cool story, thanks for sharing! i agree with you about the courses. i took one here in the US, and i hated how i sounded afterwards. i generally came to the opinion later that i would rather sound like myself sometimes and stutter sometimes than weird all the time. and i found in the fluency shaping course the therapists didn't get "it", so it seemed ridiculous for them to school me on stuttering. and if you sound weird, you feel more self-conscious, and you kind of lament your situation. probably the best i was ever speaking was when i had to stand up and give research presentations once a week in graduate school. i was stuttering a bunch at first but slowly got used to it, gained some confidence, the audience didn't affect me as much.