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Face Blindness, medically known as Prosopagnosia, is the difficulty or inability to recognize people by their faces, while other aspects of visual processing (such as object discrimination) remain intact. Some people who have suffered from brain traumas in certain parts of the brain may have acquired face blindness (developmental prosopagnosia) while others, up to 2.5% of the population, were born with it (congenital prosopagnosia).
There are two types of prosopagnosics, those who can't recognize famous people and those who can't recognize day-to-day faces. Regardless of which one may be, they will often have a hard time following the plot in a movie or TV show because they can't recognize the characters. People with face blindness often use other factors to help them to recognize people such as their hair style, clothing, body size and shape, skin tone, walk and their voice among other things. When someone they met last week cut their hair, they will either struggle to recognize them or they won't recognize them at all. Aside from the visual processing problems, they will sometimes struggle with social skills or making friends because they can't recognize their friends. They will avoid social situations where people they know will be present or situations where they will need to recognize someone. Acquaintances or friends will be offended because they will walk right past them and not say hi. When faced with a situation where they must recognize someone, anxiety will be aroused until they finally put the face with the prior engagement. They feel humiliation when they mistake a person with someone else or can't recognize someone.
In hypnotherapy, we can help prosopagnosics to accept their lack of facial recognition abilities, reduce anxiety and humiliation, let go of past bad experiences and to bring to their consciousness a focus on facial visual differences such as eye slant, mouth shape or differences such as a mole or scar to help them to recognize people when meeting someone for the first time. Over time, they will gain confidence in social situations and will start recognizing people better than before.