I'm not sure what you mean by you "treated words as objects." Can you elaborate? I agree that speech is well coordinated muscle movements by the articulatory (lips, tongue, jaw etc), laryngeal and respiratory systems, but I disagree with you that these are unconscious movements. They are purposeful and planned and you can manipulate them (e.g., you can change your speech to speak with a different accent etc). Automatic or over-learned might be better words in my opinion. (Unconscious would be things like heart rate, veinous contraction, digestive peristalsis, the correction just after a trip) And the way you describe how the benefit you received from the Valsalva Approach suggests to me that rather than changing airflow, it actually increased your attention to you the way you were producing speech overall. This allowed you to pay attention to that "stuttery feeling" which, perhaps, became a cue for you to change the way you're producing speech. I think this is great. And if the Valsalva is a tool to use to increase awareness of what happens during speech, then fantastic. I'd consider recommending that to someone in therapy. But stuttering doesn't result from a sensitive valsalva mechanism. And there are more direct ways to facilitate increased awareness. So, in my opinion, it's not really about the Valsalva Approach changing your airflow or voicing, but about the Valsalva Approach being a mechanism by which you pay increased attention to how you are producing speech. Again--there is great value in that skill. It's a skill I've worked on with many clients (and I have worked on). At a fundamental level, all stuttering therapy (that focuses on speech) can be boiled down to two main ideas: we can "speak more fluently" (focus our efforts on making sure we do not stutter) or we can "stutter more fluently" (focusing our efforts on getting out of moments of stuttering quickly with little effort and frustration). At the risk of beating a dead horse, the valsalva hypothesis seems simplistic to me. I can see it fitting in to tell part of the story, but it's not the whole story. At a cognitive level the Valsalva Approach doesn't make sense to me. The vocal track must close in order to produce speech. Airflow must be stopped (at he mouth / larynx level), the vocal tract must be occluded, the larynx must close. There are pieces of truth in the Valsalva hypothesis. I just don't think those pieces fit together the way he's suggesting they do.