Unseen Minds

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 spiralling, 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.

The Fall into Therapy

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 understanding 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 or just stories that others told. That I don’t have an inner monologue and experience thoughts 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.

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.

 But that’s not what happened.

Where It All Went Wrong

In our very first session, I was invited to talk about my childhood.

“I can’t access those memories,” I said gently.

He nodded and continued. “What’s your inner voice saying to you?”

“I don’t have one,” I reminded him. “My thoughts don’t come through as speech.”

He nodded again and asked, “Can you visualise yourself as a child in that moment?”

I sighed.

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

It didn’t.

This pattern continued for six weeks. 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 had 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.

I needed to find a way to uncover the thoughts that were underneath all of that.

He was trying his best. I honestly believe that. He was kind, well-intentioned, and clearly cared about helping me. But the tools he relied on were incompatible with my mind. And because he 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 he’d also checked out by then too.

I left that therapeutic relationship feeling more broken than when I entered it. I wasn’t just struggling, I was starting to believe I was unfixable.

The Realisation

Looking back, I see it clearly now. It wasn’t his fault; he was clearly well intentioned and demonstrated a willingness to want to help me. He just didn’t know how to.

Like most therapists, he had never been trained to recognise or adapt for minds that don’t operate in imagery, memory, or inner dialogue. He had never been taught that some clients don’t feel and can't step in to 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, he couldn’t adapt.

He was working with only the tools he had.

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

I’m Not Alone

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 registers.

Again and again, my searches proved fruitless.

What I found instead were stories just like mine. People who had sat in rooms trying to comply, trying to explain, and slowly giving up. Clients who left therapy not just feeling unsupported, but 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, they gave up. They just left quietly. 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.

Among the 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.

A New Path Forward

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.
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, if not the world's, first training programme designed specifically for therapists.

Students say that it's the most valuable training they've taken, since qualifying, and that they wish they'd discovered it sooner.

Why I Wrote This Book

This book is not a full methodology. It’s not a substitute for training, and it’s certainly not an accusation.

It’s a map.

A way of naming what so many clients have struggled to express.

A way of showing therapists what might be happening beneath the surface of confusion, resistance, or shutdown. Most importantly, a way of opening the door to 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.