Good question. I've seen a lot of people comment on the fact that voluntarily stuttering more seems counter-intuitive. This is solely my own experience; I know nothing about how you stutter or you as a person. My SLP was insistent on me stuttering more. Particularly stuttering intentionally at first. I was also confused. Throughout my life (27 now), I had developed ways to 'get out' of moments of stuttering; avoidance and escape behaviors. While this immediately feels good in the moment, it leads to worse things than stuttering; secondary behaviors, avoidance, substitution, etc. etc. The cause of a lot of my difficulty with speaking was the tension I was putting there. This tension led me to harder blocks, more difficult speech, and an even worse fear of stuttering. V-v-voluntarily stuttering in a forward moving way, at first in the therapy room and then into other parts of my life, led me to becoming quite desensitized to my stuttering. Once there was a marked decrease in the tension in my speech, I was able to actually start working on techniques to get out of moments of stuttering in a forward moving way; i.e. holding and tolerating, voluntary stuttering, opening my mouth more, etc. etc. Without getting rid of the tension and accepting some repetitions or prolongations as part of normal human speech, I would have never experienced the success I did with these techniques. I thought I was ready to begin cutting back on my speech therapy sessions. I was speaking more and anticipating less. I went down to seeing my SLP every other week. About a month into it I was in a bad spot; I felt like a lot of the tension was back and I was getting into blocks a lot more often than the previous few months of therapy. I realized that the one thing that had changed was my voluntary stuttering. I wasn't reading aloud with bounces, I wasn't throwing bounces into every single conversation, and I was chasing fluency (the one thing guaranteed to lead you away from fluency). Since that regression, I have been a maniac about trying to stutter in a controlled way as often as possible. I don't throw myself into hard blocks, but I try to put a few light repetitions into every conversation I am a part of. When real moments of stuttering do happen (I think they always will), I am relaxed throughout them and get out of them relatively quickly and easily while saying what I mean to say. TLDR: Trying not to stutter leads to worse stuttering, in my experience. Trying to stutter leads to less and far easier stuttering. Edit: obligatory demographic info about me... Am now a 27 year old male, very covert about my stutter my entire life, started seeing a speech therapist specializing in adults who stutter over a year and a half ago. My #1 goal, currently, is to be more overt and up front about my stuttering.