My Story and How My Stutter Improved (a bit long)

My Story and How My Stutter Improved (a bit long) **My Story** Stuttering began to take control of my life starting in about 8th grade. It was very severe throughout all of highschool (getting progressively worse). I had planned to go to college but opted out right before orientation—I just didn’t think I was capable. I pretty much then just took a year off from life, staying home. During my year off, I went through a lot of anxiety at first, but it progressively lessened. Maybe a half year into my break, I began to talk better. I got to the point where I was confident enough to sign up for classes. Right now I am into my second semester of college (am signed up for it). I am 20 now and consider myself to be a mild stutterer (albeit worse lately). I can now say whatever I want after a little “preparation” (which I will explain later). **My Type of Stuttering Explained** I had a very severe blocking stutter. When I would go to speak, my throat would lock and most of the time I couldn’t even tell my mouth how to move. It would move but in a horrible stuttered mess. There were many repetitions (because I was blocking on the next word) and times where I wouldn’t be able to make the sound I wanted at all—I would just sit there struggling with my mouth to make something happen (often making no sound for 10-20 seconds). I didn’t stutter in everything; I would not stutter at all when reading to myself. I stuttered less when talking to my dogs. I was however unable to talk to any person without a serious stutter, even my family. As you can imagine this was frustrating; there was nothing wrong with my mouth muscles as I could read to myself, but the neural “program” would just not work right when I needed to talk to people. **How I Improved** I think the biggest factor was me being away from all the anxiety inducing situations of school (staying at home for a year). My anxiety was bad for a while during my 1 year break, but got better and better. Now I only really have anxiety about normal things (school deadlines). As everyone says, anxiety is a big part of stuttering. As I was attempting to stop stuttering, I was always trying to find some trick that I could do that would help cure it. A lot of things seemed to work for a moment (probably a distraction) and then got back to being bad again. One of my tricks finally seemed to help for longer than 5 minutes. After a while during my break, I was talking to my brother when another trick popped into my head. Here is what I do: whenever I speak (especially when sensing a block), I would visualize and do the starting movements of the word. Say I wanted to say “peanut”. I would (try) to put my mouth in the shape of the ‘p’ sound and then move it into the ‘n’ sound. I am basically ignoring the vowel sounds. Note that I am not saying any other these sounds just putting my mouth in the right place. I would then keep alternating between those two mouth positions until the word “came to me”. This seemed to help sometimes so I kept at it, even when blocking for like 20 seconds. The word eventually came and I felt as though I just spoke with a word without forcing it out. Something felt right in saying it without the block. Doing this over time, it became easier and easier. I began to (1), get out of the blocks faster, and then (2), I would block less. I think there is something to saying the word without “pushing through it”—like not forcing it through your larynx. I think forcing it is what keeps the stuttering cycle going. I think stutterers can tell when a word “feels right”. As the stutterer, I can tell whenever the block is going to come, and I can tell whenever I can say the word (usually). Sometimes it just feels right, and I’m like, “yup, I can say it for sure at this moment.” I experienced this plenty of times even when I was stuttering at my worst. Doing my technique thing brought about more of those “hell yeah, I can say this now” moments. **More detail** When doing the technique thing I am making no sounds. I don’t try to hold my breath or anything but sometimes the block will be holding my breath. I guess I try to breath normally when I am doing it (I don’t think much about the breathing). Also, sometimes I go on past those first two syllables (in “peanut”, going from ‘p’ to ‘n’ to ‘t’). I am not sure what works best yet. **Conclusion** Doing this, I really started to see some improvements in a short amount of time; I felt real progress in about 4 days. I am about a year past the time since I discovered the technique. I have gotten to the point where I barely even think about my stutter anymore (though I still don’t speak perfect). Not thinking about my stutter for so long has made me gradually get a little worse again, but I have been trying out my technique some again and it is still working. Tell me what you all think. A big part of my stuttering was my severe anxiety, and I don’t know if my technique could have worked back when my anxiety was at its worst. I want to know if anyone else thinks there might be something to this. Edit: typos and small fixes