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psychedelics and stuttering Hi guys, I wanted to share an experience I had with psychedelics and how it related with my stuttering. Please take what I say with a grain of salt. I’m not a speech therapist/expert. This was just my experience. I did a therapeutic guided psychedelic session a month ago and during the trip I was able to gain insight into my stuttering. I realized my stuttering was an emotional issue, a sort of blocked energy/trauma that lived in my body. I was able to really get in touch with that energy and give it all the room it needed, which really allowed it to heal. My theory is that somewhere along the line some of us had a disfluent moment and as a result of negative feedback felt so vulnerable and hurt that we associated speaking with painful emotions, which then turned into stuttering. When we block it’s as if there are two opposing forces happening. While on the conscious level we want to speak, our subconscious does not because it doesn’t want to experience those painful emotions again. So that’s why our body does the exact opposite we want it to do when we speak So in a way we developed a defective coping response to the painful emotions we felt from moments of disfluency, which got continually reinforced. Stutter -> embarrassment -> fear -> more stuttering. That’s why desensitization doesn’t always work because we often reinforce the fear and the stutter by putting ourselves out there and being courageous. So what I took out of it is that we have to practice awareness during stuttering. We have a natural tendency to want to escape when we experience discomfort/anxiety but when we escape we’re reinforcing the clenching response of the body. So in a way we have to build our capacity to be with those painful emotions. So when we block instead of reacting to the alarm system/panic in your body with resistance we have to learn to be with it and give it space. When we do that, we loosen the body’s learned response to shut down/refrain from speaking. So when I block now rather than panicking and pushing harder, I noticed how I’m feeling, breathe into my stomach, give myself time and then speak without that tension. While I still stutter and will likely continue to do so, I don’t struggle as much anymore. While some of what I said may be obvious to some of you and you get that logically, sometimes you need to feel that truth rather than just logically. It’s like telling someone life is too short you gotta enjoy it more. That makes perfect sense but we only really get it when we have a near death experience for example. That’s what psychedelics provides: emotional truths. Psychedelics is not a cure for stuttering but it can radically change its role and your relationship with it in your life.