Even though I knew the material cold, I never spoke up in class or raised my hand. I tried to avoid making eye contact with the rebbi, so that he wouldn’t call on me. With my friends, I felt more comfortable talking, but when I felt myself about to get stuck, I’d stop mid-sentence and say, “Oh, never mind.” Having what to say and not being able to get the thought out was always a painful experience.

Over the years, my parents sent me for all sorts of therapies, spending hundreds of dollars a week out of pocket to help me conquer my stutter. Each of these therapies helped, but only temporarily. During the months that I was actively in therapy, my speech was always better, but as soon as I skipped a session, my stuttering returned.

One therapist had me speak using a stopwatch, timing every syllable at precisely one second. As long as I focused on speaking a syllable a second, I was able to speak without stuttering. But because it was a very unnatural way to speak, I couldn’t keep it up after I finished that course of therapy.

Another therapy I tried involved controlling airflow. Before I started speaking, I had to let air out of my lungs. That wasn’t practical, either.

Thinking that it would help to tackle the emotional component, my parents sent me to a hypnotist, who charged $400 an hour. The hypnotist went deep into my subconscious, trying to purge me of my fear of speaking. For a day or two after each treatment, I was floating on a cloud, and my speech was clear and fluent. But I came off the cloud after a couple of days, and my stutter returned, like a headache coming back after the Tylenol wears off.

My parents also sent me to a social worker, who worked with me on overcoming the anxiety and fear that held me back from speaking. But a month after my last session, I was back to where I started.

Through all the ups and downs of the various therapies, I developed a number of strategies to compensate for my stutter. I would stand on line in the pizza shop, waiting to order a couple of slices, but then, when I realized that I wouldn’t be able to get out the word “pizza,” I’d quickly change my order and ask for something else. I would sit there with my friends, watching enviously as they ate their pizza, but secretly feeling relieved that I hadn’t stuttered.

Once, in yeshivah, my rebbi wanted me to give a chaburah. “I know the sugya well,” I told him, “but I can’t speak in public.”

“Everyone is afraid of public speaking at first,” he said. “The only way to get past the fear is to confront it head-on. The first time you speak, you’ll be terrified, but as time goes on, you’ll get used to it. Go for it!”

“But I have a speech impediment,” I protested feebly. “I can’t do it!”

“It’s not the speech problem that’s holding you back, it’s the fear,” he replied.

I hated myself for being a coward and letting my rebbi down. But still, I couldn’t bring myself to stand up in front of all the guys in my shiur and make a fool out of myself.

The beginning of every zeman in yeshivah was a time of tremendous anxiety for me. I was considered a metzuyan, but I was always afraid that my new chavrusa would realize that I stuttered. I was deeply ashamed of my stutter, knowing that it made people extremely uncomfortable and caused them to view me as strange.

The most common reaction people had when I started to stutter was to attempt to put me out of my discomfort by saying what they thought I wanted to say or finishing my sentence for me. But that wasn’t really putting me out of my discomfort — it was putting them out of their discomfort at having to hear me struggle to get my words out. Embarrassing as it was for me to get stuck, it was a lot more demeaning not to be allowed to say what I really wanted to express. And even if being put out of my verbal misery was a temporary relief, in the long run it just made me more self-conscious about my stutter. The more people “helped” me, the less confidence I had that anyone would be willing to hear me out.

At some point during my teenage years, my parents found out about an intensive stuttering treatment program in Norfolk, Virginia. The program boasted remarkable success rates, but my parents considered it a last resort, because it was so far away and because the program’s staff and participants were not Jewish.

Throughout my years in beis medrash, I dreamed of approaching the rosh yeshivah and posing my questions to him naturally, the way other bochurim did. Here and there, I’d come up with a really great kashe, one that I knew would impress the rosh yeshivah. But I always found an excuse not to ask him. I’d find a problem with the kashe, or I’d try to figure out the answer myself, or I’d tell myself that the rosh yeshivah was preoccupied. Sometimes, I’d get my chavrusa to go over to the rosh yeshivah and ask the question. I’d watch from the side as the rosh yeshivah’s eyes widened in delight over the kashe, and I’d feel cheated. It wasn’t fair that the rosh yeshivah assumed that my chavrusa had come up with the question!

One day, during my third year in the yeshivah, I finally mustered the courage to approach the rosh yeshivah after shiur and ask him a question. My kashe was a dazzler, but when I stood there in front of him, I froze, and I couldn’t utter a single syllable. Finally, after two minutes of silence, he said, “Come back to me when you remember your sh’ailah.” He was a busy man, and he had better things to do than wait around forever while I stood there like an imbecile, blinking furiously and turning red in the face.

The pain and humiliation of that encounter were so overwhelming that that night in my dorm, I sat down and wrote a song, expressing my feelings to Hashem and asking Him, as a son to a father, to help me. I don’t remember all the words of the song, but one line that echoes in my mind was: Father, Father, my dear Father, I know that all You do is for my good, but please do for me all that You could.

And Hashem sent me the yeshuah.

That day, I called my mother and asked her to sign me up for the next available session in Virginia.

“Until now I didn’t want to send you there because I didn’t think you were mature enough or motivated enough to do it,” she said. “But now I see that you’re ready.”

On the first day of the program, I sat in the program’s waiting room along with six other stutterers. We sat there waiting for a full half hour, in total silence. We all knew the reason we were sitting there, and yet no one spoke. Even among fellow stutterers, we preferred to avoid talking rather than risk the embarrassment of getting stuck on a word.

The director of the program explained that stuttering is a physical problem, not a psychological one. Most people, he said, are able to put together the various elements of speech instinctively, without having to consciously control their breathing and facial movements. But for stutterers, the complicated process known as speech doesn’t happen involuntarily. It has to be studied, understood, and practiced.

Hearing this was a tremendous relief for me. So I wasn’t just being a coward when I refused to stand up and give a chaburah. Asking me to get up and give a chaburah was like taking a person who couldn’t swim and throwing him into the ocean.

But now, there was hope. I could learn to take voluntary control of my speech processes — or targets, as they called them — and speak like a regular person.

The program was two weeks of intense work. Learning how to control my breathing and airflow while speaking. Learning how to begin to speak with what’s called a “gentle onset,” easing into the sounds instead of beginning with a “hard onset.” Learning how to “stretch” my syllables by holding a sound and feeling it at the front of my mouth before it emerged.

I had worked on some of these processes during therapy when I was younger, but I had never worked on them in an integrated way, as I was doing in Virginia. Also, at this point I was highly motivated to succeed. I realized that there were no magic pills, and that no therapy was going to do it for me. If fluency was my goal, I was going to have to put in the work, and keep working at it for the rest of my life.

My fellow program participants and I practiced each of the four speech targets for a few days, and then spent the rest of the time in the program putting them all together. At times, we were connected to biofeedback-like machines that lit up to indicate whether we had pronounced a syllable correctly.

Another thing the program taught us was to eliminate all fill-ins. Stutterers are so desperate not to stutter that they develop all sorts of habits and tics to “fill in” the spaces in which they can’t get the words out. I used to say “um” or “like” or “whatever” repeatedly, and my eyes would twitch or blink.

The trouble with fill-ins, they explained, is that it generates an additional problem: on top of the problem of stuttering, you now have a nasty habit to eliminate. Better to stutter your way through a sentence than to resort to a fill-in to avoid stuttering.

I left Norfolk with the tools to speak clearly — and the confidence, too. For the first time in my life, I was able to make a phone call without worrying that my voice would betray me and the person on the other end of the line would say, “Hello? Hello? Hello?” and then hang up before I could say a word.

Before Norfolk, I preferred to text, rather than call people on the phone. Now, I didn’t want to text anymore — I wanted to talk!

My stutter wasn’t cured. I still had to do exercises and practice on the phone with study partners from the program. But I knew that as long as I would implement the skills I had learned, I would be able to speak fluently, like a normal person. No one would ever know that I was making a conscious effort to control my airflow, start with gentle onsets, and stretch my syllables.

As a bochur, I was always afraid that girls would say no to me in shidduchim because of my stutter. But by the time I started shidduchim, I was confident enough about my speech that I was able to focus on the dating itself and not worry about whether I was going to have a stuttering fit. After we got engaged, I mentioned something to my kallah about my stutter, and she reacted with surprise. “I didn’t even realize that you stuttered,” she said.

Even after I got married, I still had to do my exercises. After we had our first baby, things were stressful, and I started having some trouble with my targets, so I called up my study partners and practiced with them on the phone until I got back on track.

When the time came to look for parnassah, I considered going into sales. My personality was well-suited to that field, but for a stutterer to become a salesperson is practically unheard of. Not only do you have to initiate conversations with total strangers and do tons of cold calls, you also have to make sure not to stutter!

Most stutterers would probably choose to work at a computer, where they could hide safely behind e-mail. Was I crazy to even think of going into sales?

“Go for it!” my wife encouraged me. “Your stutter is a non-issue in your life. It doesn’t have to hold you back from doing anything.”

With her cheering me on, I took the job, and I haven’t looked back since. I speak to new people every single day and try to get them to buy my products, but stuttering is not part of that picture.

I’m sure that different things work for different people, and I’m not here to promote any particular form of therapy. What I do want to say to all the stutterers out there is that there’s hope. With siyata d’Shmaya, stuttering can be successfully managed and does not have to interfere with a person’s life. And to all the non-stutterers out there, try to put yourself in the stutterer’s shoes, and just listen patiently while he fights his way to fluency.

(Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 611)