Betweeen stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.

 Victor Frankl

This sentence by Frankl  is so ‘Alexanderian’ that it could have been taken out of F.M. Alexander’s own writings.

This is because F.M. Alexander’s technique, is, in Alexander’s own words  “a technique for changing human reactions”. In his fourth and last book he explains this in some detail with various examples, including stuttering.

Through 60 years of practical experience he discovered that if we succeed in,

1. inhibiting (stopping) many of our habitual responses to stimuli and

2. giving a different direction to these responses (reactions within the nervous system), we can change many things that normally happen automatically…. including the way we speak.

Through Alexander’s  Technique and particularly my Re-orientation Technique, (which I developed from F.M. Alexander’s work especially for changing and improving the human voice), stutterers can discover step by step how to help themselves quite fundamentally.

Stutterers can use these techniques,

a.) to become  more aware of what really happens when they start speaking and stuttering, and in addition,

b.) they can learn how to slowly throw out interfering reactions that may tighten the chest, neck, lips, tongue and jaw and that cause them to hold their breathing so that it stays  shallow and restricted. They can learn to stop using the kind of excessive force,  strain and effort that normally activates the “stutter-reflexes”.

My Re-orientation Technique works with all three areas of speech:

1. breathing, 2. phonation (voice production), and 3. articulation (movement of the throat, palate, tongue, and lips).

It changes the nervous control and the coordination of these responses. Whatever the cause of the stuttering (developmental, neurogenic or psychogenic), it often partially or even entirely disappears in the process of re-orientation. I would like to emphasise however, that my Re-orientation Technique and the Alexander Technique are not treatments for stuttering, but offer what Alexander often called “re-coordination on a general basis”.

The great neuroscientist and Nobel Prize winner Sir Charles Sherrington, who coined the term “synapse”, endorsed F.M. Alexander’s work in the field of inhibition and re-coordination.