Thank you for your question. What I found in the MCguire books is this: >Fear of being perceived as insane versus desire to be perceived as sane: A stammerer using lots of tricks and avoidances no longer looks like a stammerer. People understand stammering. They don’t understand jaw chomping, leg slapping, tongue thrusts, and head jerking. Some folks will see it as crazy. Very few people want to be perceived as insane. > >There are two types of people who stammer: One type is very successful at hiding the stammer by skilful use of tricks and word substitution and situation avoidance. We refer to these folks as ‘coverts’. Many times those whom he or she has known for years do not know that s/he stammers. But for a successful covert person who stammers, it means going through life waiting for the axe to fall . . . waiting for that situation where s/he can’t get out of the situation or there just isn’t another word to substitute for the word that s/he knows will cause a big embarrassing block. Someone who is an overt stammerer is simply anunsuccessfulcovert stammerer. S/he tries to avoid and usetricks, but the struggle and blocking is there for everyone tosee. Perhaps s/he was successful for a while at hiding thestammer, but ran into a few too many unavoidable,untrickable, inescapable words and situations whichcaused him or her to lose confidence in theirhiding/avoiding strategies and panic started to rule the day.Coverts can control the panic; overts can’t. > >Give up: your old tricks and avoidance mechanisms thatgot you by before. These have nothing to do with goodspeaking technique and will impede your progress. Morethan that, tricks and avoidance will increase your fearmaking even the best techniques ineffective. > >Courage: just starting this journey takes courage. You are, or should be, throwing down the gauntlet against your old stammer. You will need courage to keep from using tricks and avoiding words and situations. > >If you don’t release your air pressure, you will get into a pattern of taking shorter and shorter breaths. This can develop into just another trick just to get the word out. The result is you gasping for air before a feared word – playing not to lose. You should focus on this right before you start to speak, and at the completion of each phrase