Oh BNLsMOM, you are a woman after my own mind(!)

Hmmm, QA, I never really thought about it as personification, but maybe there is some of that. Stuffed animals for sure... names, personalities etc, but to my thinking, that's normal (well, you know, pretty much, just more unusual in an adult, ya? )
I "switch tracks" without warning in conversation too. Wouldn't worry about the therapist/chair thing. You were *looking* at the chair, but you were not *talking* to it.
There's no associated trauma, and I know who's who and what's what, so it doesn't seem to be dissociative at all (though it did make me read up on it!).

I think the most perplexing/troubling things about it for me are:
1) How much I do it.
2) What makes me carry on with so much useless chatter? (Not amusement as noted earlier, which is, of course, useful.)
3) How often don't even realize I'm doing it.
4) I'm not actually talking *to* anyone. So why can't I just shut the heck up?

Ahhh, thinker22, your post came in while I was editing this. Good points. Hehe, "If I were a cookie..." I say that all.the.time. Those things *are* more "thinking aloud", as you point out. Come to think about it, those sorts don't bother me so much either. It's the "useless" stuff that unsettles me. Ahhh, the lonely part. You know, there may be a correlation in pure amount and frequency of chatter with times of greater isolation. I still do it quite a lot regardless, but it probably does go up in those times. (And being rather the loner, there is no time that isolation is *not* a reality for me, though it can be greater or lesser.) Hmmmm.

Oh! And BNLsMOM too (it takes me for.e.ver writing posts!). No worries! Besides, thread-killin's my job...