Rebecca Saunders (00:03.864)
Hello and welcome to the EMDR Doctor podcast. This is a podcast for clients where I share and explore information about all things EMDR.
My name is Dr Caroline Lloyd. I'm a mental health GP and an EMDR practitioner. And my goal is to demystify EMDR or eye movement desensitization and reprocessing to help you on your EMDR journey. EMDR is a powerful therapy, which helps to reduce the distress from difficult memories. And my goal is to make it accessible to everyone. I hope you enjoy this episode. Hello and welcome back to the EMDR Doctor podcast. I'm Dr Caroline.
coming to you from a very warm Melbourne today. I hope you're staying cool and comfortable. This week I thought I'd do a quick potty on uncommon questions just for a bit of something different, the not so frequently asked questions. So before I start I will just let you know that the doors to my heal your past course
starting March the 6th are open now. So if you would like to get started on your healing journey using EMDR, this is one way to work with me starting in about a month's time. head on over to emdrdoctor.com.au forward slash heal. That's H E A L to save your spot in the group. If you're not quite sure how group EMDR works, my episode 22 last week went into it in some detail. So
Feel free to have a listen to that episode. Anyway, so today's topic is aphantasia, which I always think sounds like some sort of magical stage show with wizards and elephants, but maybe that's just my imagination throwing that in there. So aphantasia is likely to be some kind of neurodivergence where people can't actually see things in their mind's eye in pictures. It's found in roughly 1 % of the population.
Rebecca Saunders (02:04.994)
But many people who have it don't actually realize that they're different from the rest of the population because it's not really a deficit for them. It's just how their mind works and they don't have anything else to compare it to because we only have access to one brain. So many people with aphantasia may not even know that other people think differently. So most people think in all forms of senses. They may think in pictures and smells and words.
or a memory might just be a concept or a body sensation. But people mainly think of in pictures, like when they're trying to give someone directions, they'll maybe close their eyes to see in their mind's eye, the picture of the corner of the road, how far down they walk, what the building on the corner looks like, where you might have to turn right, et cetera. So when I think about my availability for next week, when somebody
wants to see me, I think of the picture of my diary for that week and literally see in my mind's eye if I have availability. And then I usually have to go to my diary because I can't quite remember. So aphantasia is the inability to see the picture. But that doesn't mean that the information or the memory doesn't exist. It does. It exists just in other forms. So it might be a felt sense. It may be a verbal memory or an
auditory memory. It may be a smell, it may just be an awareness of the event and knowledge that it happened. Sometimes people spell things out in their mind and they have a linguistic picture of it with words of description instead of a visual picture. Sometimes the first time that people are aware that they have a fantasia is when they come to a therapist and we do the usual.
We do a meditation or a relaxation exercise and we ask our clients to visualize a picture of a stream or a calm beach or whatever and the client reports that they can't do it and then sometimes we run into difficulty there. As an EMDR clinician, we usually start a memory processing session with asking to think of the picture with a difficult memory.
Rebecca Saunders (04:25.378)
But we can happily change our instructions to just think of the memory or be aware of the memory or bring forward the memory. And when we check back in, we can ask, how is that memory now instead of what does that picture look like now? So it takes just minor adjustments to make EMDR work in this circumstance. And clinicians, like all people, are creatures of habit.
So we might just take a little bit of practice to get out of our habits of asking for the picture. And this can be a bit frustrating for the client if they're kind of like, no, I can't see a picture. And we keep asking them for a picture, but we do learn eventually and we can adapt and we can change our practice to make it accessible to everyone. And really interestingly, a couple of times now in my experience of working with people with a Fantasia,
Once we have done the trauma memory reprocessing, occasionally clients have been really startled to find that when they think of that incident or the traumatic event, they do get a glimpse of a picture. Now, I don't want to promise that this will happen because it's not likely to happen. can't, you know, it be a pretty bold statement to say that we can cure aphantasia with EMDR. I'm not saying that.
Please don't quote me as saying that, but it just makes me wonder if maybe trauma is implicated in aphantasia in some way. Maybe it's a dissociative process instead of a neurological inability. So I've had a look for some research on this and found very, very little. So what I have found is some interesting things about aphantasia and that is that it was only named in 2015.
Which is quite a surprise. It has been described before that, but it was only named in 2015. And like a lot of things, the ability to see in pictures seems to be on a spectrum from no capacity to think in pictures through the spectrum to normal capacity, whatever normal might be, to hyperphantasia, which is the other end of the spectrum, which is an excess of vivid pictures.
Rebecca Saunders (06:48.31)
And this is really a fascinating situation because hyperphantasia seems to be related to synesthesia. Now, what's synesthesia? It's an even more fascinating condition where the stimulation of one sense will stimulate perception of another sense. So this might be if you hear music, the sense of hearing stimulates the sense of
the visual and people see colours in response to music. Or sometimes there's a crossover between words or numbers and the sense of taste, for example. So people with synesthesia can taste a word or can taste numbers. And there once again seems to be some correlation with autism and synesthesia. So that's just fascinating. So
Getting back to aphantasia, one study I read showed a functional MRI reading of the brain and the study was comparing brain activity when participants were looking at a striped pattern and then the brain activity when they imagined a striped pattern. And they both showed the same visual cortex part of the brain lighting up. But their experience of this,
participants couldn't see the stripy pattern when they had been imagining it, even though they had been trying to see it. So the same area of the brain lit up when they were seeing it and when they were trying to see it, when they were imagining seeing it. So it suggests that there is indeed an image specific representation in the brain. It just remains unconscious or unexpressed or unidentified.
So the brain is doing the right work, but the person is just not experiencing the work that the brain is doing. So that's a really interesting thing and that doesn't really answer the question about whether it's a neurological issue or whether it's dissociation. So the next question that I wanted to know when I was doing some reading was do people with a fantasia dream in pictures? Do they have nightmares?
Rebecca Saunders (09:13.868)
And the answer to that is yes, yes, they dream. Yes, they do have nightmares, but they're not in pictures usually. Sometimes they have a vague picture. Sometimes they have colors, which they may not have in in awake time. Or sometimes they dream in concepts or feelings or words. And another interesting aspect is that people with aphantasia often have a really advanced verbal ability.
as they think in words and sentences rather than in pictures. So they tend to be really effective writers. As far as the relationship to trauma goes with aphantasia, there doesn't seem to be any research on this, but in my Reddit scrolling, there were, which is a very, you know, technical way to find information out, but you know, we go to all sources. There are a few stories about people having developed aphantasia after experiencing trauma.
So I don't really know what to make of that, but it certainly is an interesting snippet to come across, especially in the context of my experience of clients having been able to experience visual snippets of their trauma after we've reprocessed the event, utilizing EMDR. So it may be a neurodiversity phenomena or could be related to trauma or even both that there is a neurodiversity aspect, which is
affected by trauma. So trauma might enhance that neurodiversity or influence the expression of it.
So for those of you who have a fantasia or resonate with that description of not thinking in pictures, just in concepts or words, then rest assured it need not interfere with your EMDR sessions. can happily process. We can happily proceed with trauma processing and it doesn't affect how effective EMDR is for you. So that's all for today. I hope you found this episode on a fantasia interesting or helpful.
Rebecca Saunders (11:21.6)
I will chat to you next week. In the meantime, take good care. Bye for now.
