Yes indeed, that’s why I mentioned it. When I was in primary and high school, I rarely experienced anxiety, fear, or pressure from stuttering. This was likely because my mother, brother, and six other family members also (have) stuttered. From a young age, I was taught to accept my stutter i.e., desensitization.. so even as a severe stutterer, I often stuttered without anxiety or fear. In my view, this does not negate the existence of an underlying mechanism where we respond to conditioned stimuli. Think about it. If I don't stutter when alone, but start stuttering with a close friend where I'm not aware of any fear/anticipation.. then the only thing that has changed is the situation. Another example, a lot of people use escape behaviours such as word-substitutions, or adjusting minor subtle changes in attitude or mindset, or increase/decrease the volume or speak in a higher or lower voice or whatnot to bypass stuttering but that's the thing.. this strategy wouldn't have worked if there wasn't an underlying condnitioned response. Such responses are deeply ingrained—automatic, subconscious, and habitual. I think that we overtime reinforced a sort of learned avoidance (towards this response) and we became less and less aware of these responses.. if we then also start to rely on controlled speech or auto-pilot speech (rather than automatic processes), then I think we remain disconnected from recognizing the underlying conditioned response. As I explained in my document, I believe humans cannot definitively predict whether they’ll block based on fear or anticipation (or any emotoin at all), as these are not reliable measures I think. Many on this sub talk about a "fluency state" but I personally don’t think it exists. If a fluency state relies on specific emotions or thoughts to execute speech, I’d classify these as intrusive emotions and thoughts, creating a false fluency state that I need to get out of. I think that stuttering remission to occur, we need to ultimately rely on automatic processes. I propose that **auto-pilot speech ≠ automatic processes**, a distinction I feel many overlook. Even on auto-pilot, we still subconsciously respond to conditioned stimuli through fight, flight, freeze, or fawn mechanism or panic response.