Well, not so much "what am I doing wrong" as "what do I need to do differently".

When I get people to think of something and then ask about the submodalities... what I'm finding is that they tend to imagine it as if it were happening all around them in the moment, instead of a specific image in their mind. For example, I've been doing along the lines of...

"Pick a time when X/a person who X/whatever."
"When you think of X, in your mind... is it black and white or color? Picture or movie? First or third person? Etc."

And I'm getting answers like...

"Where's the picture?" (Someone they really like.)
"All around me."
"Okay. What about the other one?" (Someone they really dislike.)
"It's the same."
"Okay, well... what about, specifically, the last time you met with the person you really like?"
"Same, that's how I remember all things, it's always all around me."

Even with associated experiences though, isn't it common for them to have a location and distance and so on?

I mean, thing is, it wasn't just one person -- it's every single person I've experimented with so far, with every single experience I've elicited from them. It's quite a pattern, so I'm assuming it must be something I'm doing or not doing.

I mean, basically I'm thinking, what if I wanted to map across? It wouldn't really work with what they're giving me -- all their representations seem to be pretty much uniform.

It doesn't seem like it's just a regular associated experience or anything like that. It's almost as if, instead of accessing their "actual" internal representations, they're creating an "artificial" one.

I've tried dissociating them, but it was the same thing -- it was still "all around them". I also asked if dissociating changed the experience for them -- "not really", typically. Changing most of the submodalities seems to have little effect.

Is there something I could be doing with my languaging? Are there certain things to avoid doing while eliciting submodalities? Anything I could try differently? Anything I could do after having already gotten the uniform response?

I don' get it!