Opening up didn't take long. I already was honest and very open in the first session. I would talk about everything bothering me. For me, it is very easy to share my problems. However, like for you, trusting and opening up is not the same thing. I can be very open with people I do not trust one bit.

I think this comes from my teenage years. I'd be constantly in trouble, and various teachers and mental health people would try to talk to me. I had to be honest, because they already knew everything and it would have been just used against me if I were not open.

The way I learned back then to open up was to just think about what I wanted to talk about the day before. I'd pick out my topic, and then think about how I wanted to word it, what I wanted to say. And then I'd repeat the lines I had prepared over and over in my head. Then on the day I had to talk about it, I'd sit in front of whoever wanted to talk to me, and I'd again repeat the lines over and over in my head, until I could just talk along with my thoughts and not really attach anything to it anymore.

I used to have this same feeling of something physically preventing me from talking. The approach I mentioned above kind of lowered that to a managable amount. I am not sure it is a smart thing to do, but that's what I did. Now when I talk to my T about anything at all, I don't even feel the physical thing anymore, I am so used to talking about things I don't like to talk about.