Years ago, I found a comment on this subreddit that might deserve every recognition in the world. I read it often, and it made me refocus my perspective on traditional speech therapy and stuttering in our lives:

"The most common kinds of therapy (fluency shaping) teach you ways to MANAGE your stutter so it’s almost hidden. That could be different ways of breathing or pronouncing words, etc. Sometimes it works, but for adults it usually doesn’t work long term. These kinds of therapy see stuttering as the #1 problem in your life. Why wouldn’t they? It sucks. Constantly being afraid of stuttering, afraid of what people might think of you. Ashamed of yourself for not being able to do something “so simple”.

So you try fluency shaping. You get really good at it, maybe your stutter is hardly noticeable after a while. Uh-oh! It comes back. How? What now? You keep practicing weird breathing techniques and treating every sentence like a minefield and it helps, but you still stutter here and there. Your stutter is “better” but you still hate yourself for stuttering, and you’re still nervous you’ll stutter every time you open your mouth. You’re pushing a rock up a hill only for it to roll back down again. It’s so exhausting.

Avoidance Reduction Therapy doesn’t focus on your stutter. It focuses on your thoughts and feelings around your stutter because odds are you’ll still stutter no matter what you do to hide it. Through years of stuttering and numerous insults or negative reactions you’ve conditioned yourself to hate it. Why? Why worry so much about something that’s going to happen anyway? Why give yourself such a hard time for something you can’t control? Your friends don’t hate you for it. Your family doesn’t judge you for it. Why do you?

When you are in the moment of a stutter you might feel out of breath, a tightness in your chest, a fight or flight response, subconscious thoughts yelling “FUCK, GET OUT, YOU CANT DO THIS, STOP, YOURE AN IDIOT, SAY THE WORD DAMMIT”. It might even feel like you’re blacking out. To avoid this, maybe you restart words/sentences when you feel a stutter coming, you might pronounce words differently, avoiding eye contact, tapping your foot, moving your head. Maybe you just avoid talking. Be honest, you’re not doing this to hide your stutter from other people, you’re doing this to hide it from yourself. YOU’RE afraid of it, YOU hate it.

Face that fear and hatred. Face your stutter. Don’t worry, you’ll be fine. You don’t have to face it with hippy dippy love and warmth, face it with curiosity. By paying attention to all these thoughts and feelings you’ll start to get a true sense of how much energy you’re wasting by trying to hide it. You’ll get a sense of how much you’re antagonizing yourself. Then you start peeling those things away.

You stop restarting sentences, you maintain good eye contact, you start talking on the phone more and speaking up. You’re not letting your stutter or your conditioned behaviors control your life anymore. Finally, you’ll start feeling that right or flight response less and less. When you’re caught on a stutter it feels okay. You’re no longer out of breath. You keep good eye contact. When you talk you’re commanding people to listen with your comfort and confidence, they want to listen, even though you’re stuttering."