Holly Larner-Carey

Another Aphantasic Hypnotherapist here. I never questioned whether this would be a barrier to being hypnotised - I'd been hypnotised myself multiple times before training as a therapist. If anything it made me more aware of differences in personal sensory experience and so I check with my clients to see what kind of sensory words will work best for them. I also give them space to imagine in the way that works for them, without adding my own details.

Hi Sam! I did a degree in ceramics, audit was talking with others in my class that led me to realise that "seeing in your mind" wasn't just a sort of metaphorical thing. For me it explained why I enjoyed working with clay - all the tactile sensations and the volumes of the thing, which I can "feel" in my hands and arms when I think of it. I was reasonably good at life drawing - being able to effectively copy from what was in front of me. I'm also fairly good at taking photographs, in that I see what is actually there in the viewfinder (or on the screen) rather than what my mind is hoping for or imagining? Which means that I notice the whole image, and avoid things like spires sticking out of peoples heads or distracting red signs just behind the main subject. I recall and dream mostly with a sense of space and movement, and emotional content. So I can often draw an accurate map of the house my dream took place in, and write in where the doors / bridge / pool or whatever where. But I didn't visualise those things even in the dream, and certainly not afterwards. I experience the movement through the space - how far I moved, how fast, - but I don't see the walls, I just "know" they are there. I occasionally hear things really clearly in dreams, sometimes loud enough to wake me just as I'm falling asleep which is confusing. Like you I find that words are important. The way I describe something to myself if a crucial part of my committing something to memory. I can memorise poetry and scripts, and use words to remember movements. As a martial artist and teacher, a lot of techniques have "nic-names" that describe the movement or position required. Faces however I find really really difficult - people tend to have two eyes, nose, mouth... then I'm onto the colour of their hair, whether they have a beard... then obvious jewellery and clothing, which is rarely much use for recognising them again! Everyone kind of looks the same!

I found languages really hard at school, although I usually pick up a few words if I'm in another country. I also pick up local phrases and accents after spending a while in a place (e.g. after 6 weeks in the USA on an exchange trip I described something as "awesome" without a hint of irony). I hadn't considered that this might be linked to aphantasia, but maybe it did. Learning through spoken repetition always seemed much easier than learning lists of verbs from my exercise book. I also don't really "hear" an inner voice - although I do talk to myself out loud if I'm trying to learn something or remember something. I don't remember if my teachers used visualisation techniques for teaching language, although I do remember doing role-play type conversations, which were always so fake and stilted that they really didn't help me learn anything at all.