Dear Al:

Glad you had a good birthday, I had a good day, thank you, the weather this morning was wonderful here (two states north of you) and the walk in the woods, the green and flowers and singing of birds, beautiful.

“I have confusing memories regarding when I started stuttering. 4 or 5.. don’t remember much”- our memories of early childhood are amazingly poor and unreliable. We can remember events separated by years as if they happened in one night, and then we are told in adulthood that certain things happened a certain way, and we believe that they did, but not necessarily so.

“I got stung by a huge type of black bee.. behind my ear… maybe it caused me to have severe anxiety”- I am sure it hurt and you were scared, but it is not likely that this one event caused you severe anxiety leading to long-term stuttering, not if you had a parent’s empathy and support right after that happened, during the medical treatment and after.

Did you have other symptoms of anxiety such as tics or disturbed sleeping, headaches, anything like that, as a child?

anita