“The End of Stuttering”

“The End of Stuttering – Dave Lemelman’s approach”
Dr. Chen Yehezkely new book

“My gratitude goes, first, to Dave Lemelman, whose work as a personal trainer in helping people overcome stuttering in particular and self-sabotage in general, was the inspiration for writing this book in the first place. My conversations with him were almost all short and focused, always taking one of these two forms: either he would tell me of his practice and ask me to tell him whatever thought this evoked in me; or I would tell him about my thoughts, and asked him to tell me about the practices that they related to. To state the obvious, we were not always agreed. Yet I do not recall a single incident in which our onversations did not yield some inspiring insights regarding the connections between thought and practice in regards helping people overcome self-sabotage.

Lemelman was a theater director who realized the great potential of theatrical methods as therapeutic techniques for treating self-sabotage. He started experimenting with these techniques in the field of personal training in 2008, and has been doing so ever since. I dubbed his approach the-theater-workshop-approach-to personal-training.

He concurred. It consists in challenging his trainees to dare and try all sorts of behaviors that they usually flinch from. The prevalent justification to flinching is that “this is simply not me”. To which Lemelman responds: “exactly”.

Lemelman’s work is a close brother to psychodrama and drama therapy. I do not know wherein Lemelman’s innovation lies, or what his unique contribution is. Nor do I go into discussing these questions. Rather, the point of my book is to offer what I hope is a fresh discussion of the theoretical considerations at the background to the theater workshop approach and to the study of the root causes of dependence and selfsabotage, together with the ways to beating them”

“The End of Stuttering – Dave Lemelman’s approach” gratitude chapter.

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