What is Sandtray Therapy?

Sandtray Therapy leans into our right-brain…the part of the brain that can process the unfinished business all of us humans possess…the stuff that keeps us awake at night. Sandtray is an expressive form of therapy that works differently than traditional talk therapy. It works the other side of our brain, opposite of the logical left. Sand often is therapeutic just by itself, and when we smooth it, dive into it, arrange it, create scenes in it, one cannot help but to “play with” our own inner world a bit, or sometimes a lot. You choose miniatures and decide where and how to place them in the sand. Many find this to be a powerful medium in which to resolve inner conflicts, reconnect to the best parts of yourself, discover aspects of your life that are ready for retooling, or to be discarded entirely, and to literally create different paths in the sand so you can experiment traversing in new ways. All the while the therapist holds for you a safe, non-judgmental space in which you can experiment safely.

Many times, the real take-away occurs days or weeks later after you have built your world in the sand. This is how the expressive therapy of Sandtray works. The work happens even when you are not thinking about it. Remember the thinking about it occurs in the left hemisphere of your brain. The doing about it occurs in the far reaches of the unworked out, unresolved stuck parts of our brain. This is what I believe makes Sandtray Therapy so magical. It is FUN, it brings us back often to a simpler time playing with objects in the sand, and the works occurs automatically. Plus, it hits right in the sweet spot developmentally in all of us: Children who have not developed sophisticated language to describe what they need and how they would like to change, as well as us adults who have things unresolved from our past.