Exactly 😊 Back in university, I stuttered severely—but one day I tried visualizing that I was alone while speaking to classmates… and I was fluent the entire day. Like you said, it’s clearly not just specific feared words—otherwise, I wouldn’t have been fluent on the non-feared words that I would normally stutter on. I wonder if the real trigger is the act of saying something to someone—the whole speech plan itself—as a conditioned stimulus. Essentially, every word, situation, and speaking condition can, if conditioned, trigger an approach-avoidance conflict. Your thoughts? It’s like there’s an in-built “social rejection” filter in all of us that, under fear, shuts down communication (i.e., approach behaviors). I think this filter exists in all humans, but maybe in people who stutter, this natural system becomes miswired or overly sensitive. Genetics and neurology might just set the stage for that miswiring to take root—or they contribute more to the onset of stuttering, and less to preventing remission. Because, as I understand it, most PWS recover from stuttering within three years of onset. But then the question we should ask is: Why three years? Perhaps those three years reflect a period where the maladaptive filter becomes conditioned layer by layer—like a knot or web that becomes very difficult to untangle.