I made good headway when I started noting, in my real life, when I was protecting myself too much and started looking at and working on it myself. For example, I had to drive through T's parking lot to get to her office a different way because adjacent buildings were having their roofs redone and there were huge trucks and pieces of equipment in the parking lot roads, along the route I usually took. It made me anxious! That caught my attention and I looked at it (and, fortunately, was on my way to T so could discuss it right away, 10 minutes later :-) and realized I felt "exposed". It felt like I had been sneaking around behind the bushes and suddenly someone removed the bushes and everyone could see me out there in the open parking lot driving around. My stepmother might "get" me That was the crux, whenever my stepmother "noticed" me, she had a complaint or something for me to do, etc., it was usually an unpleasant interaction. So, I learned to keep as low a profile as I could, keep out of sight.

We re-enact in therapy similar scenes as we have in the past up until therapy; we are very much creatures of habit and learned perspective. Think of the feelings you have that you like least (my anxiety) and when you feel them, stop and figure out why, no matter where you are/what you are doing. They will happen outside therapy and inside therapy and the better you get at figuring them out, the faster you get at noticing, etc. the better you will get at keeping to the road you want. It's a little like video games where you shoot the bad guys/asteroids/monsters/zombies, you-name-it in your path to keep going; the faster you get at noticing and shooting the further/more points you get.

Make the "goal" to be seen by your therapist and keep that at the front of your mind as you work and it will happen easier as you'll notice more readily when you are blocking or hiding. Even if it is too scary to say something, you stop and tell your T that it is currently too scary; you acknowledge what is going on rather than try to hide it. You do not have to talk about "what" yet, but just "that". I hide my eyes sometimes watching scary movies I need to at least look. I cannot begin to get rid of the scary part by not looking/denying it exists?