*In my own journey, I didn't wash away negative feelings, to achieve subconscious fluency. I did the exact opposite, I really experienced and accepted the negative feelings and triggers.. despite this uncomfortable feeling, I executed speech movements - in order to unlink triggers from speech performance (to break the shackles and be able to move the speech muscles immediately despite being triggered). Also, I didn't try to convince myself that I should "stop needing" things, because this would only keep the mental fighting alive, aka the tug of war of convincing myself. Such as "I attempt to convince myself that I don't need a fluency demand", but the instinct or subconscious automatically fights back. The more I try to convince myself, the harder the instinct is pulling the rope (tug of war metaphor). Instead, I simply let go of this rope by not convincing myself of anything.. I just accept and really experience the wrong/invalid arguments, and despite it all, I don't rely on the demands (it's not a fighting tug of war action, it's simply letting go of the rope basically). I hope this makes sense of what I'm trying to convey.* (I just realized I could use italics rather than just quotes to distinguish your writing from my reply, better late than never I guess, lol) I found myself doing this same thing recently, feeling my anxiousness, fears and so on, staying with them and getting comfortable with them. I believe I mentioned it in one of my videos of my most recent example of calling my mechanic, feeling the nerves of worrying how he'd react to me asking about my car because I didn't wanna make him think I was rushing him (because I wasn't trying to, I really enjoy this rental car, lol), and I realized these feelings are normal and are what makes us human and I should be able to sit with them and not feel a reliance on them not being there effecting my speech. In that way, I guess I did begin calming myself from my fear of speaking in such moments anyway, ironically. *Yes, but isn't this simply a lack of knowing what strategy to apply to achieve subconscious fluency?* Agreed, a strategy is needed in the moment. I think my confusion lied in that I thought you were insinuating that nothing is needed and we should be able to rely on speech itself. I think I just over analyzed what you were saying and confused myself but now I have a clearer picture. I see you meant "instructing motor commands" and though he thought he was, he was actually tensing through and instructing at the same time I guess? Because technically he did continue on so he must have instructed himself to do so right? For the last series of questions, though avoidance does seem to "technically" work ironically, thus why people choose to substitute words, it's impractical. So the answer would be no, no need to avoid any of it. And as you said, can get comfortable with it all and start detach it from our speech functions. I think that's more what I was alluding to also without being able to find the right words to express it. And I think the idea of calming my feelings, grounding myself was also to deal with the anxiety whether I can talk in the moment or not, I just didn't like the lingering anxiety and wanted to feel comfortable again because even those that are fluent want to be able to talk without being anxious or tense about it. ​ Thank you for sharing your story! You've given me more to consider and dwell on. The next time I hit a stutter, I think this will be in the forefront of my mind. It is a lot of reading but I'd like to share it with a few friends that might find it interesting and helpful as well! It's really eye opening.