maybe it's even the other way around - like, you got confident _becase_ you got better at handling your speech... not that we need to establish causal orders to discuss these concepts, of course. maybe... (as i hinted at in that other thread,) we should self-reflect more on how these things appear to us. the various speech therapists i've been in contact with over the years (and the interval is sort of huge between these) have noted that they can't really tell me anything new about my stuttering, or at least, i seem to have an expansive understanding of it. it doesn't make me a better stutterer at all, though - only in the sense, maybe, that i'm able to talk about the angles involved, and sort of know what to expect in different situations. nothing i wouldn't expect from a lot of other stutterers, of course, but i've encountered a few who seem to have no "grip" on what their stuttering amounts to, and what's going on when it happens. we don't _need_ to live "reflected lives" in order to cope with stuttering, i guess. but when people start integrating concepts from outside of stuttering (if you'll allow me that interpretation for now), i think we have to be careful that they don't end up in a self-imposed system, where they're trying to arrive at a bunch of things that does nothing to their stuttering as such. am i making sense? i mean, such personal considerations have a huge scope, in that the information available to us spans _our entire lives_. right?