Why Relapse?

For the last couple of weeks I thought that I was coming closer to forgetting about my stutter. My speech was smoother. I was able to say what I wanted to say. And I thought (naively) that I was on the road to leaving my stutter behind me.

Oh how wrong I was.

For the last few days, my speech has been deteriorating in a big way. I feel like I'm stuttering much more than usual, and I can't seem to get that smooth-talking confidence back. In essence, I suppose, I'm experiencing relapse—whatever I did to lessen my stutter is wearing off.

From what I've read I'm in good company. Relapse is common with stuttering. But I'm wondering why that is. By examining my current situation, I've come up with two possible reasons:

First, after experiencing increased fluency, my expectations grew too high. I started to expect smooth speech, which made every speech blunder much more difficult to tolerate and probably caused me to fight my stutter even more than I did before.

Second, I started getting nervous that the increased fluency would end. "What if this doesn't last?" I heard myself think many times. And just like when I worry about whether I'll stutter, I usually do, perhaps when I worry about whether the smooth speech will wear off, it usually does.

So how to prevent relapse?

Well, my guess would be to not expect smooth speech but at the same time trust that if I talked smoothly just now, there's a good chance I'll be able to do it later too.

Essentially, believe in myself but expect nothing, assuming that's possible.