04/03/2026
The Courage to Stop Running 👟✋🏻🛑
Our Assistant Executive Director, Mark O'Malia, M.S., CCC-SLP, has experience at AIS as a client, graduate student intern, and staff clinician.
"It all started with a blind leap of faith. I found a local support group, met others who shared my experiences, and eventually found a program that approached stuttering from a whole-person perspective. This program was right here at The American Institute for Stuttering in New York. For three weeks, I was absolutely immersed in all things stuttering. I started finding my voice to talk about and work through the toll that stuttering had taken on me, explored and reduced the different struggle behaviors that formed from all of the time I spent hiding, faced my fears, and finally gave myself permission to stutter.
AIS gave me the support I needed to finally stop running from myself. After that, life opened up for me. While I didn’t leave New York with perfect fluency, I left with the belief that I could handle any speaking situation thrown my way. That I could authentically pursue my passions in life, all the while stuttering with more choice and pride than I ever thought possible. To say the least, it has been an interesting journey. While the ups and downs are inevitable, I found my freedom the moment I made the choice to step outside of my comfort zone. As a therapist at AIS, I am humbled and privileged to walk with clients down their own path towards finding their most authentic voice, and ultimately, finding the courage within themselves to stop running."
Read Mark O'Malia's stuttering journey on our website: 🌐 https://www.stutteringtreatment.org/blog/the-courage-to-stop-running
