Can a childhood stutter come back in adulthood?
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Can a childhood stutter come back in adulthood? I was in speech therapy for most of elementary school for a variety of mild speech impediments, including what I'm guessing would be called a stutter -- I didn't stutter on particular sounds/words, but I would stutter at the beginning of sentences, if I was nervous, or if I got too excited and tried to talk too quickly. I don't really remember much about speech therapy, except that I was told to slow down, stop talking, take a deep breath, and try again but slower when I started stuttering, and that seemed to make the stuttering go mostly away -- it was still there, but it was occasional enough that it wasn't really a problem. Recently, however, I seem to be stuttering a lot more. It's been increasing very gradually over time (I'm 20 years old), and it still doesn't happen all the time, but sometimes it will happen a lot, to the point it takes me a very long time to get through a sentence or I avoid talking about something (usually a story/explanation) because I think I'll stutter when talking about it. It's not a "putting thoughts into words" problem, it feels like I know what I want to say but I can't get it out and it can be very frustrating. The stuttering usually happens for the same reasons that I mentioned earlier, but sometimes it happens randomly as well -- there are days when I can easily talk for ten minutes straight if someone lets me and days when I can barely get through a sentence. When people interrupt me or seem to not be paying attention, it makes the stuttering much worse because then I get frustrated. When I'm stuttering, I also seem to have a lot of random pauses in my speech and use filler words (eg like, um, uh) a lot more in my sentences, or just answer with as few words as possible (eg. "What are you doing?" "The...the...the *thing*") because the full sentence takes too much effort to try to get out, but that might be unrelated? I'm not sure. Anyway, is this considered a stutter? And is it normal for a stutter to basically reappear in adulthood?