Trans-Cending Inner Worlds
An Immersive Training on Transgender Experiences
This project started over a frustration and a belief that things could be done better, with more empathy, more connection, and more meaning.
The Experience
I created a multi-week long, sensory-focused experience centered around an audio journey. After I interviewed several trans folks, exploring their embodied experience of transness, I narrativized the interview into 20-minute long audio experiences that explored their unique trans identity.
Because the intent was to immerse into the experience of a trans identity, I needed to incorporate embodied elements. To do that I leveraged listeners’ auditory mirror neurons by incorporating additional audio elements that work to elicit in the listener the same emotion of the trans speaker.
For example, as a speaker described feeling anxious and knowing they feel anxious because their heart is beating, I added audio layers of rapid heart beats. For the listener, simply hearing a racing heart in response to anxiety kicks off a neurobiological response that makes their heart beat fast.
The effect, then, is that the listener is both hearing the inner monologue of a trans person and embodying the emotional somatic experience, simultaneously. This multi-modal immersion brings the internal, external.
For more information on the durational aspect of the experience, please reach out.
The Organizing Principle
By immersing ourselves in the experience of trans folks, we can better understand the depth and breadth of living as a marginalized human.
The Purpose
Psychotherapists are uniquely trained to understand and make sense of the emotional processes of clients. Yet, not all therapists have the same lived experiences as their clients – especially the lived experience of oppression and marginalization. This disconnection limits the ability of a therapist to truly enter and empathize with a client’s inner world and how the client experiences the world around them.
I aimed to transform psychotherapists’ capacity for empathy by creating an immersive experience that allows therapists and mental health practitioners to immerse themselves in and embody the experience of holding a transgender identity.
The editing file for one audio journey. The green are the additional audio elements that deepen the embodiment.