Welcome to the Stammering Self-Empowerment Programme (SSEP)

A core belief that has guided our development of the online course is that the more you understand about the nature of stammering (stuttering)— the better you will be able to manage and control it.

Our online course therefore differs substantially from the traditional forms of speech therapy and psychotherapy that are routinely offered to people who stammer. Most notably, in addition to teaching ways to increase your fluency and to reduce your avoidance of feared situations, our online course also explains in detail what is currently known about how and why people start to stammer in the first place. So, as you work your way through the online course you will learn about the various factors that contribute to the onset and persistence of stammering; how it changes over time; and why it sometimes spontaneously goes into remission. The course also provides a broad overview of the most widely used traditional therapy approaches that therapists employ in their attempts to ameliorate it.

By providing you with a broad understanding of the nature of stammering and a clear overview of therapy options, our hope is that the online course will enable you determine for yourself exactly which therapeutic approaches are likely to be best suited to your own unique situation and circumstances.

In addition to teaching you about the nature of stammering, the online course also teaches two  fluency-inducing techniques: “Orchestral Speech” and “The Jump” that the SSEP has been developing and trialling over the past ten years.

These new techniques have been inspired by recent advances in psycholinguistic research. Their key advantage (compared to the more traditional fluency techniques) is that they feel (and sound) very natural, and once learned, they can be employed in everyday life situations with a minimum of effort. This means that, unlike many of the traditional fluency techniques, they do not slow you down or get in the way of your ability to focus on what you want to say.

Together, Orchestral Speech and The Jump should minimize the frequency with which blocks occur and minimize their duration when they do occur. Once learned, these techniques should provide you with a robust degree of confidence that, even if you find yourself blocking, the blocks will be short-lived, and you will still be able to quickly and efficiently get your messages across. As this confidence develops, the tendency to block will reduce and the severity of your secondary symptoms will decrease.

Just to clarify—this online course is indeed, genuinely, completely free. There are no hidden charges. The only thing we ask in return is that you complete the various questionnaires that accompany the course, in order to provide us with feedback of your progress. This is so that we can continue to improve the course for people in the future.

In recent years, an increasingly impressive body of evidence has emerged indicating that regular meditation and mindfulness practice can provide significant amelioration of the symptoms associated with a wide range of anxiety and stress-related disorders. This has prompted interest, in the stammering world, in the possibility that mindfulness training may also help people who stammer.

Our own experience of mindfulness practices suggests that such training can indeed help people who stammer in a number of ways, details of which can be found in the Mindfulness and Cognitive Therapies Module of our online course. We therefore wholeheartedly encourage people who stammer to undergo mindfulness training, and to develop their own regular mindfulness practice.

As an additional support, and to further deepen your mindfulness practice, for some years now, the SSEP has been hosting  online meditations and also a variety of residential mindfulness retreats. The retreats currently take place in the village of Etsaut, in the French Pyrenees, and are designed for a maximum of about 10 people. They are of varying lengths – between 3 days and 1 week and are intended for people who already have a basic knowledge and experience of mindfulness.

Click the button below details of upcoming mindfulness events.

It is in the nature of stammering that its symptoms can be relieved in the short-term by almost any form of therapy. As often than not, however, after an initial ‘honeymoon’ period, the initial gains that clients have made gradually disappear, ultimately leaving them little or no better off than before they started.

We believe that in order for therapy to be reliably effective in the long term, clients need to have a clear understanding of how and why the techniques they are asked to practice should work, and they need to know how they can be adapted to the various situations they will encounter in their everyday life. Furthermore, to be reliable, the techniques need to continue to work irrespective of whether or not clients have faith in them.

The only way of determining whether or not our onlinecourse (and other forms of therapy) adequately fulfil these needs, is by continuing to monitor clients’ progress over an extended period of time after whatever therapy they have undertaken has ended.  Unfortunately, to date, very few therapeutic programmes have ever done this. As a result there is very little reliable evidence to indicate which forms of clinical intervention for stammering are effective in the long term and which are not.

The continuing lack of reliable evidence of the long-term effectiveness of speech therapy interventions for stammering has contributed to the failure of health services worldwide to provide adequate funding for such therapy. Instead, other conditions are prioritised for which there is reliable evidence that therapy provides lasting benefits.

We want to help change this unsatisfactory state of affairs. But to do so, we need as many of you as possible to cooperate, by completing the various surveys and questionnaires that constitute our ongoing assessment of the effectiveness of the online course.

Thus, after you start our online course, we will send you questionnaires at 6 monthly intervals for up to 2 years. These questionnaires will enable you to provide feedback regarding which modules of the course you have worked your way through, and which (if any) fluency techniques you have adopted and are continuing to use. Also, at 6 monthly intervals, we will invite you complete a standardized (OASES) self-assessment of stuttering severity. This OASES assessment has been adopted by therapists and researchers worldwide and provides the best possible way of monitoring changes in individuals’ stuttering over time and comparing the effectiveness of different therapy approaches.

By cooperating with this research and responding to our questionnaires and assessments, you will help provide the data that is needed in order to ensure that, for future generations, effective therapy for stammerers becomes properly funded and available – both in the UK (through the NHS) as well as in other countries.