Calle Englund

Oh yeah, very. Also the moment I realised there was something fundamentally different with how my mind works. Like you I had tried and rage quit many times. Then I was in a CBT group for anxiety / panic management, and they relied heavily on guided meditations and visualization as tools. No-one else in the group had any problems, and could describe their imagined scenes in varying detail. I just sat there in frustration, looking at the inside of my eye lids. The psychologists that lead the group had no understanding or recognition of anything like that. Some time later I found there was a word, and explanation, for this. Understanding that I'm actually incapable, and not just not trying hard enough, has helped me somewhat get past the frustration, and find other ways to use visualization based guided meditations; treating it more like narrative voice about a character in a story, and using that as focus instead of the imagery they intended. But I really prefer guided meditations that use exploration of actual current body sensations as focus. Or just simply guided breathing, which happens to be something I can also do on my own, mostly. And the only thing I have left when I catch anxiety about to tip over to panic, and that goes away too. Also, got diagnosed as ADHD with (not yet further explored) autistic traits, in about the same time frame, so there's been a lot of reinterpreting a life of "not trying hard enough" as "actually incapable, need to find another way around". All that work might also have helped reframe guided meditation "failures", but it all blends together. Oh, side-track. TL;DR: Yes. ;)

The first time I had that "everyone else can" moment was in a CBT group for anxiety a few years ago, and we were doing a guided meditation, that involved visualizations... my nemesis... and afterwards we were asked to describe our experience. Everyone had varyingly imaginative things to tell, while I sat there silent. At first I thought they were all just making things up, but then when I didn't volunteer anything, the psychologists leading the group asked me, and I was like "uh, nothing? just the darkness of having my eyes shut". They had never heard of such a thing, so not just the only one in the group, but the only one ever?! Took a while until I found the word for it, and stories from others. So apparently I'm not the only one, just a pretty rare one. Then I read more and realized that most aphantasiacs still have some degree of vividness in their other senses. I don't.