**In my opinion:** I think that the problem with achieving a phase closer to stuttering remission is, that most people who stutter - do not have the answers to some important questions: * What is the most underlying primary symptom of stuttering? (compared to secondary symptoms) * What am I intolerant to? (which increases the protection mechanism and prevents us from saying the sound) * How exactly do I avoid the initial speech plan? (e.g., by using easy onset or speaking slower we unnecessarily avoid the initial speech plan) * What speech errors are we blaming exactly, to not move forward regardless? * What beliefs/attitudes are actually helpful towards associative / reinforcement learning? What unhelpful attitudes / high expectations - are preventing synaptic dopamine levels from rising? For example: * needing hyper-vigilance towards sensory stimuli to manage fluency - (1) which reduces faith in the feedforward system, and (2) which prevents adaptive associative or reinforcement learning) * confusing reassurance-seeking for new-information-seeking, such as repeatedly asking the same question: "*Do I sense that I will stutter?*" (and needing to challenge or argue it) * needing the compulsion 'applying silent blocks' to reduce anxiety * needing to ask people who are unqualified to answer these questions * needing to wait out improvement until we get older (in our 30s) (which is what my speech therapists recommended to me in the absence of a better solution) * needing to time when the initiate motor execution - using abnormal techniques (external), rather than focusing on speaking on the timing of our prosodic encoding in the speech plan (internal) * needing reliance on the physiological system as an index of anxiety in stuttering * perceiving severe stuttering (and the secondaries) as sufficient as our way of speaking (in other words, seeking a desired answer rather than seeking the truth) * believing in incorrect information: *\[wrong speech plan\]* leads to *\[stuttering anticipation\]* \- rather than correct information: *\[anticipation raises the execution threshold too high\]* leading to *\[inhibiting the speech plan\]* * believing that they will always stutter no matter what \[unhelpful belief\] - leading to (1) subconsciously inhibiting acceptance of any helpful beliefs/attitudes, and (2) perceiving positive successful experiences as invalid (impairing incentive / reinforcement learning) * needing to negatively evaluate listeners (e.g., being misunderstood, being asked to repeat an answer, apologizing, refuting a criticism, or difficulty trying to get across a point of view) **Conclusion**: These unhelpful attitudes / high expectations - then result in a greater desire to avoid punishment or suffering than the desire to speak, the net result is that dopamine levels do not increase enough to reach the execution threshold, and the speech motor plan is never executed. Not knowing the answers will likely increase the stutter disorder: * we then start focusing on unhelpful corrections * we let other stuttering family members answer these questions for us (in other words, our understandings and beliefs get distorted due to stuttering influence resulting in developing a system to systematically avoid the initial speech motor plan, aka primary stuttering) This is just my own take on it **Your thoughts?**