Comparing tension to an elephant or hypnotist: **Example #1**: A hypnotist asks someone in a trance to lift a glass of water of the table after giving them the suggestion that the glass weighs a ton. You can see the person struggling and straining, attempting to lift the glass, but he cannot. While the mind of the hypnotized person is activating the muscles involved in lifting, it is also simultaneously activating muscles that resist the lift, which reflects his belief that the glass is extremely heavy. His subconscious mind is orchestrating this very complex set of activities that creates a reality coherent with his belief. Both sets of muscles are working all out to handle this glass, like an isometric exercise, so there is no net effect on the glass. In this way whatever beliefs we acquire will shape our biology. **In my opinion**: It's similar to your comment about muscle tension. PWS (people who stutter) started immersing in muscle tension as if it prevents execution of speech movements, and slowly lost faith in their automatic feedforward system, and then we gradually build a mindset around incorrectly blaming muscle tension for not being able to move the speech muscles.. a mindset that links a belief to limit speech performance, so that everytime we experience tension + stuttering with a negative outcome, we gradually made this association (aka [conditioned response](https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fi.redd.it%2F53tdhmpm6gcc1.png)) stronger in our mind. And thus, if we would then apply tension, we learn to struggle, strain or fully immerse in the block, much like the example of the hypnotist, where we activate muscles to initiate articulation while simultanously also activating muscles that resist executing speech movements, leading us to believe in this imaginary concept even more. You could say that, during a speech block, we are hypnotized that we will stutter and cannot get past the block, do you agree? And thus, the more negative stutter experiences we encountered, the more we confirmed that this imaginary concept is real. "*See? I am tensing my muscles? And, see? I'm anticipating stuttering more and more now? See \[this\] and \[that\]?*" Followed by: "*So, that means I don't have the skill required to rely on automatic feedforward processes*", leading to excessively overrelying on the feedback system (such as, monitoring and adjusting speech to the imaginary concept, or the sensation of loss of control, or stuttering anticipation). This could lead us to kind-of hypnotizing ourselves: "*I'm triggered, so it must mean that I'm stuck on a word'*". If we perceive our imaginary concept or incorrect image, we simply tend to believe that it makes us error-prone or hypersensitive to executing speech motor programs. This is just my own take on it