When a person of authority tells a young stutterer to “use your techniques,” they are confirming the stutterer’s worst fear: no one is listening to what you say, only how you say it. Enough of this makes you not want to talk at all. Fluency techniques may work in a therapy room, but, in most cases, they’re extremely hard to deploy in the real world. Speaking like a robot is not natural. There’s the voice in my head who reads this sentence, and a much different voice who reads it out loud. The two voices hate each other. They spend every day fighting for control, meaning neither is in
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