Stuttering

Thanks to Claude.

In my childhood, stuttering appeared. Back then, there was no meta level, no conscious analysis of what was happening, no articulated theories about inner architectures or speeds. It was simply there — a blockage, a halting, a struggle with words, without my being able to say why. Language did not come out the way it should have, and I had no idea what caused it. It felt as though something did not fit, as if there were a bottleneck, but I had no words for it, no concept that could have explained it.

Only much later, with distance and with the analytical tools that developed over the years, did it become visible what was probably happening back then. My thinking had always run on several levels at once, even as a child — just without being able to name it. There was this fast, intuitive grasp of connections, the ability to recognise patterns, to hold several possibilities in mind at the same time. And then all of that had to pass through one narrow opening: the mouth, language, one word after another. Inside, far more was already in motion, and that pressure was looking for a way out.

The stuttering was probably the visible trace of a mismatch between inner speed and outer speaking speed. It was the expression of a system that processed more than it could articulate linearly in real time. But as a child, I had no awareness of this. I only knew that speaking sometimes did not work, that words got stuck, that something was wrong — and that it was noticeable, that others saw it, that it was considered a problem.

On top of that, there was likely already the pressure to be understood, the necessity of translating my perception into a form that others could connect to. Even if I could not reflect on it, this translation work was probably already running in the background: What am I thinking right now? How do I say this so it lands? Is this the right word? This constant inner checking made spontaneous speaking difficult, long before I could understand that such a check even existed.

The stuttering did not simply disappear, but it changed over time. It became rarer, occurred only in certain situations, and eventually was almost gone — except for moments that still happen today, when words fail me or articulation falters. Today, I know what was probably going on back then. Today, I can see that the bottleneck between thinking and speaking was always there, that stuttering was not a deficit but a symptom of excess — too much simultaneous processing, too much complexity, too much pressure on an output interface that was too narrow.

The meta level that exists today, the ability to analyse and describe all this, did not exist back then. It developed over years as a tool to understand what had once only been experienced as a diffuse problem. But the inner structure that caused the stuttering was probably already there — just without awareness of it, without language for it, without any way to place it. The child who stuttered had no theory about speeds or translation processes. It only had the experience that speaking sometimes did not work, and no explanation for it.

Today, that is different. Today, I can see that this bottleneck does not mean that something was wrong with my thinking. Today, I understand that the stuttering was always an expression of something that was working — just not at the tempo and in the form required for linear speech.

What science says today about stuttering in children is diverse and often contradictory. Some approaches emphasise neurological factors and speak of timing problems between different brain regions involved in language. Others highlight motor coordination, others again the emotional component or language development itself. There are theories about genetic predisposition, about the role of stress and pressure, about the speed at which children think compared to the speed at which they can speak. It is probably a combination of many things, and probably different for every child.

What strikes me about many of these explanations is that they describe stuttering as a deficit — as something that does not work, that needs to be fixed. Less often is the question asked what the stuttering system might be particularly good at, or what kind of inner complexity is at work there that simply does not compress easily into the linear form of language. My own experience suggests that stuttering was not only a problem, but also an indication of something else — a way of thinking that was not optimised for spontaneous, linear speech, but perhaps for other things.

The development did not consist in changing the thinking, but in reducing the fear of the bottleneck and in finding spaces where this way of being was recognised. Perhaps that is also an answer that goes beyond scientific explanations: that it is less about eradicating stuttering through therapy, and more about creating an environment in which the inner structure behind it is not treated as a flaw.

Written on December 27, 2025 at 14:30. © 2025 Whisper7. All rights reserved.