>*You said: "When I saw the person..it felt more like a processing issue.  I wasn't afraid of her."* That is the thing with reflexive fear responses, they are mostly deeply subconscious that we are not aware of them. For example: We often don't stutter when alone, but there is a reddit post where someone said "*I don't stutter alone but if I record alone in a voice message, then it 180 flips the switch and I stutter so much*". You could argue that we might "feel fear or feel conscious stutter pressure" in this example. But what if we switch a situation from speaking alone, to speaking to our parents who we are super comfortable with: our approach-avoidance conflict still triggers, and we still stutter but we do not "consciously" feel any fear or any trigger. It's because the "underlying fear" that triggers the approach-avoidance conflict is too subconscious. I see it like a subtle fear, but not a big fear like "a fear of spiders" or "fear of social anxiety". It's more like: our subconscious perceives "speaking with our parents" (at that moment of stuttering) as an obstacle for speech executoin to proceed. And don't forget, this approach-avoidance conflict is not learned, it's in all humans. Remember, a baby might start crying if the parent walks away and stops if the parent returns. The problem in stutterers is not THAT the approach-avoidance mechanism activates. It's that the approach-avoidance conflict is poorly fine-tuned (our learned software regulation or filter is malfunctioned after many conditioning) leading to totally unnecessary stuttering. (as I explained in my other comment where a toddler learns to associate "fear of saying their name" with our malfunctioned speech execution filter). At least this my view on it.