I think one barrier is not feeling safe enough with your T to divulge certain things. I work on this by working on the therapeutic alliance and building trust through getting to know T better, sharing less difficult things and getting good responses from him, etc. If there is something I really want to share and can't, I may write about it repeatedly in my journal and even practice reading outloud about it, just to get my mouth used to saying the words. My big success with this was recounting recovered trauma memories from my childhood with T during an EMDR session. I wanted to share these memories but they were too "new" to me and I didn't know him well enough. We had to back off for several weeks before I could do it.

I agree with Ipse that when you are ready to make the changes you will make them. Only then will you be motivated to work hard and "do it." One needs to be patient with oneself and hope the T is too. I remember in the midst of my not being able to share the above trauma with T, he said something that was so reassuring to me, "I respect your ambivalence about telling me." I loved that. We would also talk about why I couldn't tell him, and he would have answers for each of my reasons. For example, one reason I had was that the memories were not fun ones, and I didn't want to inflict this painful stuff on him. And he reassured me that he was in a really good place in his life right now, he was very strong, that he could take whatever I had to tell, that he had heard horrendous stories from many clients. All this helped me. So did his repeated self disclosure, even about little things, so that I felt like I had something of him--it wasn't just the sunny show, sunny on display all alone in T's office. It was sunny and T together.

Another sort of barrier: sometimes there are contradictions in my actions/thoughts and T tries to get me to confront those. He can use kind of a battering style of questioning. He's done it only twice with me, and the first time he finally backed me into a corner when he got to the root of the issue (which was "I'm scared") and I felt just like a little huddled mass on the couch, finally at the end of my answers to his "why? why" why?" questions. It was kind of intense and he has done it only once since then, and I handled it better.

Ipse, it it totally cool that you write novels!!!