If there was one tidbit of knowledge I could put in every stutterer's mind it would be this: Stuttering in no way decreases the meaningfulness of your speech. Your message is important, your words matter. It's easy for us to place a value judgement on stuttering (e.g., stuttering is bad). This is not the case. Stuttering is not bad or wrong. Stuttering can be inconvenient, it can be frustrating, our reaction to it can make situations awkward. But stuttering is not bad. Our humanity is not affected by the fact that we have a greater frequency of interruptions in our speech. You say your "blocking has just gotten really out of control." My question to you--So, what? Why does it bother you that your blocking is increasing? (That is not meant to be confrontational in nature, but rather a thought experiment for you). What about stuttering is bothersome to you? When you know that you can begin to address that. One thing that really helped me was redefining what failure meant (kind of the other side of your statement, "I just fail to see any progress ..."). Years ago I defined failure as any moment of stuttering when I was trying to not stutter. This is an impossible goal. Yet it took me several years to recognize this. But in my mid 20s I can the realization that I needed to have a paradigm shift. This method of thinking about stuttering was not helpful. I was always loosing. I could never win. What bothered me about stuttering was the feeling that stuttering kept me from engaging in various activities. Given this new information my definition of failure became--when I chose to not engage for fear of stuttering. I suddenly began to succeed (while stuttering). Don't think this was an easy shift. In the beginning it took a lot of self-convincing. And even now I still occasionally "fail" -- sometimes I don't engage for fear of stuttering. But these become ever more rare. So maybe you need to find a new definition of progress. (regarding your question about reading aloud by yourself--I think all stutterers continue to stutter when they talk to themselves, read aloud in isolation and talk to babies / animals. But the disfluencies are short, rapid repetitions -- this is the case for me.)