First off, I'm sorry that you were tortured. I can't even imagine. Outside of therapy sessions, how much time did you work on your fluency? Was there homework? Practicing that the therapists had you work on? I'll be the first to admit that, like any profession, there are good speech therapists, and there are bad ones as well. What's the old joke... What do you call the student with the lowest grade graduating from medical school? "Doctor" I hear about programs that make me absolutely cringe. Where the therapist has you trying techniques in public right out of the gate. Almost like they are setting stutterers up to fail. I was fortunate to connect with a really good speech pathologist in my early teens. But I wasn't ready to get fluent yet. I wasn't doing the work. I stopped speech therapy at 16. I wasn't getting anything out of it. I wasn't making any progress towards fluency. In my mid 20s I went back to the same therapist, and I made rapid improvement. I achieved fluency in less than a year. The difference for me was that I put in the work in my 20s. In my teens, I didn't work the program. I wasn't getting up every morning and practicing. In my 20s, it was my decision to go back. I worked at it. Every morning in the shower. Every day driving to and from work. Every evening. I would work on my fluency. Everything was a progression. Like learning a musical instrument. You don't perform in public. You work on things during your lessons. You practice every day in private. Your teacher corrects you in your next lesson. Makes adjustments before bad habits form. You don't perform in public before you are ready. When it was time for me to start using my fluency in public, it was restricted. Where other therapists push stutterers to do a minimum of X amount of tries a day, my therapist wanted me to limit my fluency attempts. Come back next week and discuss those couple of attempts. I'm really thankful that I connected with a great speech therapist. I wish I would have been ready to take my fluency serious much sooner.