Well I don't think that the belief cannot be overcome - I think people overcome limiting beliefs all of the time. And I don't think it is the matter of flicking a switch and turning off a limiting belief, I think it happens gradually by pushing boundaries, getting out of ones comfort zone - and at first being willing to stutter openly in front of people without the paralyzing shame (the hard part). I made great leaps with this when I attended a two week stuttering intensive program where I opened up to my family, stuttering openly in front of many strangers, and so on - after being in denial about my problem for so long. In a way I see it as a sort of reintegration process happening on more than a conscious level. The idea is eventually one is not thinking about stuttering all the time because the fear of stuttering is diminished, and in turn the person can gradually dis-identify with the stuttering belief/identity - sort of disentangle from the stutter by facing feared situations and coming out "Ok" on the other side. I think the same is probably true for a lot of personality/behavior disorders. >As for stutterers who have gained fluency... most of them are still stutterers and continue to see themselves as such. In fact, they've just learned how to stutter better. The most visible and restrictive part of stuttering is the struggle against it. Those people have learned how to work within the bounds of their fluency instead of trying to merely expand them. I agree with you here. But these people are no longer practicing the array of avoidance behaviors people who stutter often use to appear fluent. I believe they still went through a stage as I outlined above where they may have had a period of overt disfluency - a time where the nervous system rewired to react less severely to stuttering.