I have taken a poem I have written to therapy with me and shared it with T. No, I did not talk to him before I brought it in. I just brought it. It really helped communicate a lot to him in a short space of time. Poems are very economical and mine can be intense. He read my poem and understood so much, so quickly. Very effective communication tool! I am actually very shy about sharing my poetry, but this was actually much easier than having to talk about this stuff--it would have taken a whole session or two to get through the material in the poem without the poem to read. So the poem was a good launch point for a conversation--we could get right to it without having to explain the situation.

I have also shared with him a piece of "word art" I made on the computer. Again, I didn't speak to him about this before hand. I just brought it in. He's a very informal guy and is able to accept whatever I bring to therapy with me.

Do you think your T would not be accepting if you just brought your collage in without having talked to her about it? Maybe you could bring it in a folder and not show her right away, but talk about it first, and then reveal it. I think your collage sounds very cool and I hope you can share it with your T.

By the way, my daughter and her T do art therapy within talk therapy. But they do the art during session.