The Lie We Were Told
For years, the story about aphantasia—the inability to
create mental imagery—has been one of benign curiosity or even privilege. We
were told it was a harmless cognitive variant. Recently, the narrative has
shifted, claiming it’s a protective advantage, a shield against the horrors of
trauma.
This is not just an inaccuracy. It is a catastrophic
phenomenological fallacy.
My name is Cristina Gherghel. I am an independent researcher
who has lived with Panmodal Aphantasia and Complex PTSD my entire life. This
blog post summarizes a 25-year forced inquest, now formalized in my thesis,
which proves that for survivors of long-term abuse, this condition is not a
shield. It is a cage that magnifies the agony.
What is Panmodal Aphantasia? It’s More Than a “Blind
Mind’s Eye”
To understand the argument, you must first understand the
architecture. Most people think of aphantasia as a “blind mind’s eye.” My work
defines a more absolute condition:
Panmodal Aphantasia is the full-spectrum absence
of voluntary internal sensory representation. This means:
- No visual imagery (the typical definition).
- No auditory imagery, like hearing a remembered song or voice (Anauralia).
- No internal monologue or spontaneous inner speech (Anendophasia).
- No simulated sense of touch, smell, taste, or internal body sensations.
This is not a chosen focus. It is a cognitive reality where
the mind operates on a bedrock of lucid, non-sensory awareness. And in the
context of trauma, this architecture becomes a perfect trap.
The Law of Conservation of Traumatic Affect: Where Does
the Pain Go?
In physics, energy cannot be created or destroyed, only
transformed. The same is true for the energy of a traumatic event—the terror,
pain, and shock must go somewhere.
In a neurotypical mind, this traumatic pressure is distributed
and released through multiple “vents”:
- The Visual Vent: Visualizing a safe place or a positive outcome.
- The Auditory Vent: Hearing a soothing internal voice saying, “It’s over, you’re safe.”
- The Narrative Vent: Telling and re-telling the story internally to process it.
- The Somatic Vent: Simulating physical relaxation, like imagining warmth spreading through tense muscles.
In Panmodal Aphantasia, every single one of these vents
is structurally sealed shut.
The mind cannot visualize safety, cannot generate a
comforting voice, cannot narrate the event into the past, and cannot simulate a
state of physical calm.
Where does 100% of the traumatic pressure go?
It is violently compressed into the only vessel remaining: The Physical
Body.
This is The Law of Conservation of Traumatic Affect. The
absence of imagery doesn’t delete the trauma; it concentrates it somatically.
Fleshbacks: The Body’s Relentless Replay
Without imagery, the classic PTSD “flashback” cannot occur.
But this is not an advantage. It is traded for something far worse: the Fleshback.
A flashback is an intrusive mental reliving.
A Fleshback is a continuous, somatic reliving.
- It is the body locked in a state of present-tense terror, long after the event is over.
- It is chronic muscle armoring, a sensation of an “Invisible Hand” strangling the throat for twelve years.
- It is the hormonal collapse, the inflammatory storms (endometriosis, vestibulodynia), and the metabolic ruin that follows from the body being the sole archive of horror.
The body doesn’t just “keep the score.” When the mind cannot process the data, the body is consumed by the score.
Paraconsistent Facticity: The Torture of the Lucid
Witness
This leads to the core state of torture I term Paraconsistent
Facticity.
This is the condition of a conscious, lucid mind being
trapped as a utterly helpless witness to the body’s uninterrupted suffering.
The mind sees the body failing. It understands the cause and effect with
perfect, agonizing clarity. It wants to help.
But it cannot.
The Failed Kiss: The Ultimate Proof of the Mind-Body
Schism
The most devastating evidence of this schism is what I
call The Failed Kiss.
Imagine your body is in a state of panic. Your mind, in a
rational attempt to save you, speaks aloud: “Please, breathe. You are safe.
Please stop.”
In a neurotypical brain, this is a “kiss”—the external
command is internalized, converted into sensory resonance, and the body
complies.
In Panmodal Aphantasia, this command hits a pane of
glass.
The words are understood semantically, but with no internal
sensory medium to “catch” them, they cannot resonate. The message strikes the
glass and vanishes. The mind screams “I love you” into a void, and the body,
deaf to the plea, continues to scream in somatic terror.
The purpose of self-soothing is to regulate the internal
state. When the command cannot be internalized, the purpose is defeated not by
chance, but by architectural law.
The Teleological Refutation: Why This is Not a Survival
Mechanism
A survival mechanism must, by definition, enhance the
organism’s capacity to endure and recover. Panmodal Aphantasia in long-term
abuse achieves the exact opposite.
- It defies coping, which requires attenuation of intensity. Instead, it creates a concentration effect.
- It defies defense, which requires the ability to distort reality. Instead, it enforces a brutal, unedited facticity.
- It defies healing, because it architecturally precludes the tools—imagery and narrative—used in most trauma therapies.
Calling this condition a “defense mechanism” is like calling
a missing leg a “strategy for not walking.” It is a catastrophic misapplication
of psychological terms.
A Challenge to the Field, An Offering to the Sufferer
This work is a direct challenge to the academic and clinical
consensus. It critiques the methodological errors in studies that claim
aphantasia is protective and provides a new, somatically-grounded framework for
understanding non-representational trauma.
But more importantly, it is an offering.
If you have aphantasia and have endured long-term abuse, and
have never understood why your suffering feels so raw, immediate, and
untouchable by standard therapy, this thesis is for you. It is an attempt to
give language to the silent agony.
The full argument, with all its evidence, clinical
correlations, and philosophical foundations, is detailed in my thesis.
This is not the end of the conversation. It is the
essential, missing beginning.
Cristina Gherghel Independent researcher, author, neurodivergent advocate
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Dive Deeper into the Research
Related Blogs
For complementary insights and further reading:
🔹 Neurodivergent as It Is — Exploring Neurological Realities Without Reductionism in Romanian
🔹 Cristina Gherghel Research —Panthropic Abuse and Ontological TraumaJoin the Journey
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