***However, the key issue is that stutterers usually cannot consciously regulate or control these effects at will. Can you resonate with this? So, for example, in my case, I tried through conditioning or emotional learning to convince my subconscious that “relaxing the speech muscles” should resolve the approach-avoidance conflict—but it was in vain, it has absolutely no effect because my subconscious was not swayed or convinced, so the subconscious continues to negatively evaluate "relaxed muscle tension" to not execute speech movements (resulting in a totally unnecessary stuttering block). Whereas, from my viewpoint, other stutterers seem to have been able to do so. Your thoughts?*** It's much easier to condition than to un-condition. Let’s take the example of the fear of spiders. Someone was bitten by a spider and developed a phobia of spiders. So the stimulus "spider" will elicit the physiological responses related to fear. How do we break this conditioning? You should do the opposite process. Present the stimulus “spider” without any degree of aversion (without the bite, without pain, or anything like that). We do this in psychotherapy by first presenting a picture of a spider, then a video of a spider, followed by a toy spider, a spider in vitro, a dead spider, until we reach a live spider. If this process is followed correctly, the conditioning will gradually break down, until the spider no longer elicits fear. It's important to be very careful because any aversion in this process can cause the process to regress and go back to square one. If, when presenting a “dead” spider, it suddenly woke up alive and bit the person, the fear responses would come back and might even be stronger than before, and the process of breaking the conditioning would have to start over. That is, a single aversive experience can trigger conditioning (like with the spider), and multiple experiences are needed to break it. Why don’t we do this with stuttering? Simple, because it’s not possible. You live in society and have contact with aversive experiences all the time. A person who stutters can be interrupted during speech, have someone speak for them, someone laugh at their stutter, mock them, or comment on their stutter. All of this works as negative stimuli and restarts the process. Theoretically, a controlled environment like a laboratory would be necessary for us to break the fear conditioning of stuttering, but real life is not like that. It’s so absurd that you don’t even need an external person to punish your stuttering. If you are self-critical and don’t accept stuttering, the aversive stimulus ends up coming from yourself (when you stutter and say negative things to yourself). These negative thoughts can function, at a lower intensity, as negative stimuli for yourself, and hinder breaking the conditioning. That’s why it’s important to be as resolved as possible with stuttering. So you can think more and more negatively, or not believe in the negative thoughts when they become intrusive. For that, I suggest studying Acceptance and Commitment Therapy 😊. (...5/6)