I thought I would add my story. I've stuttered FOREVER. It used to be really bad and I hated to talk to anybody. My mom, brothers, aunts, uncles all knew I stuttered but I did not have enough confidence to speak in front of them. When I got to the 3rd or 4th grade my mom insisted that I went to a speech class my elementary school offered. I was hesistant but I went anyway. It was the best thing ever, I was in a class with a pretty girl who stuttered just like me. I was in the class for a while and my stutter had temporarily went away. Well as I got older the stutter came back. It got really worse in high school. People would call on me to read from the textbook and I knew they wanted me to read because of my stutter. I couldn't accept the fact that I had this disorder and wanted to change it really bad. I did not go to any speech classes but I did start to practice reading out loud by myself. It really helped me identify the sounds I would stutter on the most so i started to replace those words with different ones to I could be more fluent. I did this for a while and it got better and better. In college my stutter was still pretty bad but I had to stop living in fear. I met my girlfriend in one of my classes and she didn't really mind that I stuttered. Her brother has autism so she could understand what having a disorder was like. We dated for a while but broke up. I told myself that if she didn't mind that I stuttered then I shouldn't worry about what others think. As of today I have a one year old son, a lovely girlfriend, a college degree where I am working at a Software QA job. I do not have to talk on the phone much but if I find a defect/bug in the software, I have to tell the client. We have weekly calls about our status and each member on the team has to speak. I do not let my stutter hold me back anymore. I have a son to feed, a girlfriend to go home to and a support group is willing to hear anything I have to say. I consider it to be a success not letting stuttering hold you back. I still do it to this day but I'm ok with it. I do not feel like I have to announce it to anyone before giving a presentation, they just have to understand it takes me a while to get my words out. I do not mind repeating myself so you can understand what i am saying. My name is Adley and I stutter. DO something about it :-P.