I think "confidence" has been assigned to the wrong thing here. Confidence in a tool does not help when your tool (your mouth) is unreliable, you're right, but people who talk about "having confidence" are never talking about this to begin with. Where it does help is when your "firm trust" is placed in your own ideas & self worth. Knowing, without a shadow of a doubt, that what you have to say is worth saying is the difference between: - Stuttering and feeling embarrassed about it later, even when other people might not necessarily care, Or: - Stuttering and not caring, and holding assholes to account if they care enough to be rude about it. Notice that the stutter does not necessarily change with confidence, your outlook around living with it does. All of stuttering treatment boils down to this, even so-called techniques. The techniques do not currently exist as reliable tools to combat stuttering, they exist to make the patient feel as though they have a measure of control (which techniques *do* give them, in most cases,) in order to build their confidence around speaking. With confidence comes acceptance, and the ability to speak openly about it with the people that matter, so that constantly masking, worrying, and downplaying the stutter is no longer a social issue at all. I used to think this exact same way, I get it. It's important to remember that most people aren't against us, this isn't like war, it's not a competition, and those who would be against us over something like this aren't worth our time to begin with. What's more, people notice and remember far less about us than we ourselves do! Yeah, a stutter can be pretty noticeable, but we're our own worst critics. You're a person, equally worthy of attention and consideration as anyone else; acting like it and demanding it, even if you stutter through it, is the quickest way to get that treatment. Harder than it sounds, I realize, but it really *does* make a huge difference.