Hey man I have been at this major research center for stuttering all day today and just saw a big presentation about what real research shows about stuttering. According to these guys (who have been taking groups of stutterers and teaching them how to be fluent for decades and taught John Stossel), stuttering is a physical defect. It begins in your skull - they hypothesize that stutterers have "different" skulls than other people. I will try to explain the best I can: When we speak, we have that "inner hum" that lets us know we are talking out loud. This is internal feedback. External feedback is what we actually hear when we speak out loud - it is our speaking voice that other people here. The people here believe strongly that the underlying mechanisms that start up in your brain when you decide to speak are where the issue with stuttering lies: fix this, and you fix everything, and they say they have a 95% success rate with a 75% fluency retention rate after a 3 year follow up (I am here for 11 more days so I can keep you updated if you want). So what is there to "fix?" Well there is this thing called skull resonance. Skull resonance is the way the vibrations that you are trying to turn into fluent speech travel through your skull. The vibrations travel through "nodes" which are basically choke points that the vibrations pass through before becoming audible noise. I can't really give you a full explanation of this yet because I have only been to the first session but stay with me - The two underlying "screw ups" that lead to stuttering as a CONSEQUENCE are your vocal tract and your jaw position. Stutterers have a difficult time passing vibrations easily through our vocal tracts and jaw bones because our skulls lack the "instinct" that fluent speakers have that allows these vibrations to pass effortlessly through their heads. To put it short, we simply need to "re-train" all the muscles in our head into what they have already perfected here as "perfect speech patterns." So what is the conclusion here? Stuttering is not the problem: the problem is what CAUSES stuttering. Stuttering is a consequence, an end result that we can "fix" by fixing what causes it. The anxiety you speak of is of course universal in stutterers, but what about this angle - stuttering causes anxiety, not the other way around. You get anxious because you think you may stutter, so you do. If you fix the problem that makes you stutter, you won't get anxious because you will have confidence in your ability to be fluent and will get no more anxious than anyone else would when speaking. I strongly believe in the people at this place and have a lot of faith in them. I can't say I know they are right, but their angle of attack is 100% science, as tacky as that sounds. They have empirical data collected across decades over how to re-train people to speak. Any age is welcome come here, from 6 to 80, which makes me feel strong as I stand amongst stutterers from all walks of life and parts of the country. edit: and just to clarify, these people do not in any way claim to offer a cure. They tell you at the start that there is no cure for stuttering, only ways to overcome and manage it effectively through hard work and effort.