I see so many people on here, especially in the “rants” who seem to not understand that through the bad stuttering experiences in your life (we’ll call that trauma even though it might technically not be) they have trained their brain to go into fight or flight response every time they go into an uncomfortable situation. Your relationship with your stutter is everything, and your body is an indicator of that relationship. Many people on this subreddit are also misinformed, or have the wrong mindset about stuttering. A person on the path to recovery will doom themselves if that main goal is fluency, because I don’t they understand what that fluency entails. That fluency would be a plethora of speech techniques that usually involves substituting words or even skipping certain words/sentences (to name just a few) which in turn would make that person appear to be fluent. But what they also don’t understand is how you feel as a person when you do these methods to hide your stutter from the rest of the world. You feel like shit, to put it plainly; you stay up at night wishing you had said this or that in a conversation and you get so lost in all the fluency methods and techniques that you forget your authentic self. You forget how you would normally speak and are constantly in your head both when speaking, and even when not. Striving for fluency will bring more pain and consequences than stuttering itself does (and stuttering has few consequences anyway, rationally speaking). Perfect fluency is a deal with the Devil. You trade your authentic self for a fluent speaking “you.” Freedom over fluency, that is key.