Role playing with T - Eek!!

My T suggested it once and I was not at all interested. Role playing actually wouldn't have helped in that instance anyway because my T briefly misunderstood what was challenging me. It was easy for me to deflect the idea of role playing in that instance because it really wouldn't have been useful.

I would not do it with T ever. It would be too weird and awkward for me but I get how it can help some people.

Same. My therapist has suggested once or twice that I talk to a chair, pretending that this chair is an emotion and I was like NOPE.

I enjoy pen-and-paper-and-dice roleplaying, but that's a completely different thing - then you're putting yourself in a role that has very little to do with your actual self, and it's all about problem solving in a group. Roleplaying real people, or pretending in front of someone else that I'm talking to a third person who is not present - no, I don't think I'd want to do that. I think I would get so selfconscious and embarrassed that it'd defeat the purpose.

I would not do the empty chair thing - it would be too much like talking to myself but with a witness. I talk to myself and the pets in that way perhaps - but would certainly not want a therapist around.

I hate doing role play. They always make us do in training classes at work (just today, as a matter of fact). Thankfully t has never tried to get me to do that. She does ask me sometimes what I would say to my younger self. Usually I have no answer at the time, but it's a good exercise for me to do on my own between sessions and I come up with some good work sometimes.

I once did the empty chair thing when I was really frustrated and upset with one of my flatmates (at the time), and though a bit awkward at first, it was actually weirdly satisfying. She also asked me to write a letter to bipolar disorder, which I then read out loud in the following session.

To be honest, I have had a lot worse in terms of doing embarrassing stuff, mostly in my singing lessons. Some of the warm-up exercises I do are pretty interesting, like scales sung in a variety of random syllables, or banal melodies with strings of silly words, often intended to trip you up or whatever. I have done the flying monkey, which is a position where your knees are bent and you are leaning forward with arms stretched out above your head, and I have been asked to sing whilst in this horrifying position. I have also stood bending over with my hands reaching for my feet, because, oddly enough, hanging upside down makes your voice resonate better. AND my favourite: trying to "get into character" with a song, internalising its message, by speaking the lyrics with the emotion you want to communicate when you're singing it. There is nothing more awkward for me than reading song lyrics out loud and trying to somehow make it sound natural. It sounds stilted, always. I sometimes just laugh at how stupid I sound when I'm doing it.

But I digress.

I actually like empty chair. I'm weird, I guess.

It allows me to distance myself from my conflicting thoughts and my introjects.

Thanks for the replies everyone!

My t and I are going to give it a go next session. Funny thing is I know she doesn't like role playing either, so we're both going to be feeling uncomfortable. Ha.