Stuttering in a 2-year-old who already could speak well
How to search and how to solve the conflict once found?
My son turned two years old at the end of November. He could already speak well for his age, surprising us almost daily with newly picked up words and already forming sentences; so well that almost everyone praised him for it.
In the first week of January, I noticed that he started repeating words meaninglessly and stumbling when pronouncing them. It got worse and worse every day, and after about three to four weeks, he was consistently stuttering when he said something on almost every word.
I have known GHK for almost ten years, and it still took me a while to get the hang of it. My head played down the situation à la: “The little one thinks faster than he can speak …” and admonished him several times a day to speak slowly after all. When I realized clearly at one moment that something was indeed wrong, my detective work began immediately:
Stuttering in the larynx is the epi-crisis in the healing phase; the spasming muscles are affected. The conflict is scare-fright.
I now rewind. I first thought about New Year’s Eve. Dad had gotten some kid-friendly firecrackers, sparklers, and flares, but even that was too much for our son. After all, Dad tried somewhat doggedly to convince him, so he cried and wanted to go inside. But when I thought about it further, it couldn’t have been this situation – I was around the whole time, he could hide with me, and when he wanted to go in, we went too. Even if he had been frightened, the situation was not dramatic for him and certainly not isolating …
That’s when it hit me! Sometime during Christmas week, I gave my son his glass teat bottle filled with strawberry milk in the kitchen. He walked with it across the tiled hallway toward the living room. And that’s when the bottle fell out of his hand and shattered on the floor.
I immediately ran over and told him to move aside and stop there because now the whole hallway was full of strawberry milk and broken pieces. Just a few seconds after the accident, Dad burst out of the bedroom and immediately started yelling. He had been asleep, was in a bad mood, and had always predicted anyway that the thing with the glass bottles would eventually go wrong. The little boy stood in the doorway between the living room and the hallway and cried bitterly in response to the yelling dad. I think he understood perfectly well that it was “his fault.”
He desperately wanted to find comfort with me, but I also had to energetically clarify that he should stay in the living room since there was still the pool and the broken pieces between us. Instead of consoling him, Dad climbed over it and simply walked past him and ignored him. So, the little one stood there, utterly distraught, until I had finished mopping up, and he continued to cry in my arms for a long time afterward until he finally calmed down.
When all this came back to me, I also remembered how afterward, he kept telling all kinds of people about the strawberry milk that had made “Noise.”
That evening, after I recognized this situation as the cause, I asked him during our evening cuddle if he could remember it. His reaction immediately showed me how vivid the memory still was. I repeated a few times that it wasn’t bad at all and that dad had only scolded him for being scared. That no one was mad, etc., and suggested that we would just laugh about it together if something like that happened again. The just two-year-old surprised me with the fact that he then, for the first time (at least that I had observed), really turned inside himself, obviously played through the whole thing in his mind, and suddenly resounded out loud from his thinking. Now he could laugh about it!
Stuttering subsided in little steps and was completely gone after about four to five days. Simply unbelievable!
The track was probably the dad, who had gone back to work in the first week of January. So, the child came partially to the solution. In the evening, however, they saw each other. Not to think what this action would have entailed for a rat tail, even if it seems harmless.
My little brother has been stuttering since kindergarten, so I know all the pseudo-therapies he has had to endure, none of which have helped. Today, as a grown man, he has it mostly relatively well under control, but it is not gone, and the stuttering has affected his life to a great extent.
Thank you, Dr. Hamer
Note by Helmut Pilhar
The event experienced in conflict is repressed into the subconscious to make it liveable. Nevertheless, this conflict remains unresolved; thus, the tracks remain existent. If one now – like the mother – knows what to look for, one can, by skillful questioning of the patient, bring his conflict of that time out of his subconscious into his consciousness.
If this event of that time is irrelevant today, this conflict will dissolve. If not, then one must show the patient another way out!
Clever mother, clever son!