The Best of the Vet with Dr. Lee Reeves (LIVE #23)
Conversation with Dr. Lee Reeves
Conversation with Lee ReevesLee Reeves is a special person with a unique perspective. As a veterinarian of 45+ years, he has cared for the life and wellbeing of animals. As a person who stutters, Lee has a rich life story and an impactful legacy in the stuttering community with 35+ years in the self-help community. To this day, Lee is extremely active in contributing to the stuttering community, and he continues to look ahead to what's next. Join us for this conversation to gain a historical perspective, as well as meaningful insights into the future of what's to come... Post your questions below... Lee Reeves Bio: Lee Reeves has been a practicing veterinarian for over 45 years and is the CFO for Stuttering Therapy Resources, Inc. Dr. Reeves is a person who stutters and has been actively involved with self-help and support for individuals and families affected by stuttering for over 35 years. He co-founded the Dallas Chapter of the National Stuttering Association in 1982 and is the past Chairman of the Board of Directors for the NSA. Lee has served as a public member of the ASHA Specialty Board for Fluency Disorders and the Texas State Board of Examiners for Speech-Language Pathology and Audiology. He is currently serving a second term as a public member for SLP on the ASHA Council for Clinical Competence. He is currently involved in To Be Like Me, a program created to educate school aged children about disabilities and differences… including stuttering. He is the recipient of the Distinguished Alumnus Award from the Texas A&M College of Veterinary Medicine, the Distinguished Service Award from the American Speech-Language Hearing Association, the Public Service Award from the Texas State Speech and Hearing Association, the Distinguished Consumer Award from the International Fluency Association, the Hall of Fame Award form the National Stuttering Association, the Charles Van Riper Award from the National Council on Communicative Disorders.
Posted by Schneider Speech on Tuesday, October 13, 2020
Introduction
Uri Schneider, M.A. CCC-SLP, co-director of Schneider Speech Pathology and faculty at University of California at Riverside School of Medicine, hosts a fascinating conversation with Dr. Lee Reeves.
Lee Reeves has been a practicing veterinarian for over 45 years and is the CFO for Stuttering Therapy Resources, Inc. Dr. Reeves is a person who stutters and has been actively involved for over 35 years with self-help and support for individuals and families affected by stuttering. He co-founded the Dallas Chapter of the National Stuttering Association in 1982 and is the past Chairman of the Board of Directors for the NSA. Lee has served as a public member of the ASHA Specialty Board for Fluency Disorders and the Texas State Board of Examiners for Speech-Language Pathology and Audiology. He is currently serving a second term as a public member for SLP on the ASHA Council for Clinical Competence.
Dr. Reeves is currently involved in To Be Like Me, a program created to educate school-aged children about disabilities and differences… including stuttering.
Dr. Reeves is the recipient of the Distinguished Alumnus Award from the Texas A&M College of Veterinary Medicine, the Distinguished Service Award from the American Speech-Language Hearing Association, the Public Service Award from the Texas State Speech and Hearing Association, the Distinguished Consumer Award from the International Fluency Association, the Hall of Fame Award form the National Stuttering Association, and the Charles Van Riper Award from the National Council on Communicative Disorders
Lee can be reached at: leereevesdvm@gmail.com
Resources and Links
www.stutteringtherapyresources.com
Transcription
5:19 US: What would you like to share? I think a lot of people see you sitting in the room at this point, one of the elder statesmen, but perhaps a little perspective on the earlier years. And then bring us to how you entered the world of self-help, what it looked like at the time, how you have seen it evolve, and what it has meant for you personally.
5:41 LR: Those who know me and have heard my story in one capacity or the other, but those who haven't. I Stutter. My story of growing up with stuttering is like many others. As I learned from my folks, I began to stutter between the ages of three or four, or somewhere in that range. As I began to speak, I grew up with a pretty significant stuttering issue. We all know, it's variable in different situations. So, there were times that I didn't stutter so much with friends and colleagues. But, you turn the cameras on and the lights come on, and boy, I really had some significant problems, which I did in school…(11:09) I had half a dozen therapists through those early school years. There was one thing that I remember that my very first therapist in the fourth grade said. When I came into therapy one day, she sat me down and said, “I want you to look at this, Lee.” And she brought me over to a big sheet of paper on which she had drawn this big circle. And then she drew this little tiny circle inside of the big circle. And she said, “This big circle, I want you to think about it as being you; this little tiny circle over here is your stuttering.” And I have never forgotten that. And that may have been the basis that really set the tone for how I thought about myself from that point forward. Stuttering was a major issue for me up until the time I was in the first years of veterinary school. But somehow I never forgot the fact that I was bigger than my stuttering. And even though it was painful and it was hurtful, I overcame it.
24:54 US: And when you say that you couldn’t keep going the way you were going, just explain what you mean by that. Did you mean to polish it up and get that fluency going or do you mean internally, like just relating to it differently or both. What do you mean?
25:11 LR: Obviously at the time, my focus was on not stuttering anymore, or at least doing something, because I literally couldn't put two sentences together. I had a difficult time speaking; I struggled a lot and I got stuck. I have blocks and that was my primary stuttering behavior. But to answer the question. In retrospect, here is what I was thinking happened up until that point in time; I thought it was other people's responsibility to fix me. When I was a kid, I was put in therapy. When I was in school, I was put in therapy. Everything was done for me in a sense. And when I graduated high school and went off to college, I was on my own for the very first time. And I realized nobody else was going to do this for me. If something was going to change, I had to take the initiative and figure this out. I had to find a way. Fortunately, I was able to find a therapist who was referred to me by a fellow classmate who actually stuttered. And he was being treated by this individual. I actually had stuttering modification therapy, van riper style, chapter, and verse, but it was administered by a counseling psychologist. And for me, that was the key because she brought that perspective into the therapy room. Now it's a little better.
27:12 US: What perspective are you referring to?
27: 14 LR: Treating the individual more than just the stuttering itself. Her counseling skills were what brought it in. She would ask questions like, “How are you feeling about that? What did you want to do? How did you do that?” And she had my number; she would say, “Over the next week, I want you to make a half a dozen phone calls to the movie theater, to the store and ask things.” And of course the phone in those earlier years was actually attached to a cord, but I was scared to death of the phone. And I would say, “Are you kidding? I am not going to do that.” And then she would say something like, “Oh yeah, you're probably not ready for that.” So it was that kind of a challenge and reward for the good behavior that spoke to me. It wasn’t the reward for not stuttering, but just doing the work… (28.24) The therapy was not any different than traditional speech therapy by somebody who understood to some extent the phenomenon of stuttering, but the component that many speech therapists didn't have at the time, which was the counseling part, dealing with the humanistic part of the stutterer. So I went every week for a couple of years. That changed my whole life, but then I had a relapse.
39:20 US: Let’s talk about that: the experience of sharing the wins and also having the supportive camaraderie of people who get it, who can identify with you and not try to patch up the very real struggles and frustrations.
39:35 LR: It's so incredible. People came into the group; we were very successful. We were having 25 or 30 people at a meeting every month. Folks would come in for the very first time and they may have heard about us a year before. Finally they found enough courage that one day, whatever it was, they lost a job or something happened in their life. Finally it drove them to that point of pre-contemplation. I want to take action. Walking in that room for the first time takes an incredible amount of courage for somebody to do. They may come in and as we go around the room and introduce ourselves, the challenge hits them. Why? Because it's one of the most difficult things we have to do. And it's just part of the process, part of what we do. And we never demanded it of anybody. We still don't. If you don't want to speak, just say, pass or hold your finger. That’s not what we're about. But I can't think of a single person who ever passed up that opportunity.
55:01 US: There's a big group of people who say, this person left me with years of damage that I had to process. What are your thoughts in terms of building bridges on one hand and working together, while being cautious on the other hand, because there are reasons for that. It does come from somewhere. And I'm just wondering what your thoughts are just to validate and propose a way forward for those that have that caution, because it's coming from somewhere.
55:28 LR: I think we have to be good consumers of services. And I think we do have to be careful. It has opened up a Pandora's box of opportunities that are good, but some that are not so good. And we are vulnerable. The folks that are looking for help that are struggling and afraid can become desperate people who do a lot of desperate things. And so I think we have to be careful. The best thing that we can do is to continue working together. And educate as many people as we can and improve the knowledge base. And I'm not talking about a particular therapy or a particular approach or anything else because not one size fits all. There are many paths out of the forest and what's important for us to do is to help people find their path, whatever that is...you can't really tell a person who is struggling and looking for something that they're going down the wrong path, because that just reinforces what they're doing. But we can be there to pick up the pieces. And coming back to self-help, support groups, working together with the professional community, working together with scientists and researchers and parents and grandparents. And we have to be a safety net so that when people do fall, regardless of where they are and how they got there, we need to be there to catch them, not to fix them. We need to be there just to catch them and to help them find their way out, climbing up that safety net. What I would hope, what I have always hoped, is that when people get to the edge, they find their way out. They get out and take a hold of that net and help the next person that falls. That's always been my dream.
59:26US: What would you want to see in the next five years? What would you hope to see and what are some steps you'd like to see some people take to get there?
1:00:24 LR: From the stuttering community, I would hope that we would continue to advance the knowledge base, and the understanding of stuttering throughout the world. The reason that most people either make fun of stuttering, or have struggles, is because they don't know about it. They don't understand what it is and they don't understand what impact it can have on individuals. And there are efforts obviously going on to encourage that understanding, For example, International Starting Awareness Day is just one incredible thing. I would hope that research would continue; it's important to look at how the brain communicates and how it functions. That research is not necessarily for the cure, but more because the more research we do toward looking for that cause, the more we understand and then develop new therapeutic avenues. Working in the professional community, I would hope that the educational academic programs could find ways to help individuals come out of those programs with a little more knowledge and greater skills about stuttering.
01:17:06 US: How would you encapsulate or share the contribution of my esteemed father, Dr. Phil Schneider? What would you say is his gift to the field and to moving things forward?
01:17:08 LR: His contributions are monumental to me. In the early days, Phil brought in an esoteric kind of view that in some ways went against the grain. But that view is much more acceptable today. He would look at the whole individual and at the person behind the stuttering, the “inside story”, as he calls it. And then documenting and videoing every therapy session was an approach way before the times. He did it on these VCR cassettes...your dad's major contribution in my opinion was to introduce this other way. And it wasn't maybe that it never had been talked about, but he introduced it in a way that made a lot of sense. And still does. He says, “I'm really not teaching the students. They are teaching me.” His viewpoint has always stayed with me. Don't think about how much I can teach somebody else, Think about how much they can teach me or expand my knowledge or help me to understand a little more. So that's his contribution and obviously other than that, just an amazing friend and human being.
1:30:55 US: We had the privilege to speak to Lee Reeves. How can people contact you, Lee, or what's the contact for the company?
01:31:05 LR: They can contact me personally, by email at LeeReevesdvm@gmail.com or they can get online with stuttering therapy resources.com, and get in touch with Nina Scott.