talkmagic.co.uk

Hi. I've been an enthusiast for quite some time now, read A LOT on the subject (actual books from "real" magicians bought, don't worry), but I can't really put it to test because I have a moderate-to-severe stutter.

I've been perfecting the "motions" so I can at least feel confident enough that I'll perform the acts right, but, as you know, in close-up magic, patter is (pretty much) everything.

Also, I'm mainly interested in Mentalism and NLP, and unflappable confidence, along with total control of your voice and speech, are essential to it — and stuttering makes it impossible for me to have/fake any.

But, anyway. I started a serious speech treatment recently, finally with an expert on the subject, and we've established that years and years of looking for alternate words and trying to phrase sentences in a way that would avoid stuttering have messed with my thought processing. Now I'm having a hard time accessing the words I need. Like when you have words in the tip of your tongue. But with me it's pretty much constant.

So the only way to "correct" this is by exercising the accessing of words, a lot. I'm doing all sorts of lists, like "things in the bathroom that start with P". Pretty fun stuff, but I just keep struggling with it, and have a nagging suspicion that I might just be doing what I always did, and not be actually getting better at it — or might be even getting worse.

In short, I don't feel like I'm really "optimizing" my thought process regarding that task. But then it dawned on me: perhaps magic could help?

So I wanted to ask: are there any mental techniques that you know of that you think might help me in this task? Like that memory technique where you assign a thing to every object in a room, so it will be easier to remember? (I know it has a specific name but, well, it's not coming to me...)

And, further, I would like to discuss a couple NLP-related ideas I had that I think could help me optimize my therapy, and I would like to discuss it with people who know more about it first, but I think this post is way too long already.

So, if anyone has any ideas, I'd love to hear about it.

Thanks.

Derren Brown's Trick of the Mind book has a section devoted to the process of memorising by list and the the routine of associating items with a walk through a known place (your house!) works well for many people.

Very often, there's no need for a lot of patter, in fact jabbering performers can be a right turn off, all mouth and little action! Keep any patter required to the absolute minimum, use it sparingly and slowly - you've probably seen The Illusionist where Ed Norton's character speaks with assurance but only as much as is required during performance thus presenting a very enigmatic persona, let the magic tell the story as much as possible.

I'm sure our members will be along with other ideas so give them all a whirl and see what works for you. Oh yes, welcome (back) to TM !

Its just a sugestion but why not build your stutter into the character your playing when you do magic?
This may well help you in confidence, and subsequently may actually reduce the severity of the stutter during the act.

you wouldnt be the only one to do this. Derrens tick is a good example.
And im one of a long line of chubby performers who activly uses my body shape in order to create a situation on stage.

Couple of things:

a) Have you ver considered hypnotherapy as a possible course of action to help stop the stuttering?

b) With regard to performing, the previous posters may be right. It could be a powerful weapon is helping to disarm your audience, get them on your side, and then totally blow them away. I hope that doesn't sound patronising, but it could be a part of your character that would make you quite a unique performer. This may sound awful, but rather than try to cure the stutter completely, and then become just another run-of-the-mill smooth magician, I would be thinking of getting the stutter "under control" but still keep an element of it to make you stand out from the crowd. Easy for me to say I know, but kind of stop thinking of the stutter as something to be "cured" and start thinking of it as something that defines who you are. Embrace the stutter, find peace with it, and you may be surprised how much easier it becomes when you're not worrying about it.

Hope that makes sense and doesn't sound like a load of patronising garbage!

I would say firstly - relax. It sounds like you're an intelligent and thoughtful person from your few paragraphs. One of my friends is in his 50s, and he has a very severe stutter. However, i actually taught him a simple k**-card effect and then just told him, a little harshly, to get on with it. His patter/script would have to be his own. So after cussing me for several minutes, he went off and did it. He's even performed it down a pub a few times to strangers no less. He stutters a little, but he doesn't care.

Neither did the people who were entertained by it.

A memory/pegging system, as Mandrake stated in Derren Brown's book would be both useful, and...well...useful. For both you personally, and for magic and mentalism. Its less than ten pounds too.

I would also say do not give up on the list idea. Doubting yourself, and reinforcing to yourself that you cannot do something, will make things harder or near impossible. Im sure its utterly frustrating though, however it is for the greater good - you. So I'm going to have to insist you carry on. Or we shall all tell Derren on you. And no one wants to upset that mind-fiddling merchant.

I remember a programme with Paul McKenna, he was helping a guy with a very severe stutter indeed. A mixture of hypnotherapy and a couple of other methods i believe. He greatly improved and almost "dared" himself to continuously improve. Which i think you'll agree with me now, that you will too.

Good luck.

First, thanks for the responses.

@Mandrake:

Derren Brown's Trick of the Mind book has a section devoted to the process of memorising by list and the the routine of associating items with a walk through a known place (your house!) works well for many people.

I think I remember this as the Memory Room I spoke about earlier, but I'm going to read it again and think of how can I put it to better use.

And I completely agree with your point on patter. It's just that, well, when you lack confidence, you often don't really lead the acts very competently. For example, smartasses will turn over their cards and deliberately go against your instructions (to catch the secret or just to embarrass you) unless you give them something to fill their heads with. So I think patter is often a necessary crutch. I think it would certainly be, on my case.

@daleshrimpton:

Its just a sugestion but why not build your stutter into the character your playing when you do magic? This may well help you in confidence, and subsequently may actually reduce the severity of the stutter during the act.

This is an important point regarding mindset, but the reality of the stutter is that it's mostly beyond any conscious control. Also, my experience is that, when people know you're doing magic, they become suspicious, and often you can't proceed to the next step without saying something first ("take a card, any card"), and when they see you "acting weird" because you're actually trying to get the words out, they become more cynical, resistant, because it looks like you're up to something.

I don't know if I made myself clear, but the thing is that, in real life, people don't think stuttering is "charming" and "fun". They are very irked by it, and it changes their whole demeanor, and I feel it increases their resistance to the act. And well, stutterers pick up on that very easily.

you wouldnt be the only one to do this. Derrens tick is a good example.

Derren has ticks? I'm afraid I never noticed. He's always seemed... *odd*, but I never caught anything specific like that about him.

@themagicwand:

Have you ver considered hypnotherapy as a possible course of action to help stop the stuttering?

I don't think speech therapists use hypnosis in their treatments (at least I never heard of it), but I sought psychological therapy from 3 different shrinks that did. The last one was even an NLP practitioner, with a Ericksonian approach to hypnosis. I was very excited. Nothing really worked.

To be honest, I never even "felt" hypnotized, though I don't know if I even really should feel any different (specially with the Ericksonian approach). The most I did feel was relaxed.

Regarding your point of embracing the stutter and using it to my advantage, I actually already gave a lot of thought about it. It's something I've tried to do before, in my personal life.

Coming to terms with stuttering is actually a part of every modern stuttering therapy. Stuttering is very much like a chinese finger trap: The more you avoid it, fight it, and worry about it, the more you stutter. If you can embrace it, or not be terribly bothered by it, it will eventually affect you less (even if, for the external world, you're still stuttering just as much).

There is an approach aimed at helping people accept their stuttering while also gaining control over it, called "voluntary stuttering". The idea is that you deliberately "fake" your stuttering when talking to people, and that should both desensitize you to their reactions while helping you notice the transition from fake to real stuttering (happens often), so you can become more aware of the process, and that should also give you more tools to deal with it.

I still haven't tried it, and still haven't developed enough control over my speech to put your suggestion in practice, but incorporating a controlled stutter into the act is certainly an option I look forward to try.

@Duplicity:

I'm happy for your friend. Older people (no offense intended) usually have a more positive approach to their stutter, and I think that influenced his attitude when performing the act, and consequently his reception by the people in the pub. Research suggests that even just maintaining eye-contact when you stutter makes people more comfortable, even if the stutterer himself is not comfortable doing it (looking away is usually the first thing stutterers do).

The friends and family I have performed to so far were also amused by the effects, but I could tell they were often distraught in the process, and that still bothers me. It feels like you're doing a bad job. But I agree with the rest of your post, and yes, I'm actively committed to improve this time.

And man, sometimes I wish I had access to the seemingly miraculous abilities of people like Derren, McKenna and Erickson. I can't shake the feeling that there's a much more efficient way to do what I'm doing, and I'm just not seeing it. Oh, which reminds me of the other thing I wanted to discuss with people who really know their stuff.

This post is already long enough, so, for clarity, I'm gonna go over it in a different post. I hope this is not frowned upon.

The thing about stuttering is: no one really knows what it is. What comes to mind when we think of stuttering — the repetitions, hesitations, ticks, etc — are actually our attempts to overcome the "blocks", which are thought to be the actual underlying phenomenon.

No one knows what the "blocks" actually are, and since stuttering is most often developed during childhood, later, when most people start to pay attention to it, the blocks are already inseparable from their physical, external manifestations. Thus, both cause and consequence are then interpreted as one.

But what are the blocks like, to the stutterer? Simply put, when you are blocked, you just can't say what you want to. You know the word, you are "ready" to say it, but it just won't come out. Your mind/body just won't act in the way it always does when it's speaking.

But, in a conversation, or when reading out loud, you can't really have that. There is a flow that is characteristic of the act of speaking. If I start a sentence now, become totally silent, and only finish it 2 minutes later, then what the hell just happened. That's not what we take for communication.

So, in an attempt to maintain the flow, we start trying really hard to get the sounds out. Every person develops their own "techniques", and that's what stuttering looks like to the observer.

Eventually, though, the very things we started doing to help us get the words out are the very things that end up getting in the way, later. A few years of speaking the wrong way, and that's how your brain thinks speaking really is.

But anyway, enough with the boring theory. My idea was regarding the blocks.

One of the problems is that the blocks are seemingly random. Even with MRI, no one has yet pinned down something that happens and is then followed by a block, to even begin to examine correlation/causation.

The most important problem, though, is that no known technique to overcome blocks will work every time. Sometimes we will try all of them, and the block will persist. Others, we will try the first one that comes to mind, or barely give it any notice, and it will disappear. If I could just snap my fingers to make a block disappear, I wouldn't mind having 10000 blocks a day and being known as the dude-who-snaps-his-fingers-nonstop. (actually, I would, but bear with me here...)

One of the things we do in speech therapy is to fight the urges to use the "secondary traits" of stuttering; the stuff we always did to overcome the blocks. The block will eventually "go away" on its own, and we won't be reinforcing things that do nothing to help anyway, and only makes us look stupid (we just don't always do that because we can't wait who knows how long when we're talking or reading to an audience).

Also, we're instructed to pay attention to what is going on in our bodies, when we block, in order to gather information and to better know how to deal with it.

One day, when I was being quiet, "waiting" for the block to go away, I realized how similar it was to meditating. You can't keep thinking about the block, or else it will never "pass". You can't keep trying to say the words you're blocking on, either mentally or sub-vocally, because that's also focusing on the problem. And you're better off not thinking about the wors entirely. So, ideally, whenever you're confronted with a block, you should just stop, relax, clear your mind and focus on what's going on in your body.

I have been trying this on myself, and I've began to notice that I experience a particular sensation, and every time I try to speak after that sensation, the words comes out as if I had never blocked. I can only describe that feeling as the block being "dissolved". It also appears to have a cumulative effect, as doing it constantly improves my speech overall, when I'm able to do it successfully.

So, one day it all hit me: what if I could anchor that sensation of the block dissolving, so I could trigger it with the "snap of a finger"?

So far, the only conditioning approach to the improvement of stuttering have been to repeat what you just said without stuttering (when you're finally able to do it), as to teach your brain that "this is the right way". Hopefully, with enough repetition, it will start choosing that way, instead.

I find that a less-than-ideal approach because it's based on something that happened *after* the block (and never seemed to work for me). This sensation I'm talking about is the only thing I know of that seems to be directly related to the block, and happens *before* the actual stutter, as it's directly connected to the block that causes it, and not the consequences.

So, what do you guys think? If you think it's possible to anchor that sensation, and then have it as a resource that I can trigger at will, how would you go about doing it?

What would Derren Brown do?

For example, smartasses will turn over their cards and deliberately go against your instructions (to catch the secret or just to embarrass you)

That happens to all of us, if you engage them in too much patter they'll assume you're arguing and will get even more annoying. Best to try and avoid getting in that situation in the first place and there are several threads here on how to deal with hecklers, how to select specs and allied matters. I've seen one close-up worker who, when confronted by a smartarse, just smiled benignly at the person, tapped the side of his nose in a conspiratorial manner, winked and then changed focus to another spectator. It wasn't confrontational and it gave a bit of breathing space!

You're right to be concerned about dealing with patter and your stutter but I think the general trend of the replies here is to please don't worry too much, specs only expect the highly paid mega magicians to be 100% perfect so there's a bit of leeway for the rest of us. I still reckon minimum patter is best, it's like radio or a book where all the sets, characters and scenery are perfect because they are formed in the mind of the audience. Let the magic speak for itself.

I must confess i know little to nothing about why people stutter. I do however, take my hat off to you resplence, for forcing ahead with something that requires a flow of speech, usually rehearsed, to work. A lesser individual would probably have given up at the first hurdle.

Whilst reading this thread i was reminded of a trick David Blaine did on a chap who i think was deaf. Whatever he was, he couldnt communicate in a normal fashion. Blaine did the trick in complete silence and it worked a treat. Of course if deaf he be then patter wouldnt have worked anyway, but the point is he wasnt making silly gestures or asking this chap's friend to translate. Not saying this would work for everything, of course it wouldnt, but you may find it heartening to watch. It also got me thinking just how much i myself rely on patter for misdirection. I wish you the best of luck with this, i remember being quite startled at how Gareth Gates managed to get control of his stutter when i saw him being interviewed on GMTV one day. It was really something.

As for what Derren would do, he himself admits a lot of NLP is rubbish. I've read some books on it, and i think there's some interesting ideas there, if it works for you then great. I think sometimes people claim he uses it when really its just a magic trick.