But for the speaker, it misses the point completely- the speaker's experience is one of stuttered blockages that cannot be prevented. Thus the blame lay in the professional failure to recognize that fluency is not the proper objective of therapy. The reasons turned out to be why the speaker is helpless to prevent involuntary blockage. I discovered that the neural mechanisms of naturally fluent speech production couldn't be brought under voluntary control no matter how long you try. Expecting to speak naturally with voluntarily controlled fluency is like pasting feathers to your arms and expecting to fly.
Fluency is simply a natural by-product of the speaking system functioning automatically. .
When I figured that out the solution to stuttering fell into place. It explains why my colleagues and I have been to blame for fluency failures. For this reason I feel compelled to declare war on fluency. Voluntarily controlled fluency is the wrong scientific objective, to say nothing of the wrong treatment objective. Indeed, the very existence of self-help groups speaks to the failure of professional therapy to address the needs of those who stutter, which is not about making speech acceptable to listeners.