SHE is intelligent, warm and bubbly, with as much to share as anyone else, but for Julia Ammon, her stammer was once so debilitating, she did her best not to ever talk.

While her colleagues would be engaging in office banter and chit chat, Julia, 25, would sit quietly at her desk hoping nobody would try to speak to her.

Although she desperately wanted to join in, Julia, of Church End Road, Wickford, was simply too embarrassed about the stammer which had plagued her since she was a young girl.

However, for Julia, there’s been a happy turnaround. She has learnt to greatly control her stutter and became much more assertive after enrolling on a groundbreaking course which has helped the likes of Pop Idol runner up Gareth Gates, conquer his speech impediment.

As International Stam-mer Awareness Day approaches on October 22, Julia, who is originally from Florida in the US, told how the course has had a huge impact on her life.

“It was my mother-in-law who read about the McGuire Programme and suggested I enrol,” she said. “I went to Coventry and took part in a four-day course in June. It was fantastic. Gareth Gates was an instructor for the first day and he told us how much the course had helped him.

“He was a really nice person and he shared a lot of his experiences with us.

“The programme is very different. It teaches you to use breathing techniques, such as breathing through your lower diaphragm and projecting your voice like singers, so you feel more confident about talking.

“It doesn’t hammer into you that there is a cure for stammering, because there isn’t.

“But it teaches you to have some control over it and you can learn to live with it, without it affecting your life so much.”

Julia knows all too well how children and adults can be cruel and dismissive of someone with a stammer.

She said: “I think with stammering it’s very unknown to a lot of people, so when they come across someone who has a stammer, they either think you’re not very intelligent or nervous.”

“People can be unkind, that’s for sure, and they do need to be more understanding.

“I’ve had a stammer since I was about five. I don’t know why exactly.

“They think it could have come from something as simple as me messing up a word when I was younger and this had a dramatic effect on my confidence.”

Research shows the impact of stuttering on a person’s functioning and emotional state can be severe.

They will often be terrified of being caught stuttering in social situations and will experience self-imposed isolation, anxiety, stress, shame and feelings of losing control.

Stammerers can also suffer in their private lives. Julia, an administrative worker, explained: “You can get very nervous about meeting people. I am lucky I have a wonderful husband who has always been very understanding.

“I met him online and we began e-mailing. I told him about my stutter and we finally met. I felt so comfortable with him so my stutter wasn’t as much of a problem as it had been at other times.”

Julia, who attends regular McGuire Programme support group meetings in London, added: “I feel so much more confident now than I did this time last year.

“I actually feel like I could go for a promotion at work and have a career.

“It’s an ongoing process and there’s no quick fix, but I have seen some great results over the past four months. Before I would do my best not to talk to anyone, but now I can join in. I’m a lot happier.”

l For more details about the McGuire Project visit www.mcguireprogramme.com