Sticks and stones…turns out words really can hurt you.

The Study

The Monster Study, also known as the “Iowa Study of Stuttering,” was a controversial experiment conducted in 1939 by Wendell Johnson, a speech pathologist at the University of Iowa. The study aimed to investigate the origins of stuttering, find ways to treat it, and establish if stuttering could be induced.

Johnson and his graduate student, Mary Tudor, selected 22 children from the Iowa Soldiers’ Orphans’ Home. All of the children were told they would be receiving speech therapy as opposed to the truth, they were to become human guinea pigs.

The design of the experiment was as complicated as it was cruel.

10 children had been labelled as ‘stutterers’. They were split into two groups of five.

One group was told that their speech was fine and they did not stutter.

The other group was told that their stutter was as bad as the teachers have reported it to be.

The remaining 12 children who showed no evidence of stuttering were randomly put into two groups of six.

One of these groups was told that they were developing a stutter and that it must be corrected immediately.

The final group was told their speech was fine and they were praised and complimented on their pronunciation and enunciation.

This experiment lasted five months and over this time the staff at the children’s home as well as the researchers reinforced what the children had been told at the beginning of the experiment.

The results were practically immediate and the most severe for the group of non-stutterers who had been labelled as stutterers.

A number of the children in this group, one as young as five years old refused to speak, they hung their heads low and when they spoke they did so very quietly and with little to no confidence. Other children became withdrawn and isolated from friends as they had so little confidence in their ability to communicate that they just stopped speaking with their friends. The trauma caused to the children within this group is what lead to a lawsuit being brought against the university for sanctioning such cruel research on children that were too young and too vulnerable to advocate for themselves and be protected from the short and long-term damage this study caused.

So, what’s the lesson?

That there is immeasurable power in our words.

The children in this experiment were young so you might be thinking, ‘but I’m an adult, I can just ignore when people say mean things to me’. Yes, but what about what you tell yourself, what about the messages you have been repeating in your head for years that you never question? The messages you may have (just like these children) received from the external world but then interanlised to incorporate into your own story.

These words can vary from the outright negative (although often said under our breath) “god I look fat today” or “you’re so f*cking stupid” to the less overtly deprecating “I’m terrible with numbers so you’ll have to do it” or the “I’m not smart enough for a job like that.”

The research shows that we have an estimated 12,000 to 60,000 thoughts per day, with 80% being negative and 95% being a repetition of what we think every single day. And for those of us who consider ourselves ‘talkers’, that’s an awful lot of negative words that are not only going through our minds but coming out of our mouths.

The connection between the words we say to ourselves and our mental and physical well-being cannot be understated.

Think of all the rags to riches stories you have heard about when the only thing that took that person from nothing to everything was their mindset and the way they spoke to themselves, and usually a killer work ethic but we can only tackle one thing at a time.

What are you telling yourself that’s holding you back?

Break the cycle

Start catching yourself when those narratives start swirling and practice the creation of a new story. We have more control than we realise over the trajectory of our lives and it all starts with what we tell ourselves.

1. Catch it: Be aware of your thoughts and notice when they become negative and self-flagellating.

2. Break it: Say “STOP” or “NO” out loud to externalize the negativity and start to break the cycle.

3. Challenge it: Counter negative self-talk with positive affirmations or a visual image of yourself protecting yourself from negative thoughts.

Building a new habit can be hard and here, you’re building a new habit. A better habit. A healthier, more positive, less hate yourself for no reason habit. Be kind to yourself when you forget and slip down a negativity hole. Use a journal to keep track of the shift and write down the new words you are replacing the old ones with, look at them, commit them to memory than start believing them.

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