I will never forget the day I was walking out the door after a session -- we met in a small, cluttered office that belonged to another T and I never looked around either -- I happened to have my head slightly left and there was a bookshelf or something right there and on it were 3 elephants! Talk about surprise, LOL! I was not expecting that at all? Anyway, I wrote a poem about that experience, how there can be elephants in the room and yet I did not see them until months or years into the therapy and I shared the poem with my T the next session and that freed me a great deal; I could look around a lot more and discuss looking around or not, etc. From then on I decided to take "control" of the room for myself. One week I came in and the recliner I sat in was too far back against the wall to recline so I hauled it further into the room (closer to T :-) so I could recline some, etc. I got so bold I criticized my T! She would root around on the other therapist's desk to find a piece of paper to put down on the chair seat she used as a footrest (so as not to get her shoes on the cloth of the chair seat) and I thought that was funny/odd; what if that was an important piece of paper? She explained her process and how she knew it was not something important, LOL. Sometimes we had to meet in the "Director's" room, which was huge and much nicer and where she got a real chair with footrests, etc. and the next week, when we were back in the small room, we talked about the different experience; in the big room she was almost "next" to me rather than quite so across and the distance was different, etc. But all this noticing and talk about the physical surroundings, which were a bit safer than talking about "us" or people? helped to pave the way to talk to her. . . and to talk about us and people.