For your information. What works for one person may not work for another. The best thing we can do is learning from various perspectives to expand our own understanding and beliefs! Here is a summary of the hypothesis: * **Stimulus**: Emotions that come up when starting to speak, being immediately suppressed because it's too painful to bear (fear of being punished for making mistakes for example). The exposure to pure free emotion (as your voice never lies, just like the eyes) is so scary, that people repress it immensely. We stutter due to avoiding the fear (which is another layer of fear) that breaks down a normally complete automatic process. * **Response**: Removing the pure emotion from their speech * **Compensatory strategies**: Trying to use techniques to regain it. Trying to convince themselves they are not afraid of mistakes, but actually really are. * **Approach-avoidance conflict**: The harder they try not to do something, the more they will have that specific compulsion. ​ * **Stuttering occurs**: The normal form of spontaneous fluent speech is disrupted **Interventions proposed**: (The only way the doctor finally learned to stop stuttering fully) * **Underlying vulnerability/emotion**: Address the deeper layers of vulnerability. Figuring out that specific emotion. Treat it like an anxiety disorder * **Address the domains influencing the speech movements**: anticipatory anxiety, self-confidence, vocabulary, fluency etc. Your 'relaxation domain' is small, weak and its timing is off - so anytime you even want to activate it, it just won't work because it's weak. You need mental physiotherapy just as if you've had an injury: slowly and carefully build up the strength in your relaxation, fluency skills, self-confidence skills etc. * **Let go off external validation**: Speak with the intention of no external validation. Say what I really wanted to say. Learning to really express your emotions instead of focusing on not making mistakes. * **Learn how to relax in general**: Meditate, exercise, and body scans - to relax every single muscle in your body (especially shoulders, neck and throat). Relax them while feeling the emotions associated with them. Learning to become relaxed and then talk. * **Emotional processing**: Work on the emotions that cause the insecurity behind stuttering. Stuttering itself further causes insecurity (vicious circle), but it's the wrong level on which you should focus the larger part of your time. It's like focusing on putting bandages on your knuckles while you keep hitting the wall with them yourselves. Focus on both, but more on the layer behind it. Learn why you started stuttering. Learn why you have trouble really showing yourself. * Practice more talking to yourself. Accept that you'll feel like an idiot practicing talking again like you're a baby. But fuck it, you're now a baby in this regard, but an expert in future empathy for other people and in adult meta cognitive skills.