Introduction

Unseen Minds is a book I never planned to write and yet, in many ways, I was always going to.

This book was born out of personal frustration, confusion, and the deeply disorienting experience of not being understood in therapy. Not because I wasn’t willing, but because my mind simply didn’t work in the way therapy expected it to.

I came into therapy already knowing that I had aphantasia, SDAM (severely deficient autobiographical memory), anauralia, anendophasia, and alexithymia. I wasn’t confused about how my mind worked, as I had spent years understanding it, living with it, and learning how it shaped my experience of the world.

What I hadn’t expected was that the therapists I turned to for support had either no or very limited understanding of these cognitive differences.

That’s when I realised that the problem wasn’t with me, it was with the training, with the assumptions around how our inner worlds work, and with the lack of knowledge and understanding. It was with therapeutic models that simply haven't caught up with the full diversity of human minds.

This experience took me from being a coach and practitioner to a woman determined to make sure no one had to sit through therapy thinking they were broken or not believed, when, in fact, they were simply misunderstood.

This book is my invitation to you to see what’s been hidden, to recognise what’s been missing, and to gently explore how you might work more effectively with clients whose minds don’t fit the mold that therapy was built around.

This isn’t a textbook or a manual. Instead, it’s a conversation, a starting point and a guide to what could be.

Who This Book Is For

This book is primarily written for counsellors, psychotherapists, and other mental health professionals who want to expand their practice to include neurodivergent clients, especially those with cognitive profiles that are often invisible and deeply misunderstood.

If you’ve ever sat with a client who didn’t respond to visualisation, struggled with memory-based work, or seemed emotionally flat despite your best efforts, this book is for you.

If you’ve ever wondered why some clients just don’t “get” inner child work, can’t connect with parts, or fail to respond to imagery or future pacing techniques, this book is for you.

If you’re committed to inclusivity, accessibility, and client-centred practice, and you want to grow your understanding of how different minds experience therapy, this book is for you.

But it’s not only for therapists.

This book is also for coaches, educators, wellbeing practitioners, and even those who are just beginning to suspect they might have one or more of the cognitive differences described here. If you’ve recently discovered the term aphantasia or stumbled across SDAM, this book will help you understand what it all means, especially in the context of personal growth and mental health.

It isn’t designed to replace clinical training, but to spark awareness. It will not give you all the tools, but it will show you why you need them.

Most importantly, it will point you to the path forward, toward the specialised training that can transform your work and the lives of the clients you serve.

How to Use This Book

This is an interactive book, and it’s been written with real-world application in mind.

Each chapter introduces a key concept that makes up the cluster of multisensory and cognitive processing differences: aphantasia, SDAM (Severely Deficient Autobiographical Memory), anauralia, anendophasia, and alexithymia.

You’ll find short reflective exercises and practice-based prompts throughout. These are not academic tasks; they are invitations to pause, reflect, and reconsider. To look again at how you work, and who you might be missing.

Some chapters include brief case examples, drawn from either my own lived experience or composite client stories. These are designed to help you “feel into” what therapy might look like from the client’s point of view.

I encourage you to:

•  Keep a journal or notepad to write down your reflections.
•  Pause at the end of each chapter to consider what has shifted in your understanding.
•  Resist the urge to diagnose, this book isn’t about pathologising but about understanding.

If, by the final chapter, you’ve found yourself rethinking just one part of your practice, then this book has done its job.

If you’re ready to go deeper, the final chapter will show you how.

Chapter 1 – Where It All Began

For months, I’d known something wasn’t quite right. I couldn’t name it, but I could feel it. There was a tightness in my chest, a churning in my stomach, and a fog that sat like a veil across my thoughts. Nights became restless and I would lie in bed for hours, eyes wide open in the darkness, staring at nothing. In the morning, as I woke from what little sleep I’d had, I could feel a strange energy in my mind, as though thoughts were spinning, and spiraling, but there was just silence. No racing thoughts to tell me what was worrying me. No stream of consciousness. Just a tense, humming stillness, like something was trying to form just out of reach.

Knowing something was wrong, I did what I’d always done, I tried to understand it. Every morning, I sat down with my journal and attempted to write my way to clarity. My logical mind worked overtime, dissecting every element of my situation. I knew what the problem was on paper, yet nothing about the emotional intensity made sense. Why this situation? Why now? And why was I spiraling when, on the surface, everything looked so normal? It just made no sense and the harder I dug to try to get to the root of the problem, the deeper I fell into the blackest of holes.

When journaling didn’t help, I turned to my usual coping tools. I meditated, I practiced mindfulness, I tried grounding exercises, and breathwork. But these tools that had previously been helpful to me just weren’t working. Still, I hoped something would shift.

And then, one day, I just broke. I couldn’t get out of bed and the spiraling I’d felt for weeks turned to the heaviest weight. Tears came in waves I couldn’t explain. Panic attacks started without warning, and I was clearly no longer managing. I couldn’t work and I could barely function. I was broken and I didn’t know how to put myself back together again.

I knew I needed help and not in a vague, future-oriented way, but right now, urgently. I needed someone who could help me make sense of the overwhelm, the burnout, the strange disconnect between knowing what was happening and not being able to feel my way through it. I needed someone who could help me to dig deep enough to identify and understand the silent spiraling thoughts. Someone who could get me past my logical knowledge of the situation and closer to understanding what I was feeling and unable to name. Someone who could help me out of a depression I’d never experienced before.

I met with a therapist whose background and profile gave me confidence that I was going to get the help I needed. During our initial call, I explained that I live with multisensory aphantasia, severely deficient autobiographical memory (SDAM), alexithymia and anendophasia.

If you’ve never heard of those terms, you’re not alone, most people haven’t, but I had learned enough by this point to explain them clearly.

I said that I couldn’t visualise, that I had no mental pictures, and no internal senses. That my childhood memories were inaccessible to me, just facts or the stories that others told about my life. I said that I don’t have an inner monologue and experience thoughts wordlessly, without hearing them in my mind.

I explained that, logically, I was very aware of the cause and the events that had led to me feeling this way, but that I didn’t understand why I wasn’t coping with that situation. That living with these cognitive differences was making it difficult to understand what I was thinking and why it was hitting me so hard.

I was seeking support to understand why I was so emotionally overwhelmed by a present-day situation that wouldn’t normally have affected me. What I really needed was someone who could help me find the thoughts that I couldn't hear, so I could address them and move on.

Someone who could help me uncover what was triggering this reaction and how I could process and heal from that.

My therapist hadn’t heard of any of these terms before, but was warm, curious, and professional. I felt hopeful that, even without prior knowledge, we could find a way to work together.

Sadly, that isn’t what happened.

In our very first session, I was invited to talk about my childhood. “I can’t access those memories,” I said gently. They nodded and asked, “Can you see yourself as a child and imagine yourself in your bedroom?” I sighed. “That’s not something I can do” I said.

They nodded again and said that we would try something else. “Thinking about the moments when you feel yourself spiraling, what are you thinking? What is your inner Sassy saying to you? “I don’t know, I can’t ‘hear’ those thoughts,” I reminded them. “My thoughts don’t come through as speech.”

I would explain, repeatedly, that I couldn’t do what they were asking. That I had no inner child to visualise. No inner voice to interrogate. No sensory landscape to explore. But each time, they’d rephrase the same questions and offer the same techniques, as if repetition might unlock something.

It didn’t, and that pattern continued for all our sessions.

We would talk about how planning for what I could do to get me out of the situation would help me to move forward, but I had already done that. I’d already decided on the course of action I needed to take to remove myself from the situation. I had a plan and was ready to start putting it into practice but first I needed to overcome the crushing depression, overwhelming anxiety, and all too frequent panic attacks so I was well enough to put that plan into action.

I needed to find a way to uncover my thoughts, deal with them and move on.

They were trying their best. I honestly believe that. They were kind, well-intentioned, and clearly cared about helping me, but the tools they relied on were incompatible with my mind. And because they didn’t understand my internal experience, or perhaps didn’t fully believe it, our sessions became a painful, frustrating mismatch.

By the fourth session, I had checked out. I was no longer engaging and, if I’m honest, I was just there because I had six sessions and felt obligated to turn up. I’ve often wondered if they had also checked out by then too.

I left that therapeutic relationship feeling more broken than when I entered it. Now I wasn’t just struggling, I was starting to believe I was unfixable and that I’d never be well again.

Looking back, I see it clearly now. It wasn’t their fault; they always demonstrated a willingness to want to help me, but they just didn’t know how to.

Like most therapists, they had never been trained to recognise or adapt for minds that don’t operate in imagery, memory, or inner dialogue. They had never been taught that some clients can’t feel or step into memories, can’t see safe places, and don’t have an internal voice to talk to. That for some of us, uncovering our thoughts can be difficult, and without that knowledge, they couldn’t adapt. They were working with only the tools they had, and those tools just didn’t work for me.

It wasn’t until later when I began speaking with others like me that I realised how common this experience was.

At first, I thought my experience was an unfortunate one-off, that I’d simply found myself matched with a therapist who wasn’t the right fit. So, I went looking for stories like mine, hoping to find someone who could say, “Yes, I’ve been there, and here’s what helped.”

I searched forums, support groups, and professional directories. I read every post I could find that mentioned aphantasia, SDAM, no inner monologue, or alexithymia. I looked for recommendations, and I typed keywords into therapist and counsellor registers.

But every time, my searches proved fruitless. It didn’t matter which directory I tried, there just wasn’t anyone who said that they understood these cognitive differences.

What I found instead were stories just like mine. Stories from people who sat in rooms trying to comply, trying to explain, and slowly giving up. Clients who left therapy not only feeling unsupported, but also deeply ashamed. Some were told they were dissociating, others were accused of resisting, a few were labelled as emotionally avoidant.

Like me, most said that they just checked out, and they gave up. Others who quietly left, ghosting their therapists when reminded that they were due to book further sessions.

Time and again I read comments from people saying that they left feeling even more broken. This was especially true for those who, at the time, had no idea that they even had a different way of thinking and experiencing the world.

Scattered amongst the ‘horror’ stories, I found glimmers of hope. Therapists who hadn’t heard of aphantasia but had listened. Professionals who, even without training, had adjusted their language and approach to meet their clients where they were. There weren’t many, but they existed, and they were making a difference.

Those early threads of possibility gave me something I hadn’t felt in a long time: purpose. I remember thinking that I was going to have to fix myself, and once I’d done that, I was going to ‘fix’ therapy for people like me.

I threw myself into learning. I revisited everything I thought I knew about therapy, first from a client perspective, and then from a practitioner. I undertook counselling training, not because I planned to become a therapist in the traditional sense, but because I wanted to understand the frameworks, models, and assumptions from the inside.

What I found confirmed what I had already sensed. Most therapeutic techniques are designed around minds that are visual, emotionally expressive, and rich in inner narrative. Those models depend on memory, imagery, sensory processing, and verbal emotional awareness.

They are not built for people like me…but they could be if therapists knew, if therapists understood and if therapists were trained to adapt.

I set about developing the training that would help therapists to know, to understand and how to adapt. It became my mission and hours of research and practical application led to the launch of the Aphantasia Therapist training programme. The UK’s, first and only training programme designed specifically for therapists.

Therapists who’ve completed this have come away with a whole new level of understanding to help them to connect with people like me. To support us to feel seen, understood and heard. Some have said that it's the most valuable training they've taken, since qualifying, and that they wish they'd discovered it sooner.

Many have said that they wished they had been more aware of these cognitive differences and that was one of the main drivers for me writing this book.

This isn’t a full methodology, nor a substitute for training, and it’s certainly not an accusation. It’s a guide, and insight into what so many clients have struggled to express.

It’s a way of showing therapists what might be happening beneath the surface of confusion, resistance, or shutdown. Most importantly, it’s a way of opening the door to therapeutic practice that is more inclusive, more flexible, and more aware.

People like me are already in your rooms and we’ve always been there. We’re thoughtful, sensitive, analytical, and emotionally present but cognitively different.

You don’t need to change everything, but you do need to see us and that’s what this book is for.

Now that you understand my journey, let's explore how these assumptions about our inner worlds shape therapy itself.

Reflective Practice

Before you turn the page, I invite you to pause with the following:

1.  Have you ever had a client who didn’t respond to visualisation, memory recall, or parts work in the way you expected? What interpretation did you make at the time?
2.  Have you ever gently insisted that a client “just try” to picture something, even after they said they couldn’t?
3.  Have you considered that difference, not resistance, might be behind certain moments of therapeutic mismatch?
4.  How does my story sit with you? What thoughts or feelings does it bring up?
5.  What would it mean for your practice if some of your clients can’t visualise, recall their childhood, or access an inner voice and they started to ‘check out’ in your sessions?

You don’t need to have all the answers now, but if these questions stir something in you, a sense of curiosity, reflection, even discomfort, then you are exactly the person this book was written for.

Chapter 2 – When Therapy Assumes a Rich Inner World

We grow up with messages everywhere that our minds should be full of pictures, voices, and richly detailed memories. Children’s books ask us to imagine dragons, fairies, and magical kingdoms. School exercises prompt us to “picture your perfect day” or “use the blackboard in your mind.” to solve complex maths equations. Films portray memory as vivid flashbacks, often layered with narrative voiceover, the inner monologue made audible. Self-help literature tells us to “visualise your goals,” while meditation apps begin with, “Close your eyes and imagine yourself...”

Visualisation and inner speech are so normalised that we rarely question them. In fact, they’re not just seen as normal, they’re considered essential tools for personal development. Research into sports and performance psychology frequently highlights the benefits of mental rehearsal. Studies show that athletes who visualise their routine often perform better. Motivational speakers and business coaches encourage clients to create vision boards, mentally rehearse success, and engage their senses to manifest their desired future.

There is robust evidence for these practices. Imagery-based mental training can enhance motor learning, increase confidence, and strengthen emotional resilience. But what happens when a person can’t picture a scene, imagine a movement, or hear their own internal voice narrating a task?

Where does that leave people who simply don’t have access to that kind of inner world?

The answer, sadly, is often exclusion, not by design or intention but by assumption.

This cultural backdrop creates a foundation that quietly infiltrates therapeutic practice. It’s never said outright, but it’s always there, this quiet assumption that everyone has access to an inner world of pictures, inner voices, rich emotional recall, and sensory experience.

It’s not unique to one modality or method, it shows up everywhere; in scripts, in training manuals, in CPD workshops, in the phrases we repeat to our clients and ourselves.

 “Talk to the part of you that’s afraid.” “Go back to the moment that memory was formed.” “What were you thinking at that moment?”

These instructions aren't careless, they're thoughtful, therapeutic, and often transformative. But they are shaped by a particular world view, one that assumes everyone can imagine, recall, visualise, and connect in the same way.

That becomes a problem when the client in front of you simply can’t do the things you are asking of them. It also becomes a problem when it assumes that the absence of this inner world means that something is wrong.

When a client struggles to visualise their childhood home or talk to their inner child, we often interpret this as resistance, avoidance, trauma, or a relational block. When a client can’t recall the emotional tone of a significant life event, we may conclude that they’re not accessing the work deeply enough, or that dissociation is at play.

Sometimes those assumptions are accurate, but sometimes those responses are not psychological at all, they are cognitive differences that may have been there since birth. Differences that your client might not even be aware of.

When therapy has been shaped by a single dominant model of the inner world, these differences become invisible, unseen, leading to a mismatch and the potential for a breakdown in the therapeutic relationship.

My experience of this isn’t unique, with many people like me saying that therapy left them feeling “like a failure”, “broken” or that it could never work for them.

If your client can’t do what you’re asking them, maybe they aren’t shutting you out, or being resistant, maybe they’re giving you the most honest version of their internal experience but therapy, as it’s commonly practiced, doesn’t always know how to receive that.

Case Study – Claire’s Story

Claire is a project manager for a large banking firm. Throughout her career she prided herself on her ability to handle workplace feedback, and other people’s personalities with ease. She was known for being calm, reasonable, and professional, able to take constructive criticism in stride and resolve conflict with clarity. But something shifted when a new colleague joined one of her project teams, and with them came a wave of unexpected reactions. In meetings, when this person spoke sharply or offered critique, Claire would feel flooded with emotions. Her chest would tighten, her stomach would churn, and she would find herself rattled for hours afterward. She didn’t understand why because nothing overt had happened and the things he was saying weren’t anything she hadn’t dealt with before. There was no confrontation, no aggression, no inappropriate comment but she still felt a consistent, visceral reaction that didn’t match the surface of the interaction.

Claire was asked who the colleague reminded her of, she couldn’t answer. Not because she didn’t want to, but because there was simply nothing there. No memory, no image, no story, just the same blank fog she always felt when trying to recall the past.

When her therapist asked her to describe what she was thinking in those moments, she struggled again. She knew there was something that she was reacting to, but she just couldn’t access the thoughts behind the feelings.

Claire didn’t know that cognitive differences like SDAM, aphantasia, or anendophasia existed. All she knew was that therapy had become a space where she couldn’t explain herself and that it was unlikely to ever be effective for her.

Claire’s story isn’t unique. Here’s how it often begins: You’ve been working with a client for a few sessions. You feel there’s a good alliance, great rapport and they’re engaged, present, and reflective. Then you introduce something that relies on internal imagery or sensory recall, perhaps a visualisation or a memory-based intervention.

You say, “Let’s go back to that moment. What do you see?”

They hesitate, or they say, “When you say ‘see’ what do you mean?” Or maybe they start to talk about what they ‘see’ in a way that sounds like they are reading from a shopping list. Factual things lacking in rich detail or emotion. Or maybe they just say, “I don’t know”, look confused by your question and talk about having “a dreadful memory”.

So, you rephrase or encourage. You offer some structure. “Imagine you’re stepping into that moment, just observing it from the outside. Like you’re watching it happen. What images, or sensations are present?”

Still nothing.

At this point you make a mental note that they seem uncomfortable with the exercise, possibly resistant or even a trauma-related blockage. You file it under ‘needs more time’ and move on. Or you try to find other ways to help them to uncover and understand the ‘blockage’ that seems to make them even more confused.

But what might your client be experiencing?

They may be thinking:

•  “Is this how therapy is supposed to work? Am I doing it wrong?”
•  “If I don’t feel anything, does that mean I’m numb?”
•  “Should I just say something to move it along? I could just make something up”
•  “Maybe I’m broken.”

Right there, without rupture, without raised voices, something vital is lost: the sense that the therapist sees the client clearly.

Clients with multisensory aphantasia, anauralia, anendophasia, or SDAM often sit in therapy rooms silently questioning themselves. They’ve followed the instructions, and they’ve tried the exercises, but when nothing shows up, they’re left with a difficult internal narrative.

They may conclude they are doing therapy badly because they are failing at introspection. They may feel that they are too “in their head,” emotionally blocked, or irreparably broken.

What they don’t realise, and what therapists often haven’t been taught to consider, is that this isn’t about will, it’s about wiring.

In supervision, we’re often taught to look for what lies beneath. When a client doesn’t engage with an intervention, we ask, “What’s being avoided?” We look for what the behaviour is protecting. We wonder what attachment dynamic is being replayed. Rarely do we ask, “What if this simply isn’t how their mind works?”

Therapists are trained to map emotional responses onto a landscape of trauma, attachment, and defence. We’re less often encouraged to look at cognitive processing styles as a foundational element of how a client engages, or doesn’t, with therapeutic methods. The result is that genuine difference is often read as dysfunction. It is labelled, interpreted, or explained away using familiar frames. We don’t question the tool, we question the client’s readiness, openness, or depth of work. But what if it’s the tool that’s the mismatch? What if your client doesn’t need to be “encouraged” to connect with their younger self, but needs you to find a way of working that doesn’t rely on internal imagery or their inner world at all?

Most therapists begin their professional journey with a deep commitment to helping others. They study diligently, reflect honestly, and build therapeutic relationships with care. Training equips them with a broad range of theories and techniques from psychodynamic thinking to person-centred principles, trauma frameworks to CBT protocols.

There is guidance on working with dissociation, neurodevelopmental conditions, and relational dynamics, but there’s a notable gap in the curriculum.

Very few training programmes teach therapists how to work with clients whose inner worlds are simply built differently. You might be taught to explore memory, but not what to do when a client can’t access autobiographical memory at all. You may learn to work with parts, but not what it means when a client doesn’t hear an inner voice. You’re guided to use imagery, metaphor, and emotional recall but rarely shown how to support clients who can’t visualise, can’t name what they feel, or don’t “re-live” the past in sensory ways.

These aren’t fringe experiences, they’re simply unnamed in most training and when something isn’t named, it becomes invisible not just to the client, but to the therapist too.

At this stage it’s important to understand that this isn’t a failing on your part. It’s simply a gap in the system. A gap that doesn’t recognise, or support you for:

•  People who don’t visualise
•  People who don’t hear an internal monologue
•  People who don’t emotionally “re-live” memories
•  People who can’t access their life memories.
•  People who can’t name or feel their emotions in a typical way

You’ve been trying to support clients with the best tools and knowledge available to you. It’s even possible that you’ve been intuitively trying to adapt, even without knowing what you were adapting for. Maybe you’ve even sensed when something didn’t quite fit, but you didn’t have the words to explain why that might be.

As I’ve said before, this book isn’t here to shame your practice, it’s here to fill in those gaps and to give you language, insight, and starting points so as not to replace what you do well, but to enhance it.

Once you see these invisible differences, you can’t unsee them, and once you start adapting intentionally, clients who previously checked out or quietly disappeared may finally find a way to stay.

Reflective Practice

Noticing Your Own Framework

Set aside ten to fifteen minutes to sit with the following questions. You may wish to journal your responses, discuss them in supervision, or use them as prompts for your own professional development planning.

1. Which therapeutic tools or techniques do I use that rely on the client having internal imagery, emotional memory, or inner speech? Think beyond formal interventions and consider the language and metaphors you use.
2. When a client says, “I don’t see anything,” or “I’m not sure how I feel,” how do I usually respond? Do I assume resistance? Do I reframe? Do I pause and explore further?
3. Have I ever interpreted a client’s cognitive difference as emotional flatness or disconnection? What might I have missed?
4. How comfortable am I sitting with not knowing, especially when a tool I usually trust doesn’t work? What do I reach for in those moments?
5. What would it mean to practice therapy that centres the client’s way of experiencing the world, even if it looks nothing like my own? How might that change my sense of confidence, flexibility, or creativity as a practitioner?

The work of becoming a more inclusive therapist is never about perfection, it’s about attention. The more willing you are to question your tools, the more space you make for the client who has never quite fit into them.