Blank Imagery During Visualization: Why “I See Nothing” Isn’t a Lack of Imagination — It’s Self-Protection

What if “I see nothing” isn’t an absence of imagery — but proof that the mind is protecting life?

Image generated using AI under the creative direction and composition of Mint Achanaiyakul.

© Mint Achanaiyakul — Founder of Crimson Cat Events & Psychomedia

Abstract

Many trauma survivors report “seeing nothing” during visualization therapy, EMDR imagery prompts, or Rorschach testing and other projective tasks. Clinicians sometimes interpret this blankness as a lack of imagination, detachment, or avoidance. This paper proposes a different explanation: the blank perceptual field is not absence, but defense.

Building on trauma neuroscience and dissociation research, this paper proposes a testable model: inner imagery can be suppressed when accessing memory would exceed the individual’s capacity for safe autonomic regulation. Blankness is therefore not a cognitive deficit, but an extreme survival reflex — a memory firewall that prevents destabilizing content from reaching conscious awareness. By reframing visualization failure as protection rather than failure, this article challenges common misinterpretations and introduces a more trauma-informed model of inner imagery access.

The Meaning of “I See Nothing” During Visualization in Trauma

1. The Misinterpretation of “Nothing”

When clients are asked to visualize a memory, a scene, a body sensation, or an inkblot, a common clinical assumption behind “I don’t see anything” is disengagement. Some therapists conclude that the client is resisting, unwilling to cooperate, or simply lacking imagination. This assumption can persist partly because trauma research and projection-based assessment rarely intersect. Yet many survivors describe an internal experience with structure and constraint, contrary to the interpretation of “emptiness.”

The “nothing” is not neutral. It is a block, a sealed vault. It reflects protective shutdown described by van der Kolk in 2014 in The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma, where access to traumatic material can be inhibited to preserve stability. When imagery is missing, it is often not because imagery is impossible, but because imagery is dangerous.

2. Reframing Blankness in Trauma Literature

Some early trauma descriptions framed this blankness as a loss of imagination, especially in survivors who could no longer respond to projective tasks or visualize scenes in therapy. On the surface, they appeared emptied out. Yet later neuroscience makes a different reading more accurate. What looks like an absence of imagery is often consistent with active suppression of perception when recall is predicted to overwhelm the system.

Rather than treating these clients as if their imaginative faculty had been destroyed, it is more precise to understand their blankness as a form of high-threat dissociation — a firewall that prevents catastrophic activation at the cost of conscious access. The clinical error is not noticing the blankness. The clinical error is treating it as a character flaw instead of a threshold signal.

3. Blank Imagery During Visualization as a Physiological Intervention

Visualization does not begin with imagination — it begins with safety. Blank imagery during visualization is often the nervous system choosing regulation over access when predicted emotional load exceeds capacity. The limbic system evaluates whether accessing sensory memory will maintain or overwhelm physiological integrity. If the predicted autonomic load is too high, the brain does not open memory. It closes perception.

This aligns with developmental affective neuroscience emphasizing affect regulation as the gatekeeper of what can enter awareness under threat, with trauma-linked shutdown and dissociative dynamics shaped by right-hemisphere regulatory systems described by Schore in 2002 in Dysregulation of the right brain: a fundamental mechanism of traumatic attachment and the psychopathogenesis of posttraumatic stress disorder. It is also consistent with trauma-related dissociation research by Lanius in 2015 in Trauma-related dissociation and altered states of consciousness: a call for clinical, treatment, and neuroscience research, where consciousness can constrict under overwhelming threat load rather than expand into vivid recall.

In this state, imagery is not “missing.” It is withheld.

• Memory imagery is gated

• Interoceptive awareness is dimmed

• Emotional content is sealed behind shutdown

• The mind reports “nothing” because “something” would destabilize the system

The absence of imagery is not the absence of content. It is the absence of permission.

4. Why the Brain Chooses Blankness Instead of Panic

The clinical population that reports “I see nothing” often appears calm externally. Many are mistaken for “stable” clients who simply lack vivid imagination. Yet the blank perceptual field is not calm. It is silent detonation.

Some trauma activates panic because the nervous system believes safety can be restored through expression. Other trauma activates blankness because the nervous system calculates that expression would be intolerable. In both cases, the body protects life. But blankness is the more extreme form because it requires constricting conscious access to prevent destabilizing content from surfacing.

As Porges describes in 2011 in The Polyvagal Theory: Neurophysiological Foundations of Emotions, Attachment, Communication, and Self-regulation, when mobilization is not viable, autonomic defense can shift toward immobilization with reduced access to felt sense and perception. Blankness can function as immobilization at the level of inner perception — a protective reduction of signal when the cost of signal is too high.

5. Rethinking “Low Imagination” Labels

A brief distinction matters here. Trait aphantasia is a relatively stable, lifelong or acquired inability to generate voluntary visual imagery across contexts, as described by Zeman et al. in 2015 in Lives without imagery – Congenital aphantasia and experimentally supported by Keogh and Pearson in 2018 in The blind mind: No sensory visual imagery in aphantasia. By contrast, trauma-gated “I see nothing” is often state- and cue-dependent. Imagery may be available in neutral daydreaming, creativity, or dreams, but collapses specifically at the threshold of traumatic recall when predicted autonomic load exceeds capacity. Clinically, that difference shifts the interpretation from “no mind’s eye” to “mind’s eye temporarily locked behind safety.”

Blank imagery can also arise from anxiety and attentional overload, medication effects, sleep deprivation, depression, or a mismatch between the prompt and the client’s imagery modality. The practical question is whether the “nothing” is global and stable across contexts or cue-dependent and threat-linked.

This paper does not claim that all low imagery is trauma-based. It argues that cue-dependent blankness during trauma prompts is often a state protection response.

Many survivors who “see nothing” during therapy are deeply imaginative in daily life — creative writers, artists, musicians, world-builders. Their imaginative capacity is not broken. It is selectively disabled only at the gates of traumatic recall.

The problem is not imagination. The problem is permission to see.

Clinicians who misinterpret blankness as noncompliance risk retraumatizing clients by pushing for access before readiness. If visualization remains blocked, it is not resistance. It is protection.

6. Therapeutic Implications

When therapists stop interpreting blankness as avoidance and instead recognize it as protection, treatment changes meaningfully:

• Safety becomes the prerequisite, not the reward

• Slow access replaces forced access

• Embodiment replaces memory extraction

• Regulation is prioritized over disclosure

Clients stop feeling like they are “bad at therapy” and begin realizing they are good at staying alive. The therapeutic question is no longer “Why won’t you remember?” but “What does your system need to feel safe enough that remembering won’t harm you?”

Trauma healing requires memory access through capacity, not pressure.

Notes on Novelty

This paper argues that blank imagery during visualization is often a protective autonomic response rather than an imagination deficit. While dissociation is well documented, the specific clinical pattern of reporting “no inner image” is frequently misread as noncompliance or low imagination. This article links that report to a mechanism-based model of perceptual suppression under predicted overload and reframes treatment as capacity-building before imagery access.

Related: Panic vs Blankness Trauma Response: The Two Opposite Trauma Responses We Misinterpret

Achanaiyakul, Mint. Blank Imagery During Visualization: Why “I See Nothing” Isn’t a Lack of Imagination — It’s Self-Protection (2025).

References

van der Kolk, 2014. The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma.

Schore, 2002. Dysregulation of the right brain: a fundamental mechanism of traumatic attachment and the psychopathogenesis of posttraumatic stress disorder.

Lanius, 2015. Trauma-related dissociation and altered states of consciousness: a call for clinical, treatment, and neuroscience research.

Porges, 2011. The polyvagal theory: neurophysiological foundations of emotions, attachment, communication, and self-regulation.

Zeman et al., 2015. Lives without imagery – Congenital aphantasia.

Keogh and Pearson, 2018. The blind mind: No sensory visual imagery in aphantasia.