From what I've read, academic literature supports the concept that anticipatory anxiety (also called 'intrusive predictive thoughts and feelings') bring about **confusion** in PWS: * especially in Adults Who Stutter, we tend to overreact and overthink on the notion of stuttering anticipation, whereas Children Who Stutter it's usually the anticipation of negative listeners responses causing a speech block, whereas Normal Fluent Speakers who anticipate negative listeners responses don't block. So, it's not anticipation that causes a block, rather it's the overreacting/overthinking (basically creating this **confused misaligned impaired** state of mind) that leads to stopping with sending command signals to the speech muscles resulting in a speech block * fight-flight-**freeze** response * fear that listeners will leave you if stuttering returns (basically, we have a fear of abandonment) * during a speech block, we often don't know how to get passed a block * we often develop an unhelpful belief that we should 'want' ( or desire) more fluency and start this vicious-circle-battle of willpower. Contrary to what most PWS believe, desiring fluency actually creates more confusion as it will label fluency as good and stuttering as bad resulting in more overreacting and overthinking. Our unhelpful belief is: 'I should want fluency, then I will do fluency', on the contrary it's the exact opposite that will lead to lowering the speech appriopriateness regulator. If we adopt a helpful belief: '*I should just do (aka choose moving speech muscles), it means I want it*', then we don't evaluate 'words that we want to say' too highly anymore, which then doesn't result in a speech block * (1) by tracking the outcome of our speech, (2) monitoring the feedback of our speech muscles, (3) auditory feedback or (4) feedback from listeners responses, we get the impression that we are stuck (which of course is just *a confusion from and over-identification with* intrusive thoughts and a dysfunctional belief, because we believe that our feedforward system is unreliable when it's actually not). We excessively reinforce overreliance on sensory feedback, in contrast, if we put complete faith in our feedforward system (which is what Children do who outgrow stuttering), it's much more effective to gain confidence in our ability to speak (that reduces a confused impaired state of mind)