Courtni:
Someone: “So, you’re a speech therapist, huh? You help people with their sounds, like when they have a lisp?”
Me: “Yes but so much more…”
I cannot tell you how many times that I have had this conversation, even with my family members. Speech therapists do so much more than working on speech sounds--what we call articulation. We do provide articulation therapy a lot, but there’s so much more.
In fact, one of my favorite things to do is aphasia therapy for my clients that have had a stroke or other brain injury. Aphasia is a condition following a brain injury that causes word-finding difficulties. We help our patients build new neural connections to re-learn how to talk or find words. I also love working with patients that need help with their memory, attention, understanding things, or other “executive functioning.”
As speech-language pathologists, we are required to know a lot about many different things including feeding and swallowing (dysphagia), social skills (pragmatics), voice, cognition (such as aphasia or apraxia), stuttering and fluency, receptive and expressive language, and of course, articulation. That’s why we’re required to have a master’s degree, which is another thing that a lot of people don’t realize about our job.
Truthfully, I don’t mind the questions. It gives me the opportunity to tell more people about what I do, and I absolutely love what I do. That's why I started Circle Creek Therapy in the first place!
If you would like to meet one of our amazing speech therapists, & ask them some questions, don't hesitate to call us at 253.237.3405 to schedule a discovery visit, or to just express a concern.
We would love to meet you!