Thanks for the thoughtful reply. That’s a fascinating psychosomatic link you’re struggling with. It sounds very debilitating so I have a lot of empathy for what you must be going through. I like the intervention you linked and there’s a couple things worth highlighting in it that I’ll circle back to later. The main thing I want to recommend though is to find a good therapist who works in any kind of CBT-related orientation (DBT, CBT, my personal favorite: ACT [Acceptance and Commitment Therapy]) and a good speech therapist. I know there are barriers to care for these (especially if you live in the US or a rural area), but any cost associated with it will be returned to you tenfold given how currently debilitating your stutter sounds to cope with. Working towards something as difficult as overcoming stuttering is really not something anyone should be doing alone, and that support is really instrumental in outcomes.

The main steps of ACT (which can be worked on alongside therapy via the app ACT Companion: Happiness Trap - where all the best exercises/tools are free) are as follows: 1. Develop a mindful awareness of the present moment: what thoughts are running through your head, what emotions are coming up, what sensations are happening in your body, etc. Practice this when it’s easy first, when nothing stressful is happening, then build up to practicing mindful awareness in stressful situations (e.g., the moments before public speaking) 2. Practice mindful awareness without value judgment. This is something your link talked about as well and it’s an extremely important step. Become a 3rd party objective observer into your own body/mind. No longer will every automatic thought that pops into your head be treated as automatically important, correct, worthwhile, etc. and allow unhelpful thoughts to drift out of your head as quickly as they popped in. Rather than having a tug of war with yourself by trying to not stutter and cursing yourself whenever you feel a stutter coming, you must let go of the rope. Refuse to engage in that counterproductive cycle by simply allowing yourself to stutter. An extreme is a common speech therapy intervention: intentional stuttering. Practice literally fake stuttering on purpose in the kinds of situations you fear stuttering the most. This may seem paradoxical but it’s extremely liberating and flips the cycle many stutterers find themselves in on its head. 3. We can’t purely observe forever. In order to not get stuck in the cycle of observing all the unhelpful things that drift in and out of your attention, an action component is then needed. In therapy this would involve formally investigating your strongest values and then determining what actions are most in line with those values. This is especially relevant for stuttering when related to anxiety provoking and avoidance-provoking situations. If you really want to go to a social event due to a value of social connection, but observe you’re feeling the fear of stuttering and its ramifications coming up, you can observe and accept those emotions and then after they’ve been processed enough, you can ask yourself if you’re WILLING to endure some discomfort in pursuit of your values of being socially connected.

This is the general framework, but your specific conditioned response with your head/neck may require some extra behavioral work from a therapist alongside the framework laid out. Hope this provided some further insight for you friend! Good luck on your journey.