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A method that helps me a little. I’ll try and be brief but will probably fail. Just today, I’ve been testing a method I came up with that I feel has actually helped me with my stutter a notable amount. Obviously this is not to say that it’s a cure or that it’ll benefit everyone but I thought I’d share regardless. The method is this; act like speaking is something that’s hard to do. What I mean by that is not acknowledging that speaking is hard to you and you alone but rather that it’s just hard for everyone. I think there may actually be some truth to this that stutterers fail to see. Obviously, we struggle with speaking and we see others that seem to have no problem with it and we feel almost like a different species. Obviously, this feeling doesn’t help anything. If we over-inflate how different our speech is from that of others then this sense of isolation just makes us struggle all the more with communicating with others whose frame of reference seems so different to us than our own. Contrary to this, why not pretend (or perhaps even acknowledge, to some degree) that speaking is hard not for stutterers but for humans generally? Why not imagine that whoever you’re speaking too is, like you, having to speak with a great deal of conscious care and is not, in fact, the cool silver tongue you made them out to be. You may not be able to see it but inside that person is sweating at the armpits just to spit out a simple sentence. I’ve recently been trying this method. Whenever I speak, I just imagine that I’m having to put the work into it not because I’m a stutterer but because I’m just a human and humans simply have to put effort into speaking fluently. I imagine that whoever I’m speaking to is having to make just as big of an effort as I am. Again, I honestly think there’s a degree of truth to this. I think all people find speaking more difficult than stutterers imagine. Once I acknowledge that (or pretend it), I feel much less like an anomaly and feel much less a pressuring need to get the words out smoothly and quickly. Again, this is just my method and it may not work for everyone but if it makes even a single person’s life easier, it’ll be worth the post. 😊