An unconventional approach to stop stuttering, that has helped me tremendously.

An unconventional approach to stop stuttering, that has helped me tremendously. Hi All, I guess I could refer to myself as someone who stutters, but I have managed to minimise my stutter to a point where it does not have any impact on my day-to-day life. I am school teacher and it’s never been an issue. I DONT THINK ABOUT IT ANYMORE. My background Let’s start with my background with regards to stuttering. High school was hell for me. I would skip English class because the teacher always made everyone speak at least once in a lesson, which I hated. I regular cried myself to sleep because I hated my life so much. I even did McGuire program and spent a huge amount of money on speech therapy, but with no results. I fell into a massive “victim mentality”. Which I eventually realised that a victim mentality gets you nowhere. Some of you will hate this post, because from my experience, many stutters are trapped in victim mentality unfortunately. Many of them cannot handle constructive criticism and if you even suggest that stuttering is their fault, they will usually get very angry at you. I guess I was different in that aspect. Even if some taunted me about my stutter to my face, I grew to not be bothered by it at all. I think this mentality also helped me to reduce my stutter. How I “beat” stuttering: It all started in my early 20s (I’m now 30). I stumbled accross some videos on YouTube by a person called Dr. Mort Cooper. This was the beginning of the end of stuttering for me. The first video that I watched started with what seemed to be someone imitating/taunting stutterers. Now, this is where a lot of stutterers lose their mind and get angry, but I was very intrigued. Video link is at the bottom of this post. I watched every video and started looking at alternative treatments. I was obsessed. I soon realised that the reason I was stuttering is because I was trying so hard not to stutter. “The desire for fluency is entirely counterproductive” I noticed that the more I stopped worrying about stuttering, the less I stuttered and it eventually just went away. Think about it like, stutterers are obsessed with fluent speech. They view it as the “be all and end all”. Similar to 40year old virgin, where he “puts the pussy on pedestal”, stutterers put fluent speech on a pedestal. When a regular person speaks, they aren’t thinking to themselves, “try to not stutter, try to not stutter, try to not stutter”. They just speak. When a stutterer speaks, they are thinking to themselves, “try to not stutter, try to not stutter, try to not stutter”. Having this obsessive mindset when talking is going to cause problems. Now, every traditional stuttering therapy encourages stutterers to use some kind of “strategy” to speak. But this is silly because we should be modelling how regular people talk. If you ask a regular person “what strategy do you use to speak”, they would say “wtf are you talking about”. Long story short, the way out of stuttering is to not focus on speaking well. Just talk and don’t over think it. The desire for fluency is counterproductive. This is the first time I’ve posted online in years because I simply forgot about stuttering, but I just remembered how far I’ve come and it’s sad to see people so misguided. Traditional speech therapies are hopeless and delusional. Dr. Mort Cooper is a great place to start. Don’t be bothered by him taunting/imitating stutterers at the start of the video. Instead, observe it without getting defensive and take some ownership of your stutter. Drop your victim mentality too. Or just keep stuttering and hating on life. I remember reading a quote on a forum “Stuttering is not the problem. You are the problem. Stuttering is the result”. People were losing their mind over it and become very angry. I found it interesting and kept reading and learnt a lot from that person. https://youtu.be/5gjPNBugBVg