Acceptance? Bangalore 27-Dec-2009

Today, 27-Dec-2009, we had the stammering SHG meeting of Bangalore. During the course of the meeting, all of us spoke about a subject and one of the participants spoke about ‘Landmark education’ and accepting ourselves as we were. He told the people attending the landmark forum got breakthroughs for the problems of the life like stammering, diabetes etc. He mentioned about diabetes as I was also diabetic.

After that when my turn came, I told that there was no known cure for stammering and that we should learn to live with stammering and accept ourselves as stammerers. After that it was the turn of one of the new attendees and he told, he became disappointed when he heard my words and he told there was a cure and we should be very hopeful of a cure. I spoke about the real meaning of acceptance as removing the shame from our mind and working on our communication skill. I am not sure whether he was convinced.

Later when I reached home, I just thought about the two problems of my life, namely diabetes and stammering and suddenly I could see some similarities between the two. There is no known cure for both of them. If you are diabetic, you will have to accept yourself as diabetic and then move on in life by following diet control, so that diabetes doesn’t affect your life. If a diabetic did not accept his diabetes and tried to hide it, it would be catastrophic as he would take food with sugar and it would aggravate the problem. If he accepted himself as a diabetic, he would avoid food with sugar and his diabetes would be under control and he would lead a normal life.

Similarly if somebody is a stammerer, he should accept himself as a stammerer and shouldn’t try to hide it. At the same time he should do the things necessary for controlling it, like speaking slowly, prolongation or bouncing, whatever is suitable for him. In this way it will be possible for him to lead a normal life where the stammering doesn’t affect him. If he is trying to hide it by struggling to speak fluently, there would be a lot of stress and the severity of stammering will go up thereby affecting his communication.

I hope I could have used this parallel between stammering and diabetes in the meeting and convinced the person who was a bit apprehensive about the idea of acceptance.