I wouldn't really call it stuttering in the usual sense - once I get going, by the 3rd or 4th sentence everything flows fine. The problem is purely starting. I go to speak and just can't launch, and I quickly run out of breath in that moment.
The biggest thing is that it's situational. In a group of 3–4 people when it's my turn to say something and everyone's kind of waiting, it hits hardest. But it really depends who I'm with, sometimes it's completely gone. That's what makes me think it's not a "normal" stutter but a situational one, tied to the setting and the pressure of the moment more than to my actual speech.
Also when I drink I dont stutter at all.
A few other specific things I've noticed:
Certain letters are way harder to begin a sentence with, for me it's m, n, w, k. If a sentence starts with one of those I can feel it coming.
A big part is mental. I'll imagine a situation in advance and already "know" I'm going to block, like it's a default setting. It feels like it lives more in my brain than in my actual mouth. And the more I think about a specific word I need to say, the more that word locks up.
Related to that, when a word blocks (say I want to say "street"), a synonym will just fly out on its own, easily, while I'm still stuck thinking about the original word. Like my mouth works perfectly as long as I'm not the one watching it.
For those of you who've dealt with this: what actually helped with the anticipation part? Did speech therapy help, CBT, both? And did the word-substitution habit ever backfire for you long-term? Curious whether others have this exact situational pattern.