Sandra Merlo stutters since 4 years old, graduated in Speech-Language Pathology in 2000, got her master degree of science in Linguistics in 2006, works with fluency disorders and is the scientific director of Brazilian Fluency Institute.

Growing up with stuttering has definitively changed my life. As a child I collected several information about stuttering: 1) I learned stuttering could run in families, because there were three people who stuttered in my own family; 2) I learned stuttering was not easily controlled no matter how hard I tried; 3) I learned there were waxing and waning periods which seemed relatively independent of my will; 4) I developed several tricks for disguising and hiding my stuttering; 5) I believed stuttering was entirely psychological, because my fluency got worse when I talked with some people or in some situations; 6) I learned there could be a great silence around stuttering; 7) I did not know there was any kind of treatment for stuttering. Although I got these information, I did not understand why these things happened. Therefore when I was 15 years old, I decided to be a speech-language pathologist. I intended to understand the world I was living in. My personal experience with stuttering provided a good background to organize the scientific theory I had contact in my years of college and graduate school; because of my personal experience, scientific information quickly made sense. Then I have learned: 1) stuttering may run in families because of a possible hereditary factor; 2) stuttering is not so easily controlled because it is involuntary; 3) waxing and waning periods are intrinsic to the disorder; 4) the tricks I had developed by myself are common to virtually all people who stutter and, despite the tricks can achieve some degree of success in some occasions, they do not bring well-being; 5a) speech fluency is the result of brain processing and stuttering may be the result of inadequate functioning of some brain regions; 5b) emotions also result from brain processing and emotional disorders are not the cause of stuttering, but they can really make stuttering worse and they may be one of the consequences of several years of unpleasant living with stuttering; 6) the great unfamiliarity regarding to stuttering is generalized and, therefore, parents use the common sense knowledge they have to try to eliminate stuttering from their child; 7) there are several treatments for stuttering with different degrees of scientific precision (speech therapy, psychological therapy, pharmacological therapy and so on). Theoretical and practical learning from being a speech-language pathologist has explained some topics I really wanted to know but also has provided another background to reinterpret a lot of my previous experiences with stuttering.