The crowd cheers enthusiastically as the band When We Are Wild starts playing a song prior to the 14 January broadcast of the show De Wereld Draait Door. But Hille Stellingwerf (27), the front man of the now-retired band, is mostly nervous. His stammering is not an issue when he sings; it is the interview with Matthijs van Nieuwkerk that bothers him.
The interview went well, but to some viewers he seemed quite confused. ‘He’s probably on drugs’, read a tweet about the performance. When he is finally allowed to play one minute of their song, there is no trace left of his stammering. ‘When you sing, you use your speech mechanism differently’, he says. ‘It’s more rhythmic and melodic and knowing the lyrics also really helps your confidence. Moreover, you’re on a stage, which boosts your ego’, Hille says.
Genetics
Hille and Sjoerd have been faced with stammering issues since childhood. It is genetic: their father stammers and so does their grandfather on their mother’s side. Five percent of children has speech development issues. For one percent, this leads to stammering. ‘This is related to environmental factors, for example whether people are understanding or if they bully you’, Sjoerd, RUG master’s student of social psychology, says.
‘In your head, you’re always thinking about stammering’, his brother Hille says. ‘You think: If I could speak effortlessly, I would be a great guy. I went to speech therapy when I was young, but it didn’t work. On the other hand, stammer therapy was extremely useful at first, but after two months, I was right back where I started. A lot of friends I met there experienced the same thing.’
Hille did not let things lie. ‘For three days straight, I started talking to people on the street asking them very simple questions. I recorded everything with a video camera around my neck. After a couple of conversations, I went home, analysed what I experienced and tried to improve things in the next round.’ Sjoerd copied his example: ‘It’s primarily about the social anxiety that surfaced due to stammering. It starts with creating self-awareness: Why do I stammer?’
Downward spiral
Approaching stammering as a social issue instead of a speech problem is something Hille was never taught during therapy. ‘It was mentioned, but never explored. It was mainly about physical aspects of speech: enunciation, posture, breathing.’
Sjoerd, the social psychology student, linked it to cognitive behavioural therapy. ‘Stammerers end up in a negative spiral without being aware of it. A negative self-image in turn results in negative expectations, which puts more pressure on you. This makes you stammer, which in turn confirms the negative self-image.’
Broca Brothers – Stuttering brothers with a mission from UKrantvideo on Vimeo.
Changing the negative self-image is most important, the brothers assert. However, most therapies focus primarily on speech techniques. ‘It is time that stammer therapies re-evaluate their own approach; there haven’t been many changes over the decades. We’re here to shake things up.’
Lay expert
By ‘we’, they mean Broca Brothers. Now that the two brothers are quite the chatterboxes, they have been helping other stammerers for over a year now. They have been doing so with videos, workshops and an online course. ‘Our strength lies in the fact that we’re lay experts and have gone through the entire process of getting rid of stammering ourselves. It really is all about knowing how to handle your negative self-image. Current stammer therapies meant a lot to the stammering community, but it’s time for the next step.’
Every now and then the stammering rears its head, but the brothers do not let it bother them anymore. ‘We’ve become 100 percent outgoing’, Sjoerd says. Hille nods: ‘Once, in the library, when trying to reserve a copy of a book, I started stammering again. I was glad it happened, to be honest. Why? Because it gave me something to work on. The main thing is that you’re working on it in a positive way and that you will not let anything keep you down.’
Facts:
Since 1998, there has been International Stammering Awareness Day on 22 October (last Saturday).
It is estimated that the Netherlands has about 170,000 stammerers.
Among them are a number of celebrities: former ice speed skater Erben Wennemars and musicians Miss Montreal and Frans Bauer.
Bruce Willis, Tiger Woods and Winston Churchill stuttered, too. Stuttering Help includes a long list of famous stammerers.
With Broca Brothers, Hille and Sjoerd Stellingwerf help stammerers deal with their issues.
Paul Broca is a French scientist after whom a specific area in the brain is named. When this ‘Broca’s area’ is damaged, a person can lose their speech. ‘It really isn’t related to stammering that much, but it sounded great combined with Brothers’, the brothers say.