My mind is now thinking that I'm offended by you saying this. I, and many others live perfectly NORMAL lifestyles with our stutter. I'll go into some more detail. This also occured with me when I was younger. Children can be harsh, but that's only because of skills and personalities not being developed yet. Adults on the other hand, are very different. MOST (most being all except for one experience with a person I've had) are very understanding of it. Everyone else living this kind of lifestyle will tell you the same thing. I STRONGLY disagree with not being able to display any kind of trait. I almost feel insulted that you would say this. I, and many other people who stutter openly, can all display desirable traits, just as much as everyone else. You do realize, nobody is fluent, right? Everyone stumbles over words, repeats words, etc, etc. If you listen for it in conversation, I guarantee you'll hear it. Some of us just have it worse than others. To say how I live, is somehow a lower standard of living is pretty demeaning too. I live a perfectly happy and content life while having a stutter. When I stutter, I don't kick myself for it. Because it's bound to happen, the reality is, you can use every fluency shaping technique in the world, and you'll still *always* have situations where you will stutter a bit and undergo a bit of turbulence. My point is, you can either kick yourself for this and make your life a misery because of these moments or you can change your mindset to accept that this WILL happen in the future and continue to work on ways of gaining control over how you speak, not fluency. By the way, with this mindset I never suggested you completely stop working on yourself. But concentrating on fluency alone, as from experience, will *only* have bad results. Especially if you're kicking yourself over situations where you aren't fluent. I fought, as have many others. Fought and fought and fought for fluency. You now what happened? I actually became less fluent. Why? Because your brain remembers situations where you stutter and when you're put into those situations again you are reminded by what happened before. In these situations, I at least would become overly conscious about how I'm talking and therefore have more anxiety and therefore would just stutter even more. As for you second point, many others thought they could beat it too, and from experience of talking to people, they never could. And embrace is the wrong word. You need to accept that YOU WILL stutter in the future, and you will have situations where you have trouble before you start improving. This is just my advice from talking to 100's of people who have been in the same situation as you. This is the bottom line. Kicking yourself over every situation *will* lead into a bad cycle. So you can either become honest with yourself that these situations are going to occur in the future and develop ways of making these situations better for you. Or you can continue to try your best to be fluent all the time (as a person who has a speech disorder by the way) and continue to have experiences where stuttering does occur, and you feel bad for it. You're not less of a person if you stutter or have trouble saying something. I kinda don't know what to say beyond this point, as you've kinda suggested that all of us here are somehow less of a human than people who are fluent...