Hello,
Admittedly, my thought process is extremely verbal. I am constantly using verbalization and words in recall and thinking in general. It is a natural part of my process. It almost seems that when it comes to memorization and recall this “skill” has become overly dominant and is crowding out the other “skills”… Visual, Kinesthetic, etc. I have to work quite hard to try to traverse a memory palace recalling the encoded data without having the words come to me in 100% audio. I try to go through a palace and only see the images that have been encoded. I can do it, but I have to say a mantra or sing something else to shut the audio off. The reason I want to try to tone the audio down at this point is that I think it is starving the other memory modes at this point. I go through all the work with coming up with images and encoding them, just to do recall rehearsal and the visuals are gone (They become 100% audio). This is good short term, the audio works for short term and to some extent long term. I really do feel though that if I can spend more time with the imagery and other memory modes during recall rehearsal that my memory practice will dramatically improve. Is anyone else facing this issue and can provide some advice on this? Thanks.
First things first: vebarlization, hearing voices and visualizing text are also imagination, imagination does not hinders imagination. Just train that part you lack in, don’t let your strong parts wane in order to improve another.
When it comes to mental prowess more is better, faster is only better when everything is already in order
I can’t say I experience the same problem, but I used to be a little more verbal than I am today, though I am both very verbal and very visual, indeed maybe I’m hindering my verbal prowess by trying to be more visual, though in my imagination I make a good use of “emotional” and “connotational” association: I don’t need to see a picture with all the visual details to know that such picture has certain features.
What I do to think more visual is to speed up my visualization (imitating fantasy and sci-fi): I recall my memory palaces and other random places, I recall movie scenes, cartoons, I imagine comic characters use their superpowers all around, I imagine random things happening. Speed is key. In reply to this post I explain how I improved my imaginative control: Imaginary palaces idea, good, bad, or indifferent? - #15 by InMyMemoryWorld. Maybe it you visualize lots of places and objects in it, you may dissasociate as well. I can’t give you a formula because I can’t pinpoint the exact moment in which I changed from one to the other. For instance it is like writing this answer, I could be verbalizing each word while I write them or I could just move my hand and keep going. Try visualizing the words, with funny letters or plain text, that way the text becomes visual. Listen at people talk and as fast as they say the worlds imagine letters forming the words they say, it is fun to do… 
Before the art of memory, when I was in school the way I used to recall information was recalling the text on the notebook or book where I read or wrote it, so I was visualizing the text, sometimes and rarely there was a imaginative analogy that allowed me to understand a concept.
Now that’s just visualizing without picturing, let me tell you something: you can’t consciously visualize something without first thinking about it (verbally or not). Also, don’t think language or verbalization is hindering your visual power, they are two different processes. Language is more distribute in the brain, while visualization is more related to the visual cortex, however memory is in almost every pathway of the brain.
In addition to what I mention in that post, I have to confess that I put a lot of time to simply visualizing, exploring what I can visualize; I imagined a landscape then I thought what could I do, can I create cartoons in a realistic world? can I visualize Mnemosyne the titanide goddess as a giant? I did plenty of this kinds of mental exercises and I read many books on “thinking” but didn’t trainned those methods rather I use them when I lack creativity. Ok, I better list all the things I found useful for improving my visualization:
- I watch and obverse visuals and then imagine them in very different setting (this way I allow my brain to imitate or reproduce what I saw). I look at gifs, photos, movies and so on.
- I do all the mental exercises that I mentioned in this reply and the one in the link.
- I try to imagine what it’d be to see from different perspectives in different ways: see like a bat, a dog, a bird, a ghost, like a demon on the roof, like other people, and my favorite is to pretend that I’m multiple versions of me with different desires but with a singular objective, we are in a room and I see from each direction.
- I imagine horrible things, sublime and inefable things, what is it to see when you run at the speed of light?
- My memory worlds are vast, not so full, not so empty, but there I’m God, so I don’t feel sorry for anything that happens in there. There I do most of my mental experiments, that way I memorize the experiments and I redo them or remake them rarer, weirder, until I can grasp and mold the images as a mental sculptor or painter.
A final note on taking away subvocalization or verbalization from your mental imagination: use episodic memories, do you also recall events in your life describing with words? I don’t. That way it’s easy for me to memorize for instance: she was wearing a white shirt, a black office pants, I saw her amused and I heard the word interview, apparenttly she got the job. I also remember what happened after that moment, I remember myself memorizing her clothing and the scene (that’s from almost two years ago).