Would this therapist read a journal if you brought it in?When I was in college I wasn't able to talk to my therapist and so I wrote all week and brought it in and he read it and then we discussed it. If he hadn't been willing to do that I would have been IP or worse; I was just way too shy to tell him verbally the things that I needed to say. By the time I moved on from him I had learned to talk in therapy although when something is really bad I still write it down (20 years later).

I think you've said that this worked for you before. Can you kind of push for it? Just tell her you don't feel able to talk yet and while you'd like to work on that as a goal in the meantime this is the best way to communicate without shutting down.