Oh boy. Nearly all of difficult emotions about stuttering tie back to my father. He would scream, and pound his hand on the dinner table, and yell “just spit it out!” whenever I stuttered during a meal. I have permanent anxiety, general and social, from the way I was yelled at whenever I opened my mouth from ages 5-10. If I glared when he’d scream, I’d get punished further. My mother was so disturbed by this, but she couldn’t really do anything. Whenever I complained about this treatment, he’d insist he had a stutter as a child too, just like me. I spoke to his siblings, and I’m 99% sure was a lie and an excuse. My mother sent me to speech therapy, but I was seven, and I had trouble casually folding the techniques into regular conversation. It was very obvious when I was trying to employ “stretching” or “bouncing”, **and then my dad would yell at me for attempting to use speech therapy techniques.** He was upset that I still had to correct myself in the first place, and angry that the techniques were still obvious. I have no idea how he expected me to gain fluency. By the time I was 10, any fluttering in my vocal cords would cause me intense emotional distress, even if I was alone. At this time, I thought the intense shame was a normal reaction. The song “Telephone” by Lady Gaga was new and topping the charts, and there’s this bit in the chorus that sounds like fake stuttering (my-my-my telephone). I remember having a good time with friends, all singing that aloud, and when we got to that stuttering part, I felt the most intense wave of shame and humiliation. Total vibe killer. *Except I hadn’t actually stuttered, or done anything to draw attention to myself*. That was the first time I realized my father had given me trauma over my speech, and I wasn’t just embarrassed to be making the noise. I still associate speech therapy with trauma. The idea of that kind of attention on my speech again makes me want to cry. I’ve never returned to speech therapy, and I don’t think I can. Unfortunate, because it would be helpful professionally. I studied multiple foreign languages in HS, and I credit that with subtly improving my stutter as an adult - I unwittingly gave myself another round of speech therapy, telling myself I was just practicing the accents, pretending like I wasn’t working on my stutter. I dealt with it by getting older. That’s the sheer opposite of what I wanted to hear as a kid, but it’s the unfortunate truth. Threatening to cut our adult relationship off is what fixed it. He complained about my speech, I said “you’ll never have to put up with my stutter again if you don’t want to,” hung up the phone, and didn’t respond for a week. Full backpedal, and he hasn’t made any more comments in years. I still resent my childhood; he has forgotten it. I look to the positive. Reading here, I’d say I’m more confident and comfortable than many other stutterers, and it’s only because I was ripped on so often by my father, I literally cannot care anymore. There is absolutely nothing you can say to me in polite society, no “haha did you forget your own name?” that remotely compares to the cruelty I heard in my childhood home. In fact, I often go along with those jokes, even though I know I’m being made fun of, because “lol you stutter” is leagues better than “you’re unworthy because you stutter”. TLDR: just spit it out.