"I'm not sure what you mean by you "treated words as objects." Can you elaborate?" What I got from what he was saying is that changing his mindset -seeing words as simply the product of his mouth, lips, tongue's movements and the vibration of your vocal cords, instead of seeing them as these scary 'things' that just come out (or don't) of your mouth -mentally helped him. Kind of vague, wish I could describe it better. "but I disagree with you that these are unconscious movements." To be fair, I don't think he was implying that those well coordinated muscle movements are unconscious. I think he meant that while stutters have to consciously think about 'how to be fluent', non-stutterers -although they are actively moving their muscles- don't consciously think about 'how to be fluent', they just naturally do it. Edit: Yea, automatic is probably a more suitable word.