About the Author

My name is Cristina Gherghel.

I was born in Romania under one of the most repressive communist regimes in modern history. At the age of 25, I emigrated and have since lived across Italy, England, and currently, Bulgaria—each place contributing distinct layers to my lifelong investigation into human behavior, relational pathology, and neurodevelopmental anomalies.

For as long as I can remember, I have been driven by a desire to understand the architecture of the human mind—why some people cry while others laugh, why contentment remains elusive for many, and what mechanisms drive individual responses to the same environment. At the age of 48, after 24 years of systematic and rigorous study focused on trauma, abuse, and personality disorders, I came to a decisive conclusion: what I observed over decades does not align with the models upheld by academic institutions or diagnostic manuals like the DSM.

At 41, I discovered that I have aphantasia. It was an ontological shock to realize that most people possess the ability to visualize, hear, smell, taste, and physically simulate experiences within the mind. I had no idea such internal representations were even possible, let alone common. To this day, the concept that others can see or hear internally what their body has once felt strikes me as an extraordinary, almost supernatural ability.

By 47, I understood that I possess no internal landscape whatsoever—no mental representations across any modality. This includes anauralia, the absence of an inner voice, which often co-occurs with global or total aphantasia, as in my case. Prior to this, I already knew I lived with anhedonia, but according to prevailing frameworks, it was simply a symptom—attached either to major depressive disorder, trauma, or complex PTSD. None of these labels fully captured what I was experiencing.

I also knew that I was asexual, but not because I adopted an identity or label. In fact, I have never understood what it means to identify as someone or something. I comprehend the concept in a rational sense, but my mind does not generate the internal cues that underlie desire, craving, or bodily estrangement. From my perspective as an aphantasic, it seems structurally impossible to visualize oneself as another gender, species, or state. I am a woman because I was born female. Had I been born male, I would simply have been a man. That is the extent of my logic in this domain—binary and concrete. Meanwhile, everything else I study unfolds in a near-infinite spectrum of nuance and complexity.

Through decades of research, observation, and relentless data comparison, I trusted that a time would come when all the disconnected insights would cohere. At 49, I encountered Schrödinger’s paradox—and with it, the conceptual clarity I needed to open the box, so to speak. In that moment, everything I had witnessed and catalogued throughout my life snapped into place: panthropic abuse—a form of ontological trauma that exists in empirical reality but remains unrecognized in academic literature.

Panthropic abuse is defined by the absence of relational mirroring from the very genesis of development. It produces a condition I term arelationality. How such a critical dynamic could go unacknowledged in psychology and clinical discourse remains, to me, a profound mystery.

This is not the place to expand on that yet. For now, what matters is this: nothing I present is theoretical. All of it is based on empirical observation, lived experience, and rigorous structural analysis. It may seem implausible to some, and perhaps I will be misunderstood, but I have located a blind spot in trauma theory that demands articulation. I will devote the remainder of my life to bringing it to public attention—not for recognition or acclaim, but because I live with asensoria, another term I coined to describe a neurodevelopmental condition marked by the absence of specific affective simulations.

The five interconnected conditions I describe—aphantasia, anauralia, anhedonia, asexuality, and asensoria—form a coherent profile that has yet to be formally studied in neurodevelopmental psychology. According to current frameworks, not all of these are considered forms of neurodivergence. Some, like anhedonia and asexuality, are routinely pathologized as symptoms of trauma or framed as identities. My findings contradict this oversimplification in some cases.

Again, this is not the forum to explore these dimensions in depth.

My work specializes in areas such as narcissistic abuse, complex PTSD, phobias, panic episodes, personality disorders, and overlapping Cluster A, B, and C presentations. I approach these subjects not only from a clinical angle, but from a rigorous neurodevelopmental and ontological perspective.

Thank you for your interest in my work.
If you wish to support my research and explore my findings in more detail, please consider reading my books:

– In English, available on Amazon
– In Romanian, available on Google Play

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