, I noticed a palpable shift (changing lanes) that would occur if I consciously chose to use the tone in conversation. It almost felt as if I were using a fresh, new voice, which, for a stutterer, would be a dream come true. As I mentioned in my further development of the tracks metaphor, it is as if my usual speaking voice is a lane littered with debris from all the years of negative emotions associated with speaking. But when I consciously spoke in a slightly different tone, much more perceptible to myself than to any of my listeners, it was as if I were driving in a new lane, uncluttered and clear. Obviously, it is not as black and white as my description may imply, but I could feel this shift throughout my being--a feeling of space, freshness, and clarity in my speaking.