A client told Ladan Khoshbin, “I want to be able to find friends.” The request had little to do with speaking smoothly—and it helped show why stuttering therapy may need to focus on more than fluency.
At Binghamton University in New York, Khoshbin and professor Rodney Gabel studied personal stories from people who stutter. Their findings challenge a long-standing medical approach that treats breaks in speech as symptoms to eliminate. Stuttering is typically lifelong, the researchers note, so they argue that care should help people live effectively with it: communicate on their own terms, pursue their goals and feel connected to others.
The study, published in the Journal of Fluency Disorders, examined 30 personal narratives presented at American Speech-Language-Hearing Association panels between 1996 and 2019. The stories came from the Voices Past and Present collection, which gathers recovery-focused accounts by speech-language pathologists who stutter. The collection includes material shared at professional forums dating back to 1957.
Khoshbin, a licensed speech-language pathologist from Iran, moved to Binghamton in 2023 to work with Gabel, who is both a leading researcher in the field and a person who stutters. She led the review, using narrative inquiry and thematic analysis to trace how people described their lives over time: their turning points, their difficult stretches and their efforts to support acceptance. Gabel had used the narratives for years to help students understand what stuttering can feel like from the inside.
The researchers identified six themes: the emotional work of acceptance; claiming a voice through disclosure and voluntary stuttering; the lifelong, nonlinear path of living with stuttering; challenging the idea that fluency is the main measure of success; the value of relationships; and therapy as a shared process of telling and understanding stories.
For Gabel, the word “recovery” can set the wrong goal if it suggests that stuttering must disappear. “Is there actually anything wrong with stuttering? There isn't. It's just a different way of talking,” he said. He described effective living through questions about whether a person can reach goals, find happiness, get what they need and communicate as they choose.
Khoshbin said her earlier clinical work had focused on eliminating stuttering, but clients showed her that this did not always match what they wanted. One person wanted to find friends. Another said that concentrating on speech techniques took away from the pleasure of conversation. Those experiences point to a broader purpose for therapy: helping people take part in daily life, build relationships and speak with greater freedom, whether or not their speech is fluent.
The findings do not ask clinicians to ignore speech or individual goals. They ask them to listen closely before deciding what progress should look like. By treating clients’ own stories as evidence, Gabel and Khoshbin hope therapy can make room for changing needs, personal choice and acceptance—rather than measuring success only by smoother speech.