Public Speaking with a Stutter: Difference Between Fear and Shame

Lived Experience

Nov 26

“We can’t treat shame with traditional methods of dealing with fear.”

As a person who stutters, I have a unique relationship with public speaking. I wanted to make an advice blog about public speaking for people who stutter, but first I need to address a misunderstanding between fear and shame.

People generally assume that I must have stage fright times 10. Stage fright is common, so perhaps for many, it’s the closest thing they can imagine to being afraid to speak. In fact, a major non-profit recently released an awareness video comparing the two – the feeling of all eyes being on you, for example, is relevant to both. But there’s a fundamental difference between the traditional stage fright and stuttering: stage fright often invokes fear. Stuttering in front of people often invokes shame.

As I wrote in a poem in high school, “I don’t have stage fright; I have shame.”

Fear and shame certainly have some overlap. I can see why they get confused. Both trigger anxiety and avoidance. They can also co-exist. Shame can create fear, and fear can create shame. We sometime use the language of one to describe the other. “I’m scared to stutter in front of people,” I may say to someone, instead of describing the complexity of shame. [1]

They intersect, but the difference is essential to understand. It’s important to understand the way shame intersects in the lives of people who stutter.

Fear, after all, is something that can inform our actions without informing who we are. Someone being afraid of public speaking is simply someone who is afraid of public speaking. Fear is a reaction, and it’s a feeling we cannot necessarily control. Someone who is actually fearless would be someone incapable of making informed decisions. If I am cooking and almost touch a hot stove, I have a flash of fear. Fear can keep you safe. It can also become a problem, but the point is that fear is a feeling to be managed.

Shame, however, is not just a momentary feeling as a reaction. Shame teaches us to be smaller, be quieter. Shame tells us who we ARE, and who we are is not good. Shame is often confused with guilt, which Brené Brown has popularized the difference very concisely: Shame is a focus on self, guilt is a focus on behavior. Shame is “I am bad.” Guilt is “I did something bad.” [2]

This is why it’s so important to get to the root of the difference between fear and shame, too. You can’t treat shame with traditional methods of dealing with fear. More stuttering researchers have been identifying a trend with using trauma-informed methods with people who stutter. Complex trauma, death by a thousand cuts, can come in the form of messages of shame about the way you speak over, and over, and over, and over.

When it Comes to Stuttering

20 years ago, Marty Jezer, a person who stutters, wrote an article for ISAD’s annual online conference on the topic of shame and stuttering. Introducing shame, the essay reads, “Shame! We who stutter may be born with an organic or genetic predisposition to speak disfluently, but we are not born feeling ashamed of our stuttering. Shame has to be learned, and can therefore also be unlearned.” Marty describes learning it from well-meaning parents, who spoke about his speech in hushed voices. And it went past simply knowing others see your stuttering voice as something awful. He shares, “I accepted their definition of stuttering as something I should be ashamed of.” [3]

Being told “Everyone has stage fright! It’s OK!” enraged me because how dare someone think they know my experiences as a person who stutters. “You don’t get it” was my mantra in my teens and early 20s. And it wasn’t necessarily because someone didn’t understand. Perhaps they did. But I saw stuttering as so uniquely painful, such a burden into communication, that it was impossible for me to relate to someone else. The messages from shame block out the ability to see reason. I was so envious of those who ‘simply’ felt stage fright, not realizing that we were having two very different conversations.

In fact, knowing that I didn’t have traditional stage fright made me that much more resentful. All of these people terrified to speak on a stage, and here I was dreaming of it. But I could not (I thought). Stuttering does not belong on a stage (I thought). How uniquely evil was it that I, of all people, had a stutter? Why couldn’t someone with stage fright have my stutter instead?

The Never Ending Flames

People who are afraid of something may need some reassurances that things will be OK, that there is not as much to be afraid of. They can manage the feeling of fear and do a thing anyway. While that may not address phobia-level fears, it is how fear often works.

For me, shame did manifest with a lot of fears. I was afraid that people would perceive me as dumb, that they would mock me. But there was an underlying message left unaddressed. When people tried to address my fears, my underlying shame was left undealt with. And to be sure, I’m glad that my fears were addressed. That’s a necessary step.

But as I write all of this, I realize now why I never seemed able to apply the knowledge that it was safe to stutter in one situation onto others. I always wondered why my growth was so damn slow. Others would help put in so much work to make it OK for me to stutter in a poetry slam – and then I was more comfortable with poetry slams… but no other times.

Talking about stuttering as a fear of speaking without addressing shame was putting out the fires without turning the stove off. Wanting to be who I was felt impossible because the fires seemed never ending. Once I realized I was not less worthy due to stuttering, that there was nothing inherently bad about the way I spoke, that the way I spoke was quite capable of great communication, the stove was turned off. Fires still existed as leftovers, but as I dealt with those, other fires could die out too.

Talking about stuttering as a fear of speaking without addressing shame was putting out the fires without turning the stove off… the fires seemed never ending.

Turning off the stove meant I could focus on other things. Dealing with fear after fear used to feel endless – I could not see the finish line. I couldn’t even imagine the finish line. Being comfortable with the way I spoke with a stutter wasn’t even a pipe dream because I had never even considered it.

The Difference of Dealing with Shame

Nowadays, I can dream. In my late 20s/early 30s, I felt like an 18-year old on the brink of a whole new world. For the first time since early childhood, my world felt expansive. My answer to the question, “What would you do if you could not fail?” always felt humiliating to share, because my answer was public speaking. How embarrassing to dream of something that I saw as impossible to due something I could not control. And then a year or two ago, my mental health therapist asked me about my pie in the sky dream. When I said being an author and public speaker, they were confused. “That doesn’t seem very pie in the sky to me. That seems entirely possible, and you’re already doing some of the steps to get there.”

So now, in my 30s, I am learning how to go in the directions of my dreams. It’s harder work than I assumed once upon a time, and I am aware that societal stigma is not a non-issue. But whereas before, when societal stigma confirmed my shame, I now see it as a challenge to overcome. The same stigma made me throw up my hands and admit defeat (Of course it did - I ‘knew’ it was true!) is now infuriating because I know it is wrong.

I am still honing my craft. When I threw expecting fluency out the window, I realized how much work I could do to improve my speaking skills. None required fluency, but I had never bothered to improve other skills since it felt hopeless anyway. As much as I’ve grown, I still make mistakes that are somewhat embarrassing, but they are all areas I can work on. After all, communication is a skill. Public speaking is a skill. Stuttering vs fluency, however, is a neurological difference influenced by genetics. Some people assume accepting the fact that you stutter means you won’t work on your communication skills. Whereas accepting that my stutter was not something that made me a bad speaker has made it possible for me to improve my speaking skills.

Occasionally before speaking, I feel a flash of stage fright. It morphs quickly into excitement. I can use fear in ways I was never able to use shame. Shame was misery and made me feel dead inside. Healthy amounts of fear make me feel alive.