Speaking only for my case and myself, stuttering was just a manifestation of a bigger problem. I don't stutter when i'm alone. This is profound. This means I don't ''have'' a stutter in the same way someone may ''have'' blue eyes, down's syndrome, or ''have'' a 5'6'' tall body. Stuttering was something I did in the presence of others, on certain words, in certain circumstances. Something I did, not something I had. Those are very different. I never stuttered on every single word. If I ''had'' a stuttering problem and was the ultimate problem, why would some words come out fluently and others not? Anyways, for me, it came down to understanding that stuttering served some purpose when I was a kid. No idea what that purpose was, but it did something for me. Maybe it got others to take it easy on me, or lower their demands, or whatever. As an adult, I was still stuck in that habit of stuttering when faced with situations that made me feel like however I felt as a kid. My body had grown, but part of my mind hadn't. It sounds strange, but part of my adult mind was still stuck in a child-like pattern. So my journey was all about hearing massive amounts of fluent speech (reading out loud alone), retraining my mind to be happy, healthy, stable, optimistic, etc., using techniques to never stutter again while working on all of this so I would stop ''seeing'' myself as someone who stuttered, etc. It took a lot of hard work, and I still work on it to this day. I only joined this group recently and it's amazing how I can see my former self in peoples' stories. I hadn't even realized how much my attitude and personality had changed. It's like I read stories and comments here and it sounds like me when I still stuttered. I have a lot of empathy, because I know what that place feels like. But I am now mentally somewhere very different than I was, and so it is interesting to 'hear' people here reveal their mental attitudes through their writing. My speech is not a problem anymore, but it's the underlying mental side that is so radically different from where I was before. I addressed the mental game AND the speech game. Just the speech game would not have worked for me. So it was developing and changing my mental game far more than my speech game that led me to success.