Introduction
This is a story of how my stuttering became, at least for a while, something less than 99.99% better. At times it is a bit of a scary story for me. At times, it is even a bit humourous. And a few times, however, it felt glorious and triumphant.
In the Spring, Summer and Fall of 2024, there were two parallel processes going on at the same time. The first was the process to get ready for my presentation in Montréal on how I got better. The second process was where I stuttered quite a bit from July 24-August 31 2024, as I prepared for Montréal. Those 39 days were totally unique in my life.
On September 19 2021, an opportunity came along to give a gift in the name of a friend who stuttered and who died that day. That led me to get acquainted with Eeva Stierwalt. Up until the time of the Niagara Falls convention it was all done by telephone. Then, on October 22 2022, on International Stuttering Awareness Day, in Niagara Falls, everything changed. It was my youngest brother’s birthday. On the eve of that day, I first came face to face with Eeva.
When I told Eeva I once stuttered, she gently encouraged me to write about it. At first I was extremely reluctant to bring all that stuff up again. For at the age of 80, I had the strong sense, having lived for 51 years unaffected by stuttering, if I refused her request, I would continue to the end of my days, much in the same way as before. I would continue to never have a problem. But if I acquiesced to her request, I was aware it might lead me into unknown and unpleasant territory which could just as easily be avoided by simply saying "No".
At the time, I assumed other people surely must have gotten better too, perhaps much in the same way I had. So why not just leave well enough alone? However, slowly but surely, I realized that perhaps I had a civic obligation to tell my story, just in the off hand chance, it turned out to be relevant in some unknown way.
Having agreed to Eeva’s request, I immediately faced a couple of large hurdles. First of all, since I had quickly put the matter of stuttering some distance behind me, starting no later than my first date with Anne on January 3 1972, I now needed to try to remember and recover that which I had tried to forget. And the other problem I had was that recovering memories of facts, such as dates, times, locations, who said what, how long something lasted etc., etc. was going to be extremely difficult if not impossible. Any recovery of factual information was likely to be just about nil.
My first article ‘For You, For Each of You’ was published on February 15, 2022. It is filled with plenty of facts, from beginning to end. I can’t prove them all, but overall, they are all probably true, as they are some of the highlights from my life. One of those was my first stuttering experience, when I had to read from a text in high school, around the age of 13 or 14, when much to my horror I discovered that nothing would come out of my mouth. You never forget the first time.
Thereafter there is huge drop off in my memory of facts. So for example, I remember how difficult it was where I couldn’t say “McLean” without stuttering, when I tried to identify myself when speaking on the phone. I remember this happened many times. Many many painful times. But if I were to be asked to describe even a single incident of stuttering on my name in detail, I couldn’t do it. Even worse, I could not supply a single fact for any of them! such as: What was the day it occurred? What time was it? Who was I talking to? What did the other person say? What else was I able to say when I wasn’t stuttering on my name? What was the weather outside....? On and on... on and on... Parenthetically, from this it is obvious that if I were ever in court, trying to prove I got better from stuttering—something I would never dream of doing—a decent lawyer, could take what I just said about my lack of memory of factual details and blow my case right out of the water. You see courts generally rely only on facts. It’s only very rarely that feelings become relevant, eg motive in a homicide case.
The same situation is true with respect to my time in law school. I can’t describe a single incident or even provide any tidbit of information from any incident. The same is true in the Jesuits except where I have a few notes, describing something about an incident. And so for example the part in my presentation where I listed the various ways I tried to prevent more stuttering came from some notes I had from the 1960s, copies of which have already been provided to the Canadian Stuttering Association for their records.
You would think that this creates an impossible barrier for me to overcome. But not quite so fast.
For I do remember a few basic facts. Nothing seemed to come out of my mouth during the 3 separate incidents described in my presentation. But each of 'those 3 experiences were simply gruesome and each one of them remains totally unforgettable'. And I generally remember stuttering in high school, in law school and in the winter term of my first year in particular, and in the seminary. And I vividly remember coming into November 1971 with a stuttering problem and I vividly remember the problem being completely solved by the time of my first date with Anne on January 3 1972. But most of all, I also vividly remember how I felt during each painful or ecstatic step of my stuttering journey. And when I probed deeper into those feeling memories, in preparation for my Montréal presentation, those memories became even sharper and clearer. As a result, I decided to write my story based on how I felt every step of the way. This is so unlike what I did as a lawyer. In court, for example the feelings of the lawyer and the judge are irrelevant to the proceedings. In fact really effective lawyers do everything within their power to hide how they are feeling! That’s what I could never do as a lawyer, and so I willingly paid the price.
But unbeknownst to me during the Spring and Summer of 2024, re-experiencing those difficult stuttering experiences from long ago, in preparation for November 9 in Montréal, caused me to start stuttering again. Indeed, they created new feelings of ‘I hate myself’ of which I was completely unaware, until Summer was about to turn into Fall, on August 31 2024.
And so I eventually found myself no longer 99.99% better. This then is basically a story of the details of how I fell below being 99.99% better. You will see I use a lot of dates. For this time I was determined to keep some records of what was going on, still ruing my failure to do so in 1971. The actual dates themselves are not important. But what very often is important is the order in which events occurred. And it is for that reason you will see all these dates. The year of each date is 2024 unless otherwise stated.
Re-Experiencing Feelings from 1955-1971
On May 18, it was decided I was going to make a presentation in Montréal. I immediately began to work on a draft of what I was going to say. On that day, I ran off a draft which got me nearly half way through what ultimately became an 11 page presentation. Immediately I realized that anything I might write about the facts of my stuttering was not going to work. To begin with, I had so few facts at my disposal. Worse, I realized what I say would wind up boring the audience to tears, as my presentation was likely to be very repetitive as a result.
Instead, I realized what I needed was a draft expressing how I felt every step of the way. Something I had never tried to do before. And so for 2 weeks, following May 18, I wrote nothing. I decided that to really be effective in my presentation, I needed to try and re-experience those very same difficult feelings which I had felt many decades ago. It wasn’t fun. But it was necessary; that much I knew. Each time I felt new pain from that era, I found I could describe my feelings with more and more clarity. I found I could better remember how I felt about what happened than describe what actually did happen. Wigmore and other authors on the law of evidence, as far as I know, do not take into account the reality that people can often remember with more accuracy the feelings they felt, about events which had occurred, better than remembering the underlying facts which describe and make up those events. Especially those feelings associated with both agony and ecstasy. Wigmore the learned scholar on the laws of evidence would have been shocked, were he still alive, to hear that claim.
Now my decision on about May 18 to re-experience those ancient feelings marked a turning point in how I felt about my stuttering after I first met Eeva. Following meeting Eeva, I experienced a series of Stuttering Highs too numerous to remember. And these were the first Stuttering Highs since the one incident in November 1971 when I realized that stuttering for me was completely over. The most memorable Stuttering High was during the first week of September 2023, when I found myself experiencing real tears off and on of overwhelming consolation which went into a 4th day. For during that time I realized that I had found a passage in one of my scribblers written on November 22 1971, the day after I found myself right in the middle of facing a potential new stutter on November 21, 1971. Right in the middle of about the 2 week period where I got better!!! Wigmore would have heartily approved of this kind of memory/evidence. He called it “a past recollection recorded”. This evidence would be totally admissible in a court of law and likely found to be very reliable. My tears were because I had just shockingly discovered that I had found a passage written contemporaneously with the event which would almost completely resolve my reliability problems regarding the story of how I got better over 50 years ago in 1971. It was both a first and a final draft written using a ball point pen. The really crucial facts needed to describe how I got better were somehow all there, beautifully written and clearly set out. The ancillary facts about not using techniques to block the stutter were poorly described in the first draft. But these facts were not critical to the description of how I got better.
The article ‘When My Stuttering Went from Way Out of Control to Almost Nil” will always be my favourite article because of the ecstatic feelings associated with it. The other never to be forgotten Stuttering High occurred when I was driven off the stage in Ottawa during the Sunday Open Mic session by a Stuttering High leaving me on the verge of tears of joy which prevented me from saying another word.
Now my point here in all of this is that at some point the Stuttering Highs all ended as a result of my making my old stuttering pains part of my current feelings, in preparation for Montréal.
To experience these feelings from long ago, I used the look-in process, this time not to feel through whatever I might be feeling right now, as is the norm, but rather to recreate the various stuttering experiences I had had. First I let the experience of being forced to read in high school roll through me. This worked rather well, because it was the one experience I still remembered several of the facts surrounding it. I slowly let myself experience each part of that ancient experience.
This process produced a number of current feelings such as feeling: 'deathly afraid' just before I had to get up to read; and feeling 'an accelerating panic tear through me'; and just before I tried to speak, feeling “Oh No! Oh No! Oh No! Not this. Not this. I can’t do this. I can’t do this. I just can’t... Oh No! Oh No!”; and when it was over 'I felt completely alone and abandoned. I felt totally humiliated... I felt completely defeated'. I felt those same feelings once again some 7 decades later. When I did this, I realized that this is what my Montréal presentation was going to look like.
In the next day or so, I did something similar with my stuttering experience of identifying myself on the telephone, where I felt myself 'spinning out of control on a downward spiral'; and I felt 'What could be more embarrassing than being unable to say my name? People must think I am completely stupid'. Once again I made contact with those feelings as well. I felt them again after 7 decades and found that they still hurt.
Then I turned to my experience in first year Law School where 'I felt I was completely out of my depth in this class'; and where I felt my first year experience to be 'traumatizing'. There, I was also able to make contact with the 'despair' I felt at the time which then led to my feeling that I was a 'Nothing'. And where, following a moot court a year or two later, where I was up against a student 9 years older than myself, 31 vs 23 say, 'I again felt that nothing was coming out of my mouth every time I spoke'. And once again, 'it felt like my voice was disconnected from who I am'. By now I was into a rhythm of reconnecting with one set of painful feelings after another.
Next I turned to my experience as a seminarian, where I experienced the most embarrassing feelings of my entire life, when the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation came to town to tape a mass. For a third time I found that words would not come out of my mouth, this time when I tried to read the epistle. I felt: “this was a complete calamity... Now everyone across the country is going to see how pathetic I am.... How can I live with myself knowing that?'.
And then, during these 2 weeks of not writing but only feeling, I repeated this entire process all over again: from high school, to Law school, to the seminary, feeling anew how I felt each step of the way. And then I did it again for a third time, from the very beginning. I found myself repeating this process enough times, until I felt ready to write up what I was going present from the podium in Montréal. It should also be noted that each time I repeated the entire process, the amount of pain produced within me was pretty uniform. But what did change, however, was that my ability to put these experiences into words got better and better.
However, unbeknownst to me, it turned out there were real consequences for doing this. I had no idea that what I was doing at the time was creating a whole new set of ‘I hate myself’ feelings. And not knowing that, not knowing what I was doing, I was unable to respond to them, by then feeling “I am loveable” or ‘I love myself’. And that wasn’t the all of it either.
I also faced another huge problem in all of this. In my presentation, I was going to be dealing with feelings which are at the extreme edge of us all: Agony and Ecstasy—but for now, just the Agony. How on earth, on the day of my Montréal presentation, was I ever going to feel my way through each of these feelings, area by area, time period by time period, and not cause members of the audience, especially those who stutter, to feel 'overwhelmed'? Quite frankly I had no idea how I was going to be able to do this. It was only after I saw the recording of that event that I sensed that I had outdone myself. I was shocked to see and hear myself having fun, with a glint in my eye during my presentation. For that was never a part of my plan. But was it ever a plus. For that really helped me in just the area I needed. And so did the ladies laughing. That also helped keep the presentation as light as possible to prevent others from feeling overwhelmed. It’s just unfortunate they were sitting so close to the microphone. Most importantly, the ladies enjoying themselves laughing in no way ever prevented the important things I was saying from being heard.
Stuttering Starts Again
And now on to instances of my stuttering. I will try to make each as brief as possible, as the list is long enough for eyes to glaze over if I don’t cut it short.
On May 27 2024, our friend Roger came to supper. During our conversation, I was rather shocked to find myself blocking on a word. I had to momentarily substitute another word. But I managed to get the blocked word out in the next sentence. In this article when I use the term “block stuttered” I mean I blocked on the word, but I always and without exception got the word out in the next sentence, no matter how ungrammatical I might have sounded. And I did not openly stutter on the word, so that no one appeared to notice that I was having problems speaking.
This kind of stuff had not happened for years. But from now on, it was to happen on a regular basis—at least until the end of the summer. This incident then was my first new incident of stuttering since January 17 2023, about a year and a half before, when I had problems drawing the time on a clock. It would not be my last.
Around June 6, I started putting pen to paper again. My writing proceeded slowly. I took some time off. The pace gradually picked up at the end of July, during the Paris Olympics.
The period from July 24 until August 31 2024 was particularly notable for stuttering.
On July 24, the first stuttering in almost 2 months occurred. That afternoon, I phoned our family doctor’s office seeking a prescription. In speaking to one of the office staff, I block stuttered on the word “prescription”. I blocked twice maybe even three times on that word. But because I didn’t feel I was about to stutter on any other words, I did nothing further to prevent more stuttering.
On July 25, the next day, our family doctor called me about this new prescription. Once again I blocked stuttered on the word “prescription”. On both days, in each instance there was no noticeable verbal stutter that either his staff or the doctor himself would have noticed. And again, because I didn’t feel I was about to stutter on any other words, I did nothing further on July 25 to prevent more stuttering.
On August 9 there was more stuttering. It was during the track and field part of the Olympic games. I was on the phone with a former business acquaintance. Two runners ran the 100 meter dash in a Ben Johnson time of 9.79 seconds. I tried to ask him “What was the name....?” of the runner who lost, when the track officials took the 9.79 time to a third decimal place. I stuttered on “What was the name...?”. This was a real verbal stutter. It was not a block stutter. Then I stuttered on something else right after this. When I felt a third stutter about to come on, I made sufficient contact with my ‘I love myself’ feeling to prevent this third stutter. And the words finally flowed freely this time.
On August 17, in the very early morning, while lying in bed, I realized for the first time I was no longer 99.99% better. I was something less. The latest 3 incidents of stuttering had made that perfectly clear.
On August 17 a few hours later, I had yet another stuttering experience. I had dozed off while watching Emily in Paris on Netflix with Anne just before noon. A doctor’s office called. There was great confusion. The receptionist named 'Natalia' was attempting to call us on both our cellphones. I managed to hang up on her, accidentally. This really upset me. It was suddenly a bit of a zoo, as I sensed we really needed to make an appointment for Anne with the specialist on whose behalf she was calling. Twice I tried to say “Natalia” in all the confusion, still feeling in a bit of a daze and not fully awake. Twice nothing would come out of my mouth. The call soon ended after that. So I never did get to say her name during the call! Yes for sure I am no longer 99.99% better.
On August 17 once again, a third important event occurred. When I did a look-in later to see how I was feeling, the kind of thing I do all the time, I was shocked to find that I was feeling afraid that I was soon going to stutter!! This was the first time I had ever felt that way since I got better in November 1971! In response, I replaced the fear that I was soon going to stutter with feelings of anger felt towards my parents for not teaching me that I was very capable of doing anything I wanted to do. That little bit of cognitive restructuring quickly solved the problem, as by the end of my hour long look-in, both feelings had run their course. As I finalize this article on August 31 2025, I did not re-experience that fear again in the intervening year.
On August 18, Anne ran into the corner of our piano bench. This caused a massive bruise just below her left knee. I didn’t think at first it was that serious. The next day we went shopping. She made it home, but barely. About 10 yards before reaching our front door, her entire leg seized up and she found she could barely walk. The rest of the day was a total blur. I was in a state of shock. From that point on, anything to do with stuttering completely disappeared from my radar. But it was back a week or so later, when she started to get better.
Final Week of August 2024
During the final week of August 2024, from August 24 - August 31, I had one of the most amazing weeks of my life psychologically.
August 24 began the week with a bang. On that day, I realized for the first time that whenever I had tried to make contact with my ‘I hate myself’ feelings, starting as of January 17 2023 when I botched drawing the time on a clock, the ‘I hate myself’ feelings I made contact with were not the ones which exploded so often into my consciousness, back in November 1971. Rather they were much more muted and civilized. Despite the muted/civilized tone, I was becoming quite concerned with all the new stuttering I was now experiencing. I was getting frightened. I felt I needed to get back to 99.99%. To do so, on August 24, I felt if I could just re-experience those explosive feelings again, whenever I felt ‘I hate myself’ in a new potential stuttering situation, it would lead to my getting back to being 99.99% better. Therefore, in order to conduct an investigation as to why I was unable to feel those explosive feelings again, I decided I needed to isolate my ‘I hate myself’ feelings from my feelings of ‘I love myself’, so I could get a better feel and understanding of my ‘I hate myself’ feelings.
And so I decided in any new potential stuttering situation, to make contact only with my ‘I hate myself’ feelings and to specifically decline to make any attempt to make any contact with my ‘I love myself’ feelings.
On August 24 another huge thing happened. For the first time, I finally realized that the cause of my new stuttering experiences and my falling below 99.99% was that my determination—to intensely feel the painful feelings I felt back in 1971 some 53 years before in order to make the best presentation in Montréal possible— in and of itself caused me to stutter. But as of yet I didn’t know why that had happened. Or what had caused it to happen. I did not find out what had caused me to stutter, until August 31. So for the next week, as it turned out, the uncertainty just created opened up a week long gap for some amazing things to occur.
On August 26, on my way to the dentist, I got a new insight which promptly turned everything I had just said about my need to get 99.99% better upside down. That insight was that I should never be afraid of some new stuttering, because some new stuttering is likely going to give me a bird’s eye view on what went on in 1971. If that turns out to be true, nothing could be more helpful right now. It only took until August 31 for that to happen. So as between the two, on August 26, I decided that it was more important to get more information on how I got better, than it was to get back to being 99.99% better. So from that point on, I chose to stop trying to get back to being 99.99% better.
On August 27, I went for an early morning walk. It’s was one of those very rare walks, where I found myself in tears or near tears almost the entire way. As the walk started, I started thinking about what had hit me when I drove in to see my dentist yesterday. Throughout the walk, I engaged in some flights of fancy. I concluded, “At this point in your life you feel you love yourself a lot more than you hate yourself”. If so, perhaps this conclusion might provide an answer as to why I am now unable to feel the overpowering feelings of ‘I hate myself’ which I felt back in 1971. Put another way, not hating myself as much as I once did might just provide the answer as to why I cannot presently feel those explosive feelings.
On August 28, I had a really off the wall experience which triggered some wildly conflicting emotions. Around lunch time, I needed to phone my pharmacist Najat to get a new prescription. I thought to myself, here is a good opportunity to see if feeling just ‘I hate myself’ will also make me feel the explosive force that that feeling once created back in 1971. So before I dialled the pharmacy, I went through part of my routine which I first used in 1971. I paused. I took a deep breath. I made contact with my ‘I hate myself’ feeling, while accepting that I might stutter—but not really believing I would. Once again, the new feelings of ‘I hate myself’ were soft and gentle. They were not explosive. Momentarily I again felt disappointed. But despite this result, I still made no attempt to make contact with feelings of ‘I love myself’. Then I dialled the phone. When someone answered I tried to say: “May I please speak with Najat?”
But it didn’t come out that way at all. Instead, for the very first time in almost 53 years I badly stuttered on the phone with another person. “May I please speak to Najat” came out as this shocking stutter: “May I please speak to ‘Na na Njat’?
Boy, was this ever a shock. Now I am really well below 99.99%—or so I feared. It turned out it was Najat herself on the phone, but I couldn’t tell that immediately, as wearing hearing aids often leads to my being unable to identify a voice on the phone momentarily. I had asked for Najat countless times before on the phone, specifically using her name 'Najat' and nothing like this had ever happened. Or since, for that matter. Very soon I found myself wondering if this new phone stuttering would now get worse? It never did.
On August 29, I was still in a state of shock as a result of experiencing this serious stutter over Najat’s name. So I called Carla over for a little emotional hand holding. My urgent email to her simply read: “It would be really good if we could meet today Carla”. I needed her here at our condo for a short bit, because I suddenly felt overwhelmed by the need not to have to go through something like this alone. I had never experienced that need before in a stuttering context. Carla responded as she always does. She was extremely helpful. But that overwhelming need for emotional comfort soon disappeared after only a few hours, when the feeling of being a bit scared and a bit defeated was replaced by a feeling of triumph, at having stuttered on trying to say Najat’s name. For I sensed that in having stuttered so badly, I would soon learn a lot more about my ancient stuttering. It took but two days for that to occur.
And so I started to again feel what I had felt in driving to the dentist’s office on Monday last, 2 days ago: having some new stuttering, as a result of having to delve deeply into the feelings I experienced over my 3 stuttering periods, in order to make a better presentation in Montréal, was now felt as a priceless jewel. Because, it hit me like a ton of bricks that there is now another way of finding out how I got better from stuttering than looking backwards many decades. The other way I can now find out more about how I got better is to look forwards! And that way is to put myself in a position where I might stutter, simply by declining to feel ‘I love myself’ in a new stuttering situation. Now this is totally different than intentionally trying to stutter. I would never intentionally try to stutter, out of my respect for how I got better. And so I now felt much better that Najat’s name had come out “Na Na Njat”. Because I sensed that this was going to be really really really helpful!
August 31 The Biggest Day of All
On August 31, the week and the month both ended with a very big surprise. I went for yet another morning walk, this time with the intention of asking myself: “Why has probing into my feelings in 2024 surrounding each of the 3 eras of my past stuttering life caused me new stuttering?”. On my walk, I started off by looking at each of the three eras. In my high school era, the forced reading made me feel I was alone and abandoned. My inability to say “McLean” on the telephone made me feel ;what could be more embarrassing than being unable to say my name?'. In Law School the stuttering got so bad 'I felt despair and that I was a Nothing'. And the shame of having to get Daddy to bail me out was crushing. In the Jesuits, the CBC incident made me feel I was 'an embarrassment to our whole country'. The question then was: "What do each of those 3 eras of my past stuttering life, which I needed to re-experience in 2024, have in common?". The answer came back very quickly. The answer was and is in each of these instances, what I re-experienced were new feelings of ‘I hate myself’. All of this then caused me to take a look at my November 22 1971 memo:
"Remarkable week. I’ve started a project which seems to have revolutionized everything... The basic experience occurred yesterday November 21... I had noticed a remarkable dynamic in my reading at mass. When I got up I was aware that my self hatred was causing my inadequacy to go way out of control. So I opened myself to the suffering & focused on the feeling which, like self hate, lies deep in my subConscious: that I am lovable. In embracing the suffering I find myself passing from withdrawal —> presence & in the case of stammering, the suffering has been reduced to almost nil but at the same time I’ve thrown away my defences—no slow and low stuff."
On August 31, when I saw that self hatred was causing something (here underlined for emphasis) I immediately sensed that I was saying my feelings of self hatred caused me to stutter. I can’t logically prove this using just these words in italics. But on a feeling level, it is very clear to me that I was saying that self hatred causes me to stutter. That came as a surprise. Because I have no recollection of that ever happening.
That being the case, the reason I am now stuttering again in preparation for Montréal is that when I unknowingly made contact with those ‘I hate myself’ feelings in 2024—without being aware of the damage that these new ‘I hate myself’ feelings had just caused—I then failed or was unable to make the necessary contact with the corresponding ‘I love myself’ feelings, because I was unaware that I needed to! This then led to or caused me to stutter.
This discovery also answers the question of whether feeling ‘I hate myself’ feelings in a stuttering context are neutral, in the sense that when I feel them, I can then set them aside and move on to looking for some ‘I love myself’ feelings, in order to get better. The answer is I cannot do it this way.
Rather, since new ‘I hate myself’ feelings by themselves cause me to stutter, I have to get rid of them. And the only way to get rid of them is to replace them with new ‘I love myself’ feelings. So this is what I must have done in November 1971. But replacing one feeling with another feeling is the essence of cognitive restructuring. So here I found myself inadvertently having my first experience of cognitive restructuring. This new discovery too came as a surprise. Because for years, in both instances I thought the opposite to be true. [This event in late 1971 occurred but a couple of years before cognitive restructuring came to be known.]
And so this is why the “Na Na Njat” stutter was a Triumph and not a defeat. Without having experienced it, I never would have corrected my two important misconceptions about my stuttering history.
As a result of all of this, the plan then was going to be to continue to avoid contacting the feeling ‘I love myself’, in a stuttering context, in an attempt at getting more information on how I got better. But there wasn’t enough time to execute this plan. Because on September 15, I decided I needed to again start feeling ‘I love myself’, in a stuttering context, in order to be in 99.99% shape in Montréal. Otherwise, if I were to show up stuttering in Montréal, claiming I had gotten better from stuttering, I would come across as a fraud. Fortunately that’s not what happened. In Montréal, I was indeed back to being 99.99% better.
Miscellaneous
Reading My Montréal Presentation
A couple of weeks or so before Montréal I found it was too dangerous to try to do my presentation entirely from memory. I was able to get it about 90% memorized. But when I practised doing it that way, I repeatedly found myself jumping ahead over some pretty crucial stuff each time. If I did this from the podium, there would be no effective way to re-orient myself. And if that happened my presentation would be ruined. In jury addresses in criminal trials, my notes were scrawled on the back of an envelope to head me in the right direction, subject matter by subject matter. But my Montréal story required a very careful selection of words and phrases, so even that limited option was not available to me here.
Ultimately, I realized I had no choice but to read my stuttering presentation. This would be a first. Because I had never read any speech before in public. In coming to that conclusion I was acutely aware that reading in public was the original source of all my stuttering. How is that going to play out, I wondered? To make matters even more dicey, over the past 50 years I had read very little in public. And now on the biggest stage of all I was going to be reading non stop for 50 minutes. However I found I wasn’t really bothered by that prospect. For I knew I would be pouring my heart and soul into the feelings I was about to describe each step of the way. And when the moment of truth arrived in Montréal, the thought of stuttering while reading never for a moment entered my head during those 50 minutes as I had to concentrate on presenting a measured amount of painful emotion in almost every paragraph of my story, until I finally reached the point where I described the non stop tears of consolation when I realized my stuttering was over... completely over.
After August 31 2024, I did stutter a little bit, but it was pretty minimal. And I still do the odd time. Although it’s less and less with the passing of time. Yet it is unlikely to go back to zero as it did for 50 years, as it is now more important to me that I do what I can to help than it is to completely forget about the whole subject again. For the same reason, I am not upset about feeling embarrassed when I stutter. I can still count comfortably on one hand the number of times this has happened since I met Eeva: three. That, however, never ever ever ever ever ever ever happened even once in the intervening 51 years before I met Eeva.
Unexpected Consequences
It didn’t happen right away—but the realization on August 31 2024 that re-feeling these painful ancient feelings from half a century and more ago caused me to unknowingly feel new and totally unnecessary feelings of ‘I hate myself’—over time shook me to my core. I never expected to experience that consequence. As a layman I had always thought that one of the assumptions of psychiatry, if not its central assumption, is: "We get into trouble because of feelings we cannot feel". And so when I set out on a path to re-feel those ancient awful feelings again, I assumed there would be no problem in re-feeling them. Was I ever wrong! It turns out there were real consequences in re-feeling those ancient feelings. For example, 3 months later on February 9 2025, on the day of the Let’s Talk Event which Eeva asked me to participate in, I still had not completely recovered from heading down that path.
Meaning of saying “I was 99.99% better”
Arriving at the conclusion I was 99.99% better was not a mathematical calculation. Rather it was an artistic attempt at describing where I had been for 50 years before I met Eeva. It meant I did not stutter during that time. It also meant stuttering had no emotional impact on me at all. And yes I was never 100% better because of the permanent scars left within me from the experience.
Conclusion
Now the best way to describe how much I have stuttered since I met Eeva is to describe a conversation I had with Anne.
On February 9 2025, 3 months to the day after the conference in Montréal, on the day of the Canadian Stuttering Association Let’s Talk event where I was to be asked questions, I again asked Anne, my wife of 52 years whether she had ever heard me stutter. This question has come up several times over the past couple of years.
Today once again Anne said she still hasn’t heard me stutter. Not even once. She said she has heard me hesitate. And then she said something which I thought was new. She said my hesitation was no different than the hesitation she has heard other people make who are not persons who stutter. And so whatever the periodic reduction there has been from my being 99.99% better, it has to be seen in that context. It’s obviously not very much—even though at the worst of times it felt a lot worse than it really was.
Don McLean was born and raised in Hamilton Ontario. He graduated from the University of Toronto Law School in 1963. He was called to the Bar in Ontario in 1965. He received a Masters of Arts from the University of Guelph in Philosophy in 1969. He spent 5 years in the Jesuit seminary, following which he returned to his home town to practice law. He was an Assistant Crown Attorney prosecuting criminal cases in the courts for 2 decades, following which he entered private practice, during which virtually all of his time was taken up defending the Canadian Jesuit Fathers, an institution of impeccable honesty, decency and empathy for the misfortune of others, regarding civil claims for sexual assault, arising out of the gross behaviour of several of their members of which they were unaware. He retired at the end of 2007 and has been living in Burlington with his wife Anne for the last 18 years.
Don's Workshop speech in Montréal as recorded and presented in a CSA Let's Talk Event: Let's Talk: Self Love and Stuttering – What’s the Connection? Registration for this recording is free.
Don McLean has authored the following articles which provide more insight and also include a downloadable pdf 'Stuttering Exercises'. Ideally, read these in the order presented below and enjoy:
- For You, For Each of You
- Reflections on 24 Hours of Craziness, Dedicated to Tall and Beautiful Catherine from Pasadena
- Stuttering Exercises
- My Name... My Name... My Name is Don McLean
- The Day I was Finally Heard: 52 years Later
- For You, For Each of You
- A Magic Moment
- When My Stuttering went from Way Out of Control to almost Nil