.jpg "A Life in Words: A Trauma and Aphantasia book by Cristina Gherghel")
Have you ever heard of the blindness of the mind’s eye?
Ever wanted to have anauralia explained?
What does anendophasia mean?
My mind is blind, deaf, and mute, how about yours?
It is an aphantasia book examining the intersection of anauralia, anendophasia, abuse, and trauma—the autopsy of a life lived without the very cognitive machinery that most people use to survive.
And I wrote it because I had to. Because after fifty years of studying abuse, trauma, and the human mind—from inside my own skull—I realized that everything we think we know about healing is built on an a lie for millions, possibly billions of people.
When a Unquestioned Belief Becomes a Sentence
That everyone can visualize is a false belief. That everyone has an inner voice. That everyone can generate a mental image of a safe place, a future success, a loved one’s face. That you can “picture” your way out of pain, “hear” encouragement, “see” a better tomorrow.
I can’t.
I have panmodal aphantasia—the complete absence of mental imagery, inner sound, and inner speech. When I close my eyes, there is only darkness. When I think, there is no voice narrating. When I remember, there is no picture, no sound, no replay. There is only the bare proposition: this happened.
For decades, I read that this was a “neutral variation.” A harmless quirk. Cognitive science pats us on the head and says, “You can still be creative, you can still function—it’s fine.”
It is not fine.
What the Research Refuses to See
Without mental imagery, there is no bridge between what happens to you and what you feel happening.
In a typical mind, that bridge does two things:
- It dampens negative experience. When a threat arrives, imagery and inner speech give it a frame—a temporal tag that says “this is happening now, but it will end.” The body receives the cortisol spike, but the spike is buffered. The blow lands, but it doesn’t stay forever.
- It amplifies positive experience. When kindness arrives, the bridge converts that event into a rich, sensory, felt state—warmth in the chest, release in the diaphragm, a cascade of dopamine and oxytocin that tells the body: this is good, this is real, this is for you. That felt state is what fuels hope, movement, the will to continue.
Without the bridge, negative experience lands with full force, unfiltered—directly into the tissue. And positive experience never lands at all. The event occurs, the kindness is real, but it never becomes a feeling. It stays a proposition: “this person is being good to me.” The body receives no chemical instruction to relax, to trust, to heal.
So I have spent fifty years accumulating every blow I ever took, while every kindness I ever received was noted and then chemically erased.
The ledger has only one ink.
What That Looked Like, In Real Life
I woke every morning with a racing heart and a locked jaw, suffocating in my own sleep. The past had never become past. Every childhood look of contempt, every silence, every slammed door—they were not memories. They were ongoing physiological states, always present tense.
I could not visualize a safe place. I could not hear an inner voice telling me it would be okay. I could not dissociate—because dissociation requires an inner room to escape into, and I had no inner room. The blows landed on bare flesh, and the flesh had nowhere to run.
The therapists ask to picture a beach. To hear a comforting voice. To imagine a healed self. They are asking us to run software on hardware that had never been installed. And when we can’t, the failure is attributed to resistance, lack of motivation, or insufficient commitment to recovery.
The treatment is gasoline on fire.
Why These Subjects Can No Longer Be Ignored
I wrote A Life in Words because I refuse to let that silence stand. I wrote it to give language to what has been unspeakable:
- Fleshbacks—the purely somatic recurrence of trauma, with no image, no sound, no narrative—only the body becoming the blow again.
- The bone-deep exhaustion that no rest can restore—because the fuel for hope was never generated, and every day requires manual ignition, from a dead battery, just to remain upright.
I wrote it for every person who has felt that standard treatments don't work. For every survivor who has been told they aren't trying hard enough. For everyone who has been made to feel that their failure to heal is a moral failing, when in fact it is a structural impossibility.
And I wrote it because the research establishment has spent decades insisting that aphantasia is harmless—obscuring the truth so that no one ever connects 2+2 to make 4.
Is is Addressed to You?
If you are a clinician, it will force you to rethink treatment resistance. If you are a researcher, it will challenge the "neutral variation" paradigm and show you that mental imagery is not a luxury—it is a survival mechanism. If you are a survivor, it will give you the validation you have never received. It will tell you: you are not broken. The system was never built for you.
If you are simply a human being who wants to understand the full range of what consciousness can be—and what it can cost—this book will take you to a place you have never been.
Where This Leaves Us
Just like all my other books, I wrote A Life in Words to tell the truth.
And the truth is that abuse is not a lesson.
Chronic hardship is not a mechanism for growth, and suffering does not become meaningful simply because we are forced to learn to endure it.
Pain does not make a person better, stronger, or wiser by virtue of surviving it.
Some wounds never heal.
The demand to find meaning in suffering is not comfort—it is a crime against the suffering.
Get your copy of A Life in Words now.
- Amazon: https://link.amazon/B0iU6ZKsI
And if you want to support this work, you can also:
- Subscribe to my Substack for ongoing essays based on studies in neurodevelopmental psychology and arelational abuse and neurodivergence https://cristinagherghel.substack.com.
- Join the conversation on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/cw/CristinaGherghel
- Consult and work with me: https://payhip.com/CristinaGherghel
Thank you for reading this far. You are the reason I keep writing—even when the words never echo inside my aphantasia mind.
Cristina Gherghel
Thank you again for reading and supporting my career as a writer and researcher.
- To buy my other books in English click here: Amazon
- For my books in Romanian, click here: Google Play.
"Silence is not the absence of sound. It is the absence of entry."
