Sand Tray Therapy

With the soft sensory texture of sand and the visualization available with hundreds of miniature figures, sand tray therapy is an innovative therapeutic modality that can help both children and adults process life experiences, including traumatic events.

Sand tray therapy is based on the notion that if a therapist provides the safe space of the sand tray, the client can use the tray to recreate the world as they have experienced it and begin to heal. Sand tray therapy is just one modality that is offered through our Counseling Center to help young children who have experienced traumatic events heal.

“Create Your World”

A sand tray session often begins with the therapist prompting the client, “Create your world in the sand tray.” The client is then invited to select from the hundreds of miniatures in our sand tray room to depict their world, including figures like realistic looking humans, animals of all kinds, familiar animated characters like Disney princesses or Paw Patrol, or figures representing helpers like police officers or fire fighters. The room also contains a variety of other miniature figures, such as houses, buildings, trees, fences, rocks, household objects and so much more to give a variety of possibilities for clients to use.

The therapist is silent while the client moves around the room and selects miniatures for their tray, allowing as much time and space as necessary to create this world. There’s no right or wrong answer, and clients are free to create their word however they would like for each session.

Once the client feels like their tray is complete, the therapist may ask questions like “Tell me about your world,” and using a lot of “I wonder statements,” allowing the client to answer however they would like. There’s a sacredness to the sand tray that forms—the therapist does not touch the tray or the figures inside.

The therapist is careful not to name a miniature or make any assumptions about it until a client does, but they might ask “Why did you pick the dinosaur?”

Taking a Break from Cognitive Thinking

For adults and children alike, sand tray therapy can help clients to move out of their cognitive brain and into their reptilian brain. By moving out of thinking into doing, clients can tap into a different way of thinking to process traumatic events they have experienced or to see their world in a new way. The filters that some adults might use when talking through a challenge often melt away in the sand tray room, allowing the client to process more purely without judgment.

Here at The Children’s Place, where clients are ages eight and younger, sand tray therapy can take on a livelier form, with some children creating dynamic sand trays, with figures moving around within the tray or even outside it, joining in the world of play for young children.

But sand tray therapy can also be a helpful modality for clients of all ages, including adults in our caregiver therapy program.

A Healing Process

Sand tray therapy is most often beneficial over a series of sessions, with the client sometimes creating their world multiple times in the tray or exploring different details. Anecdotally, therapists have found that a single sand tray session can be as effective as up to five talk therapy sessions for adults.

A general mindset in play therapy is that toys are words for young children, so offering such a wide range of miniatures and incorporating the sensory component of sand can help children work through the experiences of their past and heal.

Learn more about sand tray therapy and the other therapeutic modalities offered in our Counseling Center here.