Love this post. I totally agree with what you wrote. Reminds me very much of techniques taught by Claire Weekes - which was more about how to cure panic and how to overcome fear/anxiety and making friends with anxiety/fear. Are you familiar with her work? Life-changing for me, and I'm also applying her work to my own stuttering problems. My theory is, that once upon a time, as a very small child, we one day went through a traumatic event - could be bullying, something else - and it made us feel fragile and fearful. When we feel fragile and fearful, a young child tends to strutter quite easily. If a child gets teased about it on top of that, the child will now also get insecure about speaking. Speaking will now become a 'dangerous' situation to the child, and the child will build up apprehension towards it. The more you build apprehension towards something, the more you train (as you said) yourself to see danger in something. Danger in something that isn't truly dangerous. But still, we subjectively see danger, and indeed train our minds to treat it as such. If the body/mind feels it's in danger, the flight, fight or freeze mechanism starts kicking in. The child will begin to stutter or block again, hence making the child think "see! Something is indeed wrong with me!" and it'll build even more appehension towards speaking. Especially when getting teased for it on top it. (like what happened with me) A speech pattern then forms slowly over time, and stuttering has become their normal way of speaking in front of people. There's a reason why 99% of us do not stutter in front of animals or when talking when NO humans are around. If there was truly something wrong in your brain, physically, then you'd also stutter when taking to yourself or when talking to animals, or when simply no humans around. So, in my opinion, for me at least, there's 2 things I need to tackle. 1. Stop running away from my stutter, allowing others to hear it, no being afraid of it anymore. 2. Re-learning how to speak without a stutter. Because, even if you tackled the fear and you're NO LONGER afraid of it, you will still have speech patterns that remain. This is where some people get caught up I think and fall back. They think: "I tackled the fear part, I'm no longer afraid or anxious about it, but I STILL STUTTER". Stuttering has become like an accent. And accents don't go away in a few days. It takes A LOT of time and effort to relearn how to speak a different way. I know people from the UK who have been living in the US for decades, and still have their british accents fully. Now, mind you, they don't actively work on changing that. But it just how a speech pattern/accent can linger if you don't work on changing it. Even feeling fearful is a pattern in this regard. Feeling fearful can be a default emotion for a lot of us, just like an accent it a default way of pronouncing things. Hope this makes sense. These are just my views, though. :) * **In a feared speaking situation, try to stutter voluntarily for feared words**. I stutter when saying my name, so when I need to introduce myself in a group situation, I voluntarily stutter. The world does not stop revolving, and nobody bats an eye when I do this. But it calms me down, and I can focus on what I have to say instead of focusing on not stuttering. I voluntarily stutter when I feel that I might block/stutter on a word. Basically I'm taking control over my stutter, and dictating when and how I stutter. Once you're in control, your brain realizes that you're safe, and lets go of anxiety/fear. Truth. This is essentially how I cured my panic disorder. I was having terrible terror panic attacks thinking I was about to die or go insane. I thought something was wrong with me. In the end, I learned I was buying into THOUGHTS thinking they had POWER and believing these thoughts were able to hurt me/kill me. I then started fighting these thoughts and pushing them away. The more I pushed them away, the stronger my appehension became towards them, and the bigger the fear became resulting in panic. Claire Weekes taught me these thoughts have NO power at all. Zero. BUT... one does NOT simply realize this by reading about it. You will only realize it, if you face the fear head on, and 100% surrender to it, telling it: "Give me all you have, now" and meaning it. Only by going straight through, will you see there wasn't anything to fear at all. But, once again, you will only realize this in your core, if you go through it yourself - if you throw yourself in the deep and surrender to all the feeligns you fear. Sorry, I can go on for days like this. It's late, and then I tend to write/ramble too much. It's still from the heart, though. :) Hope all is well. Thanks for your post!