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Therapy for adults using sandtray

by Roger Day PTSTA (Psychotherapy), UKCP Registered Psychotherapist, Certified Play Therapist

What is it?

Therapy using sandtray is a creative way for adults to resolve emotional difficulties without having to talk in detail about those difficulties.

It involves the person using intuition to choose and place natural objects or miniatures in a blue-bottomed shallow box filled with sand. The person has hundreds of objects to choose from and can add more or take some out of the sand at any stage in the process.

While this is happening, the therapist carefully observes the person. After the objects are placed, they talk about what has been created in the sandtray. They decide together whether or not to move one or more of the objects.

Sandtray is known as the ‘silent therapy’. It can be very peaceful, relaxing and enjoyable. It has a ‘Wow!’ factor because it can sometimes result in positive emotional changes in the client without much conscious effort.

If you are interested in the theory of how sandtray works, read on. If not, skip to the example below.

How does it work?

In order to understand how sandtray works, it is useful first to look briefly at how it has developed.

1. Development

Early in the 1900s playwright H G Wells wrote about elaborate games on the floor he and his two small sons played using life-like miniatures. He realised that these games were helping his sons act out and solve the problems in the world around them.

Much later, Margaret Lowenfeld, a UK-based medical doctor, started developing such games, adding a small sandtray with definite boundaries. She called her approach the World Technique (1950) because of the small worlds created in the sand.

In the 1980s, Dora Kalff, a Swiss therapist, took Lowenfield’s approach, introduced the term ‘Sandplay’ (1988) and developed a theory to understand it based on the work of psychoanalyst Carl Jung. That Jungian theory – with complex Latin terms such as archetype, persona and centroversion – remains the dominant theoretical understanding of how sandtray works.

Jungian sandplay therapist Barbara Turner explains the process: ‘The act of creating a series of three-dimensional sandplays facilitates healing and transformation by bringing up conflicts from the unconscious in symbolic form and by allowing a healthy re-ordering of psychological contents’ (2005, pages 2-3).

2. A new approach

As a psychotherapist and certified play therapist I have been developing a much simpler understanding of how sandtray works based on my therapy model Transactional Analysis (TA). TA originated in the 1950s and 1960s with Dr Eric Berne. He did an experiment with soldiers returning to the USA from the Second World War. He interviewed them for a couple of minutes and was amazed at how much about them he then knew. For the rest of his life he developed TA as a way of understanding how and why his intuition had worked so well.

Sandtray, too, uses intuition. Clients ‘know’, without knowing why (see Gladwell, 2005/6), what they need to put in the sandtray in order to resolve their difficulties. The therapist then uses his own intuition, as well as his extensive knowledge and experience, to facilitate the process.

So how does sandtray work?

Think of an iceberg. The 10 per cent above the surface represents our conscious thinking, feeling, behaviour and attitude. Then there is an area just below the surface that is sometimes revealed by the waves and sometimes is under the water. In TA we call this our out-of-awareness or nonconscious. The rest of the 90 per cent below the surface is our unconscious.

In ‘talking’ therapy we work mainly with the conscious, drawing on the nonconscious whenever possible, hopefully in order to influence the unconscious.

In therapy using sandtray we work directly with the unconscious, hopefully drawing on the nonconscious, in order to make changes that affect our conscious thinking, feeling, behaviour and attitude.

Dreams are the brain’s natural way to sort out our thinking (or, in computer-speak, defragment the hard disk). In the same way, sandtray helps us intuitively to sort out our emotional difficulties.

Berne introduced to the therapy world the concept of life-script – ‘a life plan made in childhood, reinforced by the parents, justified by subsequent events and culminating in a chosen alternative’ (Berne, 1972/5). Children make their own script decisions at an unconscious or nonconscious level as the best way they know at the time for responding to the world around them. Those script decisions were useful at the time but some of them now restrict adults in their relationships, in their emotions and in their attitudes to life.

Sandtray enables people to make new script decisions (redecisions) at an unconscious or nonconscious level. These will then be reflected at the conscious level in new approaches to thinking, feeling, behaviour and attitude.

Example

Maud was happily married with two children, a boy and a girl. When her daughter reached the age of seven Maud started having irrational fears about her daughter’s safety. She also found it difficult to be intimate with her husband. Lovemaking became a chore when it had previously been a pleasure. Finally it reached a stage where even her husband’s touch caused her to shudder. She knew she needed therapy.

There was a blank spot in Maud’s childhood from age seven to nine that she had always puzzled about. She had vague memories about a male babysitter at the time but nothing that she could put into words.

Over several sessions in therapy using sandtray Maud created some beautiful scenes – gardens, seasides, mountains.

Then, in one sandtray of a garden, she put a little dinosaur hiding behind a bush. The therapist gently pointed it out. Over several more sessions, the ‘monsters’ in the sandtray increased in number until they dominated and destroyed everything else.

One day Maud arrived for her session with a determination on her face. Tentatively she placed an armed soldier in the empty tray, then another. Soon she had a whole row of soldiers. Next came wild animals – lions, tigers, leopards – lined up as if for battle. Finally, at the other end of the tray, she placed the first little dinosaur that had appeared many sessions ago. The rest of the figures moved in and ‘destroyed’ the dinosaur.

The battles continued for many weeks, becoming more fierce as the monsters increased in number. Finally, in the fiercest battle of all, she finished by burying all the monsters under a huge mound of sand with a cross (‘for a gravestone’) placed on top.

Outside the therapy room, Maud was becoming more relaxed about her daughter. ‘Normally anxious,’ she described it. Her lovemaking had returned to its previous level, much to her husband’s delight.

Maud had changed her thinking, feeling, behaviour and attitude without ever knowing or talking about what happened in her childhood ‘blank spot’. That’s the effect of therapy using sandplay.

And finally . . .

If you are as excited as me about therapy with adults using sandtray, you will want to experience it for yourself. You can do this in a number of ways.

As a client you can request some therapy sessions with me.

As a therapist you can ask me for creative supervision in which the sandtray is used to explore your clients’ needs and what you can do to meet them.

As an organiser you can arrange for us to run a sandtray experiential training event in your area. Then you can invite colleagues to come along. Who knows, maybe they will be as excited about therapy using sandtray as you are.

Have a look at the anonymous examples of sandtrays created by adults (be patient because there are a lot of pictures to download):

http://www.brookcreativetherapy.com/sandtray/index.html#home

And remember to email me, Roger Day, at brookcreativetherapy@gmail.com

References

Berne, Eric (1975). What Do You Say After You Say Hello? London: Corgi. (Original work published 1972.)

Gladwell, Malcolm (2006). Blink: The power of thinking without thinking. London: Penguin. (Original work published 2005.)

Kalff, Dora (1988). Sandplay in Switzerland. Seminar notes. Zurich: University of California at Santa Cruz.

Lowenfeld, Margaret (1950). The nature and use of the Lowenfeld world technique in work with children and adults. Journal of Psychology, 30, pages 325-331

Turner, Barbara (2005). The Handbook of Sandplay Therapy. Cloverdale, California: Temenos Press.

Any quotations from or use of this article must include the copyright

details above and give as a reference: www.brookcreativetherapy.com