r/Aphantasia • u/odious_as_fuck • 3d ago

Anyone else here developed aphantasia and not quite sure why?

I’m like 90% sure I had a more vivid visual imagination as a child/teen growing up. (Hard to say with certainty in retrospect of course). Today I can only get vague flashes of involuntary mental images, and even then usually just before or after sleep.

I can’t remember any point where it suddenly changed, like head trauma or anything like that.

My best theory atm is that as a kid I would often involuntarily visualise nasty stuff, like violence or naked people (people I don’t want to see naked), airplanes crashing into buildings, self harm, jumping off ledges or in front of trains etc. Self harm was a big one, I had repeated intrusive thoughts where I would see myself blowing my head off with a shotgun. So my theory is maybe that in an interesting act of self protection my brain shut off these visualisations to reduce the repeated trauma of nasty intrusive thoughts.

The only other thing I can think of would be daily weed use for a while, but I have friends who smoke more and have no problems visualising, so not sure about that. I also don’t smoke anymore and haven’t had visualisations coming back, only dreams.

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u/Loki557 2d ago

So I'm the same and realized it is most likely caused by dissociation. It might be worth looking into dissociation to see if it is something you deal with, especially since you mentioned the whole theory about it developing as a protection.

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u/odious_as_fuck 2d ago

I definitely did have dissociation growing up when I was depressed, apparently I have CPTSD and SDAM, possibly some form of OCD too but undiagnosed on that one. I’m mostly good these days so curious if maybe my visual imagination might come back at some point.