Hi I'm Dave Scarbrough
From a person who stutters to a successful hypnotherapist.
I started my life as a child who stuttered many years ago. Eventually, I became a successful hypnotherapist, a job that requires a lot of talking.
What changed? What made the difference?
The stuttering started from a difficult childhood. I was born extremely premature at 6 months and then given up for adoption after spending about 3 months in the incubator at the hospital.
After being in foster care or an orphanage I was adopted at age 4. There was some alcoholism in my adoptive family however and then a divorce and following that I became hyperactive or ADHD in kindergarten and the early grades in elementary school. Hyperactivity and inattention were not well understood back in those days and I was considered a difficult student and I was always in trouble both at school and at home.
My adoptive mother and stepfather did not deal well with the hyperactivity either so I was punished a lot on a daily basics. This made me feel completely powerless. I felt like I was always wrong and I was not as good as everyone else and nothing I did could improve things and I did not know who could help me. In those days there were no school guidance counselors. The stuttering soon followed all of that and continued throughout my life. The hyperactivity soon went away but being ADD is still a problem with me, although I’m getting better with that also.
Speech therapy tended to help quite a lot after I mastered it although it tends to make someone sound a bit robotic. Speech therapy also tends to wear off after a period to time for most people who stutter who went through it. My thought is it wears off because it tends to make us sound a bit robotic when we speak and who wants to talk like a robot? They say we can eventually make ourselves not sound so robotic but I never got to that point. There were some lasting benefits to it however. Occasionally it helps me.
Hypnotherapy came later. Several years ago, I was showing a friend how I could lead them into a one on one meditation session and be completely fluent the whole time. They suggested that I do this in front of a group and I tried it. I then discovered I could lead group guided meditations and remain completely fluent the entire time. Hypnotherapy is somewhat similar to guided meditation so I trained in that soon afterwards and I noticed my fluency was improving while leading a hypnotherapy session And just recently I’ve been training in a specialized form of hypnotherapy called RTT which goes straight to the root of the problem. After training in RTT and having many RTT sessions done on me by other RTT therapists I discovered the root cause of the problem and I instantly began to feel better about myself and as that happened I developed more self confidence about speaking. As that continues to unfold my RTT sessions are getting better and better all the time and I am helping many people transform their lives and my life has meaning and purpose. I am very happy what RTT has done for me. I am feeling like I am taking control of my life and everything I do makes a positive difference for myself and others and that makes me feel completely happy that I am now able to do this.
