The metaphor I've come up with for this personally is this: Unlike fluent speakers, my underlying speech engine cannot tolerate heavy load. Although everything might go smoothly if I am trying to move things along on flat even ground (= low stress situation, like talking to myself unthinkingly or a very relaxed conversation with friends where I'm not paying much attention to what I'm saying), it has a tendency to stall and break down if I need to go over uneven ground or uphill (= higher stress situation). The thing about this, and why I'm always a little skeptical when someone treats this as the Underlying Truth That Will Make Us All Stop Stuttering, is that having higher stress situations in your life is *normal.* Of *course* I am more keyed-up and paying more attention to my words in am important job interview, or when I'm doing public speaking, or when I'm talking to an unfriendly audience and think they'll judge me. That's just... human nature. I do not *want* to be as unthinking about my speech in a job interview or important presentation as with my friends! And that's why I expect I'll always stutter. (Example of a situation where it is *clearly* underlying stress and pressure rather than any sort of fear of someone's reactions causing me to stutter: when I started learning Spanish, I really wanted to get good pronunciation and paid close attention to how I was saying each sound. At that point, I stuttered tremendously anytime I tried speaking Spanish, even when I was practicing alone and nobody was listening to me!) Now, it's undeniable that fear of stuttering specifically adds extra, unnecessary stress that makes you stutter more (and also makes the emotional experience *of* stuttering worse in a myriad of ways). So it absolutely makes sense to try to chip away at it as much as you can - the classic Catch-22 of "the more you care about whether you stutter, the more you will stutter". But I wouldn't do this assuming that you can get your stutter to zero - and ironically, doing this assuming you can eradicate your stutter means you are caring about whether or not you stutter, undermining the process. :')