"Speech Therapy opening doors for me."

I am now in my early 50's and had four years of one-to-one speech therapy appointments for my slight stammer, from late 2014 to mid 2018, at The Eddercliffe Centre in Liversedge. I also attended monthly group sessions at Dewsbury Health Centre over that time, which also carried on, right up to late February of 2020. Due to the lock-down, we have had Zoom group meetings over the last nine months, which have also been very useful as top-up treatment.

Having speech therapy has certainly changed my life for the better and has opened doors for me to move forward in life and be far more confident. My Speech Therapist Lynne, really helped me when I was unemployed for two periods and taught me interview techniques and CBT techniques, which helped me to get a more social, public-facing job, than the hide-away labouring jobs that I had been doing since leaving school in the mid-1980’s, due to me trying to hide my stammer.

I have now worked in a gardening & leisure shop since mid 2018 and it’s certainly been good for me in becoming a more fluent speaker than before. I serve customers and also try to sell them items, as well as occasionally answering phone enquiries and packing seed orders every day.

My job is good for me and I call it my daily speech therapy and it’s amazing how confident and fluent you feel when your stood behind a shop counter. Having an understanding boss, who knows about your stammering history is also very important and helps to take away that taboo pressure of having a stammer. My stammer hasn’t gone away completely and I still have to concentrate and work on it, but it’s not so bad now, because my knowledge from my Locala speech therapy treatment has really served me well.