What's Love Got to Do With It? Reflections on the Role of Stuttering in Enabling and Enhancing Relationships

Abstract

Background

Despite the literature highlighting the mostly negative impact of stuttering on an individual's life, there is emerging evidence alluding to an alternative and more advantageous experience for some adults who stutter. Features of this alternative experience include enhanced interpersonal relationships and increased sensitivity to others. Investigation of such favourable by-products of stuttering is lacking in the literature, and in order to comprehensively understand the lived experience of stuttering for all individuals, such exploration is required.

Aims

This article aims to theoretically explore stuttering's capacity to enhance a person's cultivation of loving relationships, and relationships more generally, with others.

Methods and Procedures

This aim is achieved through a broad discussion on the meaning of love, and, more specifically, through the examination of the concept of vulnerability as a fundamental component that underpins a robust loving relationship. The role of stuttering as an act of vulnerability that has the capacity to enhance the relationships experienced by people who stutter is proposed.

Main Contribution

This paper serves as a novel conversation on the potential for stuttering to enhance a person's cultivation of robust relationships. It continues the discourse that challenges traditional deficit-based perspectives of stuttering and presents an alternative narrative of stuttering that can shape our research and clinical practices.

Conclusions and Implications

The advantageous by-products of stuttering, such as the role that stuttering plays in enabling and enhancing relationships, require further exploration. A range of clinical recommendations is outlined in order to support clients’ enactment of vulnerability and enhancement of their relationship experiences.

WHAT THIS PAPER ADDS

What is already known on the subject

• The research-based literature highlights the mostly negative impact that stuttering has on an individual's life. More recent evidence, however, indicates an alternative experience for some adults who stutter, with advantageous by-products of stuttering such as enhanced interpersonal relationships being reported.

What this paper adds to existing knowledge

• This paper discusses the potential for stuttering to enhance a person's cultivation of robust relationships. Early and contemporary theories of love are discussed, and one fundamental component of love, vulnerability, is examined. Stuttering is proposed as being as an act of vulnerability, thus enabling and enhancing relationships.

What are the potential or actual clinical implications of this work?

• Speech and language therapists (SLTs) are recommended to support clients to self-disclose, offer therapies that aim for authenticity and the reduction of concealment, and encourage clients to engage with stuttering support groups.