Does sexual activity affect stuttering?

UPDATED IN 2024! I have rewritten this topic to take into account the latest insights in the area of psychophysiologic research. 

This issue is frequently raised in stuttering forums, generating a lot of uneducated comments, reflecting a lot of anxiety, and underlining the fact that so many people who stutter have very little knowledge of how our (often subconscious) feelings, thoughts, stress / anxiety levels and other mental or psychophysiological ("mind-body") activities or processes impact on our lives and fluency.  

The social media posts in discussions on sex and stuttering reflect various responses to sex, with some people saying that sex negatively impacts on their fluency, particularly after masturbating. Others say that sex improves their speech, and yet others feel that it has no effect on their stuttering. So how can these widely differing experiences be explained?

Looking at it from a mind-body perspective, I would say that if the sex makes fluency worse, feelings of GUILT - whether conscious or particularly at a subconscious level - would be our prime suspect. We feel guilty when we're doing, or have done, something which doesn't feel right.

But how can such feelings cause more disfluency? Well, psychologists say that people tend to repress unpleasant feelings such as guilt. In other words, we try to push such thoughts away, we refuse to be aware of them, we ignore them and "forget" them as much as we can.

But, of course, the brain does not really forget this mental material. It is stored deep in our subconscious memory, like unwanted and dangerous prisoners in a cellar. And like prisoners, they want to get out - they threaten to escape to the surface, into awareness.

In his great book The Way Out (2020), psychotherapist Alan Gordon explains that the primitive, reptilian part of our brain is primarily concerned with our survival. Through the senses it therefore continuously scans the environment, both outside and within us, for all kinds of dangers and threats.

And it seems that this primitive part of the brain takes internal threats very seriously, such as when strong emotions, such as guilt, fear or rage, are repressed and threaten to escape into awareness. The alarmed brain then generates symptoms, perhaps to warn or distract us in a primitive attempt to protect.

It is a type of anxiety, but much of this anxiety is under the surface, at a subconscious level, so that we are often unaware of it. And because the anxiety is subconscious and hidden, it cannot readily be picked up by speech therapists, worried parents, the brain-scanning researchers or, often, the stutterer himself. The anxious brain reacts by means of the Four F's process - Fight / Flight / Freeze / Fawn (particularly and probably the freeze, in our case). For some people, this can result in physical symptoms or an increase in such symptoms, including stuttering.

For instance, the muscles of the vocal cords might "freeze", instead of functioning normally. Fact is that speech becomes difficult or even impossible if your vocal cords go in freeze mode and block. The typical repetitions and prolongations of stuttering are simply the result of struggle efforts in trying to speak while the vocal cord muscles are in freeze mode.

Of course, if the sex is not accompanied by negative feelings such as guilt or fear, there is no reason for repressing such feelings and for the reptilian brain to feel threatened. On the contrary, the act of sex would usually be life-affirming. Sex also often acts as a release from sexual and other forms of tension, so lowering stress levels and also reducing stuttering.

So how to deal with increased stuttering due to sex? Well, becoming aware of the process as suggested above could be the first step! Repressed, subconscious guilt may be a major driver of your stutter. By becoming aware of it may remove much of its destructive force, because you won't be repressing the guilt - you will release it and so resolve the inner conflict and hidden tension.

What's more, sexual activity that does not harm others in any way should not be a reason for guilt feelings. Of course, if there are good grounds for feeling guilty, you might want to reconsider your actions.

I hope that the above makes sense and that it will be of assistance.

  

Results of my 2013 poll

The results indicate that, for a large majority, sex leads to more stuttering. The question was: "Does sex affect your fluency?" and the results were as follows:

Total of votes: 54

"Has no effect on my speech at all" - 6 votes

"After sex I'm much more fluent" - 7 votes

"Sex makes my stuttering worse" - 41 votes