Dr. Barbara Turner on Sandplay Therapy

and welcome to my office I'm dr. Barbara Turner and I'd like to share with you a little bit about Sam play therapy from the Jungian School of Psychology Sam play therapy was developed primarily for the use of children because they don't have the more abstract functioning and thinking skills that adults have and it works with their natural language of play we now though you sampling for both adults and children and we'll learn more about that in a minute Sam play consists of making a little world or design or whatever you like in this tray of sand they we have two trays in the office once one is filled with wet sand the other with dry the wet sand can be sculpted and shaped and the dry sand can't be sculpted and shaped in the same way but it has a very elegant quality to it so at one time a client may feel like working in the dry tray they may work one time in the wet they may stay with one um one is not better than the other it's just a matter of preference when I introduce sand play to a child I usually say something like this this is the sand tray and every time you come into the office you can always make a sand tray if you like I may have some things to do for you to do some days some days you'll get to choose what we're going to do but you can always do a Sam play the we have wet sand and dry sand you can use either one and what you do is just shake the sand and you'll notice the trays blue on the bottom you can make a river or a designer an ocean or whatever you like and then go to the shelves and you get to use any of the figures you want in the sand tray and make your own little world and you'll know when you're done and you'll tell me and while you're doing it I just sit quietly across there and draw a little map of what you're doing and you don't have to worry about me keeping up with your whatever I'm pretty good at it by now and that's what I say then I say we just when you're done I come and look at it and I may ask you if you have a story or a title for this one and you could say yes and tell me for you can just say no I don't know why I did it it just it just is that's fine I just write that down then we take pictures of it so when you're grown up you can come back if you like it we can look at it together and by then you'll be able to tell me what's going on in the sand play introducing sand play to adults is a little different the reason for that is in most cultures most Western cultures today everyone is so highly rationalized that we have long since forgotten about the symbolic dimensions of life and in fact we tend to denigrate them or put them down make fun of them people feel silly when they do anything like a drawing or us you know playing in the sand at the beach or sitting on a swing and swinging back and forth and it's very sad but I have to be aware of that when I'm introducing just adults because most of them will initially think that this is rather silly if not absolutely just for children so I take an approach that emphasizes how quickly this gets to deep work and moves us through so they're thinking then oh I won't be in therapy as long you know and so on so here's how I say it to an adult this is what we call the sand tray trays of sand and the process is called a sand play and what you do is very simple you come over and you can shape the sand you can use either wet one or the dry one and the wet when you can sculpt a little more than the dry you'll notice they're both blue on the bottom so you can River a design or no shirt or whatever you like and while you're doing this I sit across the room very quietly and just draw a little map of what you're doing when you've touched the sand enough it worked it enough or just what to you go to the shelves it just pick out whatever jumps out at you you may have an idea what you want to do you may not it really doesn't matter the psyche will do what it needs to do if we just let it so that's about all there is to it you'll want you may go back as many times as you want you can change things as many times as you want move the sand do whatever you need to and don't worry about me I can continue to draw my little map it doesn't matter I can keep up with them and then you know when you're done and you'll tell me I'm done so I'll come over and I'll look at it from the side from which you primarily worked and I may ask you if you had any associations while you were doing this tray and you may say well this guy's chasing that one and this one looks like you sick that was scary and I have no idea why I did the rest of this and I write down I just write that down and that's it or you may say I have no idea why I did this perfectly fine so what's actually going on here is that Sam plays like a dream however the symbols that come out of the dream kind of drift away on their own here they become three-dimensional and in addition they're shared with the therapist who's outside of our our conscious realm and dimension so what it's doing is it's bringing up that date material and it's putting it in place like stepping stones so we work through it very quickly would you like to do a sand play now let me demonstrate how an adult might do a sand ray sand play we tend to use the terms interchangeably but technically the box is the tray the method is the but you'll hear nevis on both ways so as the adult client I'm going to come to the sand and I'm going to I decided I'm going to work in the wet sand today so we would probably move the dry sand away to give me room to walk around and then I'm going to design or something I don't know just start moving the sand horse I'm doing this in silence well the therapist is over there drawing a little map or something and I don't really know what I'm doing I'm just letting my hands lead the way and if it feels right I keep it if it doesn't feel right I keep moving and change it when the adult client does the Sam play I tell them this too that they'll most likely feel very self-conscious to start with but after a few trays they'll forget that I'm even in the room and that's true because what happens is we enter a very deep trance-like State I also emphasize to the clients that this is not an art contest notice and place I've ever looked up felt the same and it's not about making that look pretty okay that feels good to me so I'm going to go to the shelves and just for the purposes of the film and the demonstration so we stay on camera I'm just going to use the shelves behind me I'm not just taking things I don't know why I've got an umbrella fiery dragon there's a man reading a pan top of a pan this is a load of center silver chalice to the white horses funny little dwarf there's some little trees berry trees totem home that's kind of a red fiery bush here's Don Quixote defeated there's a star it doesn't feel quite finished yet so I put some I think it needs some green things my wife these stars better it's a little star tree so nobody moved out well here's a big chubby laughing buddha watching the whole thing and laughing and now I'm done just feels done so then the therapist would come over and look at it from the primary place that I worked the tray and maybe ask this client if she had any associations while she was doing it and she might say something like well this is one of the funniest little things I've ever seen and she's so wild looking but I just loved her and this is looks like a very defeated person over here leaving the scene and this man banging on the pan looks like he's calling to the dragon I don't know to get rid of him or to bring in here or what but I like the umbrella on the dragon it seems to protect him a bit so maybe maybe it's a good dragon I don't know and the Buddha watches the whole thing and laughs delight delighted and I don't know why I did the rest of this I just don't know that's it but therapist writes it down and that's it so then the therapist will take pictures for the record and we never disassemble the tray in front of the client we want the symbolic imagery to live in the client and to remain in place I think it would be very destructive to take the tray apart then the cloth in the presence of the client so we don't do that in the union method of sand play the theory behind sand play stems from the work of Carl Gustav Jung he happened to be the neighbor of mrs. Dora cough who invented the sand play method as it worked out mrs. Cole was a concert pianist and she had lost a husband in the wars and was living up in the in Switzerland and next door to the Youngs and the story goes that Carl Jung's children always seem to be very centered and at peace when returned home from the coughs house so when Dora was doing analysis with Ma young and she consulted with Carl Jung about what she might do for work because concert pianist wasn't going to do it for he suggested that she was very good with children why doesn't she find a way to work with children in you Mian analysis so she began her studies and pursuits and she came across dr. mark Margaret lowenfeld from London and lowenfeld developed what we call the world technique which consists of the children taking toys and figures from baskets and selecting through them and making a world and then mrs. doctor lowenfield will talk with the child in a very respectful way about their world and Dora cough went to study with her originally Margaret Winfield was from Poland so after a devastating warm Poland she returned she's a pediatrician in the early 20th century she returned to find that the children were so traumatized and she was horrified and she said about to find a way she could directly access the way they're thinking and in her pursuits she remembered a book written by HG Wells the social theorist in London and it's called for games it's a tiny little book and my sister and I have brought it back into print if you'd like to have a copy of it it's a it is delightful HG Wells talks about in a very humorous and loving way about the games his children his two boys played on their nursery floor and that these games consisted simply and primarily of wooden blocks and pieces of paper and leaves that they would find in the garden and so on and a few purchased toys of figures of people and animals and so on and that they had been sometimes with these floor games well dr. Bowen Feld remembered this and she thought I'm going to get big box of figures for the clinic in London so she got a big box of figures and she said it in the clinic in London and it was the children themselves that came up with the world technique the kids would take the figures from this side of the clinic which was large and carry them all the way over to the opposite side of the clinic where the sandbox was and they would make whirls in the sandbox so that's how mrs. dr. lowenfeld came up with the world technique Medora called studied with dr. lowenfeld she saw something happening in the sand worlds of the children that were exactly what young described in the individuation process furthermore she saw the process of coming to Center coming to wholeness that she knew well from her studies in Tibetan Buddhism she had freaka frequently hosted Tibetan Buddhist monks at her home and even had a visit from the Dalai Lama at one time in fact in mice and mice and trays I even have a little tiny bit of sand that was blessed by the dalai lama from dora coughs and ray so it makes it a very special thing so dr. lowenfeld and mrs. cough talked about these differences and mrs. cough was very wary of interfering with the child by talking with them about what was going on because she saw she was highly intuitive and very intelligent she saw that this was largely unconscious so she thought it best to just stay silent and stay out of the way don't don't interpret the world so lowenfeld and cough talked about this and they agreed to have two different methods Lewin fields would continue to be called the world technique and mrs. cough called hers sand play she thought it was critical that the word play be in there because we access that dimension that play frame when we go and work directly with the symbols so that's how it came to be and mrs. cough began using it in her office in Switzerland with the children and soon the parents of these children were just amazed at how quickly and how well their children were doing so they did they wanted to trice and play themselves so we now work with sampling with both adults and kids to better illustrate the sand play process let's take a look at a couple of sand play case vignettes let's first take a look at the case of a young boy Aaron aged 9 brought to therapy by his mother for anger issues when we first look at Aaron's tray we see that it has a sense of ordered unordered quality about it we have Asian men in the front near left corner looking into a crystal ball three Asian ninjas in the front center preparing to fight there's a group of cartoon characters on the right Batman Robin and the enemies engaged in conflict a pair of skiers coming down the hill directly behind them and a lion tamer holding his hand high to a tiger in the back left corner in the center raised high on a hill is a man encased in armor huge in proportion to the other figures in the tray when we look at a first sand play in a series or a sand play process as we call it we look for a symbolic manifestation of both the intrapsychic conflict that this process will address and the assets the psychic assets that the client has to address that material here in Aaron's first ray we see pictures of anger and conflict a speeding car being chased by a policeman attempting to bring order to it we have in the back a raging huge tiger and a man holding up his hand as if to try to tame it and calm it down in the middle we have a man who is completely encased in steel he can't move he can't breathe he is not connected with life we have here in the front left a picture of wisdom and insight with the two Asian men glancing into the crystal ball on the other end of the diagonal from the wisemen we see a pair of skiers very skillfully descending a hill now if we look at both diagonals we've got and the diagonal in a sand play is the farthest distance you can get between two clusters of figures or symbols we have on one hand the roaring raging tiger lion and the tamer on the other end we have Batman and Robin trying to bring order and reason to the crooks crossing that we have the skiers very skilled and in the wisdom of the Asian men looking into the future at the crux Asst at where these two diagonals cross is this man encased in steel so it would appear that in order to bring order and justice to tame the out-of-control anger it's going to access aaron's inner wisdom and skill and that will then release the man in the steel suit so something needs to be released inside of Eron psyche that has not been able to emerge yet as Aaron moves into his fourth tray he touches the center of the personality the self we call this the manifestation of the self we saw in his first tray that he had that the psyche outlined the direction of its healing to release something that's been locked up encased in him and perhaps causing this rage and his anger problems on a very deep level and he will use then the assets that he has wisdom from a remote part of his consciousness and skill to confront these issues in Dre's 2 & 3 he confronts many issues and in tray 4 then he moves to the center of the self so the psyche acknowledges the centrality of the self in this tray we have a central fire surrounded by a ring of seeded Native Americans they're both men and women at the circle some of the women have children surrounding this inner circle are two quantities a square of trees of four trees and then a square of for religious masks from two traditions the Hindu and the Navajo people the both are very remote from the consciousness of this young Jewish boy it's very interesting that the masks from the Hindu tradition come from the well love story of the Ramayana where Lord Rama and we see his green face in the far right corner and seated across from him as his beloved wife Sita her face is turned away from us here in the picture Rama adored Sita and Sita was born out of a furrow in the earth so she is the very essence the quintessence of the feminine and Rama is the quintessence of the masculine well what happens then is this demon who we see with the little sort of butterfly wings in that the hint of yellow around over here by the serpent he steals Sita away and the tail has to do with Rama recovering Sita and getting back and honoring the feminine as the center part of his life above the tray on the far edge is a little girl the Native American girl that Aaron described as the spirit of a princess who died a long long time ago she stands by a moon and he said they are actually hanging over the fire so here Aaron psyche accesses the collective unconscious to bring about the precise myth that he will need to release those feminine energies and his spiritual energies from that encased man into a 1 this is Aaron's final Trey Trey 15 I saw him for about 30 sessions over a year and a half and he averaged one Trey every other session in this tray you'll notice that he's divided the world in half with this arcing River and on the right side sits a woman on a park bench in the far right corner he later said that's his mother on the left side we see a statue in the front left a gold statue Aaron said this is the statue of a guy who fought what Aaron's done here is return many of the bad guys or adversaries that he fought in his previous trays if we take a look behind the three-headed dragon we'll see the penguin that we met into a1 the other figures came along in his other trays you notice that both halves of the world are connected with the bridge and that a little blue car leaves the side of the conflict towards the home side or the peaceful world side along the river hanging over the tray on a hook Aaron constructed a way to hang the rocket man figure who patrols the river so this is a very safe place we have the car leaving the site of the conflict returning to the normal word world and on the left side we have a dark train leaving or exiting the scene as well in a final tray we do what mrs. cult called return to the market place the psyche returns to the ordinary world here Aaron moves out of the arena of conflict and returns to the feminine the woman in the corner here we see a very fit and tiny boxer next to what in proportion is a gigantic victory cup of silver so what we have we see here in Aaron's final tray is a man next to some silver medal it reflects the silver medal encasement of the night in tray one but here what's happened is it's transformed into a victory Cup and the man is no longer encased in it his spirit has been released and he is returning to normal life when he was 15 years old Aaron and his mother returned to my office for a session to review Aaron Sam play case at that time he was able to tell us what was going on within him in each tray was a very moving experience it worked out that Aaron was doing very well in school he was quite popular with the girls he was on the football team and not surprising from the content of his sand play case he was deeply spiritual and religious boy it was an honor to have worked with Aaron and to follow up and to hear of his success at this point we're going to look at a different case vignette that of an older man whom I'm calling Harold he was in his 60s he entered therapy because his wife told him to she complained that he had violent angry outbursts this was his third marriage he had several children of all variety of Ages he was a professional and he entered that profession because his first wife told him to his mother was still living his father was unknown and he complained that his mother tried to control him Harold didn't want to do sand play he did sand play because I told him to as you can tell hit from his biography his history has to do with being powerless around women his mother in particular still being alive in her 90s and still telling him what to do so I brought that into the room by directing him to do a sand play he all up and said he didn't want to be in therapy but knowing his history with women telling him what to do I did not let him off the hook I was going to wait for him to come forward and say I am going to stop therapy as we first sit with Harold stray we may have a feeling of depression sadness a sense of hopelessness lifelessness the landscape itself is barren and there isn't a great deal of life in it we have a dead cow skull from a cow that had died long time ago a lizard in a very tiny little pond what water is present is rather sketchy and ill-defined there is more life in the back left corner where we have this voluptuous young woman the colorful house and the little green tree across from her is this very old sick man it's actually a statue of Lazarus directly after he was raised from the dead we can see that he's very skinny he's got wounds all over his body raw sores he's on crutches and from the looks of him I doubt that he's going to be able to make this journey across the bridge in addition there's a boa constrictor next to him and given his appearance of weakness I think he is very much under threat of being strangled Harold had always identified himself as a ladies man he was debonair sophisticated good-looking he didn't have a father so he said he modeled himself after Cary Grant in the movies and he charmed ladies his entire life but now he's old and he's confronting it appears his mortality as this very wounded man just raised from the grave looks at this voluptuous young woman across the tray in the center of the tray we have a tall mountain peak surrounded by three flying white birds the bird is frequently a symbol of the spirit because it ascends to the heavens and then returns to the earth perhaps something of the Spirit will help Herald accept himself as he is well he's always envisioned himself as a ladies man he's actually powerless around women Harold has always carried a false persona he's been acting his whole life he's been Cary Grant well in his first tray here the psyche poses this conflict in this false identity in stark on get over Abel terms and yet central is this beautiful mountain peak with three birds three being a dynamic number something on the move from this first tray it appears then that Harold's healing or transformational direction in his sand play process will be to surrender this false identity and to access deeper resources that are aligned with the self Harold is much more grounded and focused by tray five the trays much more full of life it feels a lot more real in a sense than tray one to track the process the psyche moves through during sand play work we look at what remains the same from tray d'etre and what changes what remains the same here in this tray is that we have an old man and we have a woman here she's the Venus de Milo what has changed is that the man is a real old man it's no longer wounded bleeding Lazarus but it's a real old man seated appropriately in his garden on a bench directly in front of him he sees that this woman is not a woman it's an archetypal form she's not real it's very clear now the table is set for a banquet his psyche is feeding itself it has food now to move on outside of the circle is an empty cage perhaps he's out of the cage now as he's moved more appropriately into his own central garden his home is much bigger and we have the impression here it's definitely his home on the right he's erected a tower with a golden egg on top of a Mayan figure of a corn God after the tray was over he said that this reminded him of the sign at the shopping center which is kind of sad because that's how he always entertained himself was by buying things but now we see that it's outside the circle it's not inside the circle with this old man perhaps the only power that Harold felt he had was purchasing things but now he's fleshed out he's a real man and he no longer knew leads this tower in Harold's final tray tray 8 a caravan of elephants is celebrated us and welcomed home by a cheerleader the mountain from tray 1 returns its center front and the venus de milo returns now erected as a statue in the centre of the village the home is present and a little devil figure lurks behind the house in the upper right-hand corner a very funny old man has taken a superwoman figure to bedroom and set out cocktails and Harold just laughed and said that's an impossible situation as the homecoming is celebrated here the psyche portrays an image of this man that's funny it's uh it's a silly figure there's a sense of humor injected into the situation looking at how he had identified himself before in very humorous terms perhaps the sets of humor that he has about his situation is that little devil that lurks behind the house sort of the knowing little devil by this time Harold was exhibiting much more personal strength in his relationship with his wife and with his mother he actually told his mother no on a few occasions and he was much more clear with his wife about what his needs and feelings were he'd his bouts of anger and outbursts had remarkably decreased and by this time then Harold was able to tell me that he was ready to leave therapy and I agreed with him yes indeed you are Harold did not live to many years after I finished working with him but how wonderful it was that he was able to resolve these issues psychically before he met his death when we're doing Sam play with adults we generally have a parallel process going on with verbal therapy the verbal therapy being far more conscious mostly conscious rational and so on while the Zen play aspect of the therapy is mostly unconscious at that point and is way in advance of the consciousness that the clients currently working at so what happens is the the work from the sand trays is like images from a dream that comes up and makes almost like stepping stones I've said to help us follow our path to healing and wholeness but it trails along in consciousness so that will emerge in consciousness what's happening in the sand play will emerge in consciousness later on down the line so the sampling process may be advanced like this and the verbal process trails behind like that the theory used to support the sand play processes the personality theory of Carl Gustav Jung and for those of you that aren't familiar with his personality theory just very simply Jung believed and saw that if given the appropriate circumstances the human psyche had a natural tendency and was in fact compelled to heal and to grow or further develop to become more of who it is to become more of the self to integrate more of the self Jung also saw early in his work with his patients two levels of thinking going on at the same time he saw the ordinary thinking the conscious verbal or communication talking level of consciousness and then he saw this other unconscious non conscious level of thinking whose language was symbols and and mythologies the stories those symbols tell this is how he developed his theory of the conscious and unconscious minds well thus and play allows us to directly access the unconscious mind so when the person is working in the sand tray child or adult they're actually working moving the psyche the psyche is actually moving as these symbols and figures come together and form symbolic statements or imagery the psyche is actually moving so as this moves it comes from the Shelf and comes here the psyche is actually moving that needed element to that position and in this relationship with these other figures so when we look at a sand tray or sand play we're not looking at an artifact of the psyche we're looking at what was actually going on in that psyche at that moment it's it's uncanny but we have to really get that while we're working in sand play we directly access the unconscious and given that natural tendency to heal and develop the psyche moves where it needs to it brings up conflicts that that are in our way we address them we move through them we access new materials and we transform and become whole recent research in neurosis that the real healing that goes on in therapy in spite of what modality we use it really happens in a less conscious level of brain functioning in fact what they're finding out is that real healing and growth in the psyche or the brain takes place in the right hemispheric functions and often the limbic functions so what we're doing in healing is very really unconscious and that's the level we access with the with the sand play therapy so the verbal therapy is quite conscious the sampling therapy is largely unconscious the verbal therapy often has a hierarchical relationship between the therapist and the client the client often regards the therapist as a an authority or of someone better bigger or whatever and the sand play on the other hand is it's a mutual witnessing of what goes on the witnessing itself is very important because it's much like learning and and learning theory when something is seen when I tell you something that I've been thinking or suspecting or feeling and you you get it you understand it then it becomes cemented in reality it becomes real for me Sam plays operating at the same in the same way it the symbolic construction emerges and is fixed in the three-dimensional place and the witness therapist sees it and then thereby validates it if we draw from quantum theory we might say that the external witnessing consciousness of the therapist and I say external because it's outside of the clients psychic construct the external consciousness of the witness actually helps what the quantum theorists call collapse the non manifest into reality so this witness helps make this real by witnessing and honoring it now the therapists need not understand everything that's happening in the clients and play I asked mrs. golf this question at one point and she said this it was so poignant I actually remembered it she said you need not be engaged in understanding everything in the sand play but you must remain engaged in coming to understand what is transpiring in the sand play so we remain engaged by learning studying the symbols studying personality theory how these symbols are carrying out of the psyche moving the psyche what theory how we would apply theory to these we remain engaged in that way in fact it was years and years and years into my work in sand play before I could look at a sand tray and have any concept at all of what was going on but it kept working because I honored it and respected it very profoundly it worked for the clients as well as in my own process of course well Dora called claimed what she call the free and protected space of sand play these are the conditions Yoda said the psyche needs to grow towards the self to exercise that natural tendency that that compelling a urge to grow and develop and heal the free unprotected space is free because you have available to you by combinations by making things anything you need all parts of life and fantasy are represented in the collection and we also have a number of building materials in case you need something that isn't there we've got paper string scissors you know glue tape wood blocks tiles any kind of thing a person might need to make something they can't seem to find in the collection and the collection by the way I know I'm going off on a bit of a and here but the collection need not be as as extensive as mine a small collection as long as it's got a wide range of figures is quite adequate and works just as well the psyche will find and do what it needs to do I have an excellent list of the figures to have in a beginning collection in my handbook of sand play therapy if you'd like to refer to that so we'll go back to the free unprotected space it is completely free because you are told by the therapist you can do whatever you need to do and if we stop and think about it that is an awe-inspiring direction because an opportunity where in life do we have the freedom to do whatever we need to do where do we give us that space ourselves that space to do it well in Sam play that's what you do I always tell the children you can do anything you want but you can't throw sand at dr. barb and they laugh sometimes they say that to the to the adults I'll tell them you do whatever you want but I always tell the kids you can't throw sand at me they get a kick out of it but they get the idea you can do anything you want and and so they do now the other aspect of the free and protected space is the protection it's very safe it's safe in a number of ways the construction of the tray itself is safe because it has delimited boundaries the size and shape of the tray is such that it fills the field of vision without having the client needing to turn the head or extend the body it just fills the field of vision so that's why it really compels us to a deeper place the size of the tray is also in the handbook another and very critical safety feature of sand play is the presence of the well trained and experienced certified sand play therapists it takes years to understand what's going on here and to know to recognize the signs when someone is heading into unsafe territory it's very easy to evoke a psychotic process with Sam play for the unknowing therapist I've seen it it's very dangerous and my and my opinion is highly unethical to the client I tell my students that of all of these wonderful toys from all over the world all of these building materials these trays of sand and so on the most important tool in the sand playroom is the therapist the quality of their presence because that is what makes this very safe and if that presence isn't there the sand play will stop or it will go into a very dark direction so that's why thorough training is needed so let's talk a minute about what's needed to train in sand fly therapy if you happen to live live in a region that has a branch of the International Society for sand play therapy isst we call that you will follow their training guidelines if you are not in a region that has an isst branch I suggest that you follow it particularly if you train with me will you follow the sand play therapists of America on trading guidelines for one of two credentials and the first is the sand play practitioner this is where we start the sand the certified sand play therapist is the second credential and that takes for more experience in time let's talk a minute about the sand play practitioner to do that to become a sampling practitioner first you must be licensed as a mental health professional because we are dealing with the depths of the psyche this is not a tool for teachers or for kindergarten teachers or anything like that if there are daycare people this is a tool for the trained psychologist or psychotherapist so to train and cycle in sand play therapy with me I always say you must either be lye or you must be on a licensing track in other words if you are in graduate school working toward licensing and you want to study sand play fine with me but you can't practice and you can't get your practitioner certification until you're licensed secondly we work on the level 2 levels in training one is the rational cognitive level that's the learning and knowledge aspect of things and of the important level is the precognitive non rational symbolic level and this is where you do your own sand play process with a certified sand play practitioner Oh No certified plant sampling therapists excuse me excuse me and a process can be anywhere from 15 to 35 trays it can actually even be less than that it could be far more than that it just depends on what piece of work the psyche undertakes in that particular process so you do your own process and then the studying requires minimum of 36 hours of training with a certified sand play therapist and 18 of those hours must be a course entitled introduction to sand play therapy you must also then be in consultation with a certified sand play therapist and this is when you start practicing therapy in your your clinic or school or practice and you're working towards your your practitioner status you work under consultation with the certified sand play therapist and with the advantages of Skype these days it is no longer very difficult to get face-to-face consultation with the therapist because we can do it through Skype so that's wonderful this requires there certain numbers you have to fulfill and you can check these numbers online we'll have resources for you at the end of the tape but I believe we get you can have 20 hours over 25 hours or 25 sessions rather of a group station and a consultation group has a maximum of six people and during those twenty five sessions you must have presented your case material from your practice at least five times so you practicing and you must have about three people doing sin play or three sand trays a week on a fairly regular basis to give you enough material to get some experience and you may take digital photos of these and you bring them to consultation and your group and you with your therapist the sample a certified template therapist and you review the material and learn for your own material and support your own work with your real quiets you can do individual consultation 15 hours of individual consultation is the minimum requirement a combination of group and individual I believe is twenty hours and you must present at least think four times during those twenty hours combination group sessions and individual well we're coming to a conclusion here and I heartily heartily encourage you to join our training introduction to Sam thing perhaps some advanced trainers as well even if you don't plan to practice sand light therapy I think it's a very wise and it's a wonderful experience to get inside sand place so to speak and understand what it is so you know what people are talking about when they then when they tell you that they are a sand play therapist or you know when a child an adult could really benefit by referral to a sand play therapist I thank you for listening today and join me in my office it's an honor to have you here and I hope to meet many of you in our upcoming trainees I've been practicing same play therapy now for over 20 years and I must tell you very sincerely I never ever tire of it no to sand rays aren't ever the same no to sand plays ever feel the same even if I lose a picture somehow and have to reconstruct a tray for a record it never ever feels like the real thing it cannot be replicated sand play constantly keeps me on the edge of my chair so to speak the cutting edge of myself having to learn more about my own inner workings and deal with more and more of my issues as I learn more and more about symbols and myth I have found sampling to be highly effective in a wide variety of clinical presentations anything from depression to repression anxiety oh just down the list down the list relationship issues anything in lots of trauma work I've done a lot of trauma work it's very effective for healing well bye for now and I hope to see you at the upcoming true Oh

and welcome to my office I&#39;m dr. Barbara Turner and I&#39;d like to share with you a little bit about Sam play therapy from the Jungian School of Psychology Sam play therapy was developed primarily for the use of children because they don&#39;t have the more abstract functioning and thinking skills that adults have and it works with their natural language of play we now though you sampling for both adults and children and we&#39;ll learn more about that in a minute Sam play consists of making a little world or design or whatever you like in this tray of sand they we have two trays in the office once one is filled with wet sand the other with dry the wet sand can be sculpted and shaped and the dry sand can&#39;t be sculpted and shaped in the same way but it has a very elegant quality to it so at one time a client may feel like working in the dry tray they may work one time in the wet they may stay with one um one is not better than the other it&#39;s just a matter of preference when I introduce sand play to a child I usually say something like this this is the sand tray and every time you come into the office you can always make a sand tray if you like I may have some things to do for you to do some days some days you&#39;ll get to choose what we&#39;re going to do but you can always do a Sam play the we have wet sand and dry sand you can use either one and what you do is just shake the sand and you&#39;ll notice the trays blue on the bottom you can make a river or a designer an ocean or whatever you like and then go to the shelves and you get to use any of the figures you want in the sand tray and make your own little world and you&#39;ll know when you&#39;re done and you&#39;ll tell me and while you&#39;re doing it I just sit quietly across there and draw a little map of what you&#39;re doing and you don&#39;t have to worry about me keeping up with your whatever I&#39;m pretty good at it by now and that&#39;s what I say then I say we just when you&#39;re done I come and look at it and I may ask you if you have a story or a title for this one and you could say yes and tell me for you can just say no I don&#39;t know why I did it it just it just is that&#39;s fine I just write that down then we take pictures of it so when you&#39;re grown up you can come back if you like it we can look at it together and by then you&#39;ll be able to tell me what&#39;s going on in the sand play introducing sand play to adults is a little different the reason for that is in most cultures most Western cultures today everyone is so highly rationalized that we have long since forgotten about the symbolic dimensions of life and in fact we tend to denigrate them or put them down make fun of them people feel silly when they do anything like a drawing or us you know playing in the sand at the beach or sitting on a swing and swinging back and forth and it&#39;s very sad but I have to be aware of that when I&#39;m introducing just adults because most of them will initially think that this is rather silly if not absolutely just for children so I take an approach that emphasizes how quickly this gets to deep work and moves us through so they&#39;re thinking then oh I won&#39;t be in therapy as long you know and so on so here&#39;s how I say it to an adult this is what we call the sand tray trays of sand and the process is called a sand play and what you do is very simple you come over and you can shape the sand you can use either wet one or the dry one and the wet when you can sculpt a little more than the dry you&#39;ll notice they&#39;re both blue on the bottom so you can River a design or no shirt or whatever you like and while you&#39;re doing this I sit across the room very quietly and just draw a little map of what you&#39;re doing when you&#39;ve touched the sand enough it worked it enough or just what to you go to the shelves it just pick out whatever jumps out at you you may have an idea what you want to do you may not it really doesn&#39;t matter the psyche will do what it needs to do if we just let it so that&#39;s about all there is to it you&#39;ll want you may go back as many times as you want you can change things as many times as you want move the sand do whatever you need to and don&#39;t worry about me I can continue to draw my little map it doesn&#39;t matter I can keep up with them and then you know when you&#39;re done and you&#39;ll tell me I&#39;m done so I&#39;ll come over and I&#39;ll look at it from the side from which you primarily worked and I may ask you if you had any associations while you were doing this tray and you may say well this guy&#39;s chasing that one and this one looks like you sick that was scary and I have no idea why I did the rest of this and I write down I just write that down and that&#39;s it or you may say I have no idea why I did this perfectly fine so what&#39;s actually going on here is that Sam plays like a dream however the symbols that come out of the dream kind of drift away on their own here they become three-dimensional and in addition they&#39;re shared with the therapist who&#39;s outside of our our conscious realm and dimension so what it&#39;s doing is it&#39;s bringing up that date material and it&#39;s putting it in place like stepping stones so we work through it very quickly would you like to do a sand play now let me demonstrate how an adult might do a sand ray sand play we tend to use the terms interchangeably but technically the box is the tray the method is the but you&#39;ll hear nevis on both ways so as the adult client I&#39;m going to come to the sand and I&#39;m going to I decided I&#39;m going to work in the wet sand today so we would probably move the dry sand away to give me room to walk around and then I&#39;m going to design or something I don&#39;t know just start moving the sand horse I&#39;m doing this in silence well the therapist is over there drawing a little map or something and I don&#39;t really know what I&#39;m doing I&#39;m just letting my hands lead the way and if it feels right I keep it if it doesn&#39;t feel right I keep moving and change it when the adult client does the Sam play I tell them this too that they&#39;ll most likely feel very self-conscious to start with but after a few trays they&#39;ll forget that I&#39;m even in the room and that&#39;s true because what happens is we enter a very deep trance-like State I also emphasize to the clients that this is not an art contest notice and place I&#39;ve ever looked up felt the same and it&#39;s not about making that look pretty okay that feels good to me so I&#39;m going to go to the shelves and just for the purposes of the film and the demonstration so we stay on camera I&#39;m just going to use the shelves behind me I&#39;m not just taking things I don&#39;t know why I&#39;ve got an umbrella fiery dragon there&#39;s a man reading a pan top of a pan this is a load of center silver chalice to the white horses funny little dwarf there&#39;s some little trees berry trees totem home that&#39;s kind of a red fiery bush here&#39;s Don Quixote defeated there&#39;s a star it doesn&#39;t feel quite finished yet so I put some I think it needs some green things my wife these stars better it&#39;s a little star tree so nobody moved out well here&#39;s a big chubby laughing buddha watching the whole thing and laughing and now I&#39;m done just feels done so then the therapist would come over and look at it from the primary place that I worked the tray and maybe ask this client if she had any associations while she was doing it and she might say something like well this is one of the funniest little things I&#39;ve ever seen and she&#39;s so wild looking but I just loved her and this is looks like a very defeated person over here leaving the scene and this man banging on the pan looks like he&#39;s calling to the dragon I don&#39;t know to get rid of him or to bring in here or what but I like the umbrella on the dragon it seems to protect him a bit so maybe maybe it&#39;s a good dragon I don&#39;t know and the Buddha watches the whole thing and laughs delight delighted and I don&#39;t know why I did the rest of this I just don&#39;t know that&#39;s it but therapist writes it down and that&#39;s it so then the therapist will take pictures for the record and we never disassemble the tray in front of the client we want the symbolic imagery to live in the client and to remain in place I think it would be very destructive to take the tray apart then the cloth in the presence of the client so we don&#39;t do that in the union method of sand play the theory behind sand play stems from the work of Carl Gustav Jung he happened to be the neighbor of mrs. Dora cough who invented the sand play method as it worked out mrs. Cole was a concert pianist and she had lost a husband in the wars and was living up in the in Switzerland and next door to the Youngs and the story goes that Carl Jung&#39;s children always seem to be very centered and at peace when returned home from the coughs house so when Dora was doing analysis with Ma young and she consulted with Carl Jung about what she might do for work because concert pianist wasn&#39;t going to do it for he suggested that she was very good with children why doesn&#39;t she find a way to work with children in you Mian analysis so she began her studies and pursuits and she came across dr. mark Margaret lowenfeld from London and lowenfeld developed what we call the world technique which consists of the children taking toys and figures from baskets and selecting through them and making a world and then mrs. doctor lowenfield will talk with the child in a very respectful way about their world and Dora cough went to study with her originally Margaret Winfield was from Poland so after a devastating warm Poland she returned she&#39;s a pediatrician in the early 20th century she returned to find that the children were so traumatized and she was horrified and she said about to find a way she could directly access the way they&#39;re thinking and in her pursuits she remembered a book written by HG Wells the social theorist in London and it&#39;s called for games it&#39;s a tiny little book and my sister and I have brought it back into print if you&#39;d like to have a copy of it it&#39;s a it is delightful HG Wells talks about in a very humorous and loving way about the games his children his two boys played on their nursery floor and that these games consisted simply and primarily of wooden blocks and pieces of paper and leaves that they would find in the garden and so on and a few purchased toys of figures of people and animals and so on and that they had been sometimes with these floor games well dr. Bowen Feld remembered this and she thought I&#39;m going to get big box of figures for the clinic in London so she got a big box of figures and she said it in the clinic in London and it was the children themselves that came up with the world technique the kids would take the figures from this side of the clinic which was large and carry them all the way over to the opposite side of the clinic where the sandbox was and they would make whirls in the sandbox so that&#39;s how mrs. dr. lowenfeld came up with the world technique Medora called studied with dr. lowenfeld she saw something happening in the sand worlds of the children that were exactly what young described in the individuation process furthermore she saw the process of coming to Center coming to wholeness that she knew well from her studies in Tibetan Buddhism she had freaka frequently hosted Tibetan Buddhist monks at her home and even had a visit from the Dalai Lama at one time in fact in mice and mice and trays I even have a little tiny bit of sand that was blessed by the dalai lama from dora coughs and ray so it makes it a very special thing so dr. lowenfeld and mrs. cough talked about these differences and mrs. cough was very wary of interfering with the child by talking with them about what was going on because she saw she was highly intuitive and very intelligent she saw that this was largely unconscious so she thought it best to just stay silent and stay out of the way don&#39;t don&#39;t interpret the world so lowenfeld and cough talked about this and they agreed to have two different methods Lewin fields would continue to be called the world technique and mrs. cough called hers sand play she thought it was critical that the word play be in there because we access that dimension that play frame when we go and work directly with the symbols so that&#39;s how it came to be and mrs. cough began using it in her office in Switzerland with the children and soon the parents of these children were just amazed at how quickly and how well their children were doing so they did they wanted to trice and play themselves so we now work with sampling with both adults and kids to better illustrate the sand play process let&#39;s take a look at a couple of sand play case vignettes let&#39;s first take a look at the case of a young boy Aaron aged 9 brought to therapy by his mother for anger issues when we first look at Aaron&#39;s tray we see that it has a sense of ordered unordered quality about it we have Asian men in the front near left corner looking into a crystal ball three Asian ninjas in the front center preparing to fight there&#39;s a group of cartoon characters on the right Batman Robin and the enemies engaged in conflict a pair of skiers coming down the hill directly behind them and a lion tamer holding his hand high to a tiger in the back left corner in the center raised high on a hill is a man encased in armor huge in proportion to the other figures in the tray when we look at a first sand play in a series or a sand play process as we call it we look for a symbolic manifestation of both the intrapsychic conflict that this process will address and the assets the psychic assets that the client has to address that material here in Aaron&#39;s first ray we see pictures of anger and conflict a speeding car being chased by a policeman attempting to bring order to it we have in the back a raging huge tiger and a man holding up his hand as if to try to tame it and calm it down in the middle we have a man who is completely encased in steel he can&#39;t move he can&#39;t breathe he is not connected with life we have here in the front left a picture of wisdom and insight with the two Asian men glancing into the crystal ball on the other end of the diagonal from the wisemen we see a pair of skiers very skillfully descending a hill now if we look at both diagonals we&#39;ve got and the diagonal in a sand play is the farthest distance you can get between two clusters of figures or symbols we have on one hand the roaring raging tiger lion and the tamer on the other end we have Batman and Robin trying to bring order and reason to the crooks crossing that we have the skiers very skilled and in the wisdom of the Asian men looking into the future at the crux Asst at where these two diagonals cross is this man encased in steel so it would appear that in order to bring order and justice to tame the out-of-control anger it&#39;s going to access aaron&#39;s inner wisdom and skill and that will then release the man in the steel suit so something needs to be released inside of Eron psyche that has not been able to emerge yet as Aaron moves into his fourth tray he touches the center of the personality the self we call this the manifestation of the self we saw in his first tray that he had that the psyche outlined the direction of its healing to release something that&#39;s been locked up encased in him and perhaps causing this rage and his anger problems on a very deep level and he will use then the assets that he has wisdom from a remote part of his consciousness and skill to confront these issues in Dre&#39;s 2 &amp; 3 he confronts many issues and in tray 4 then he moves to the center of the self so the psyche acknowledges the centrality of the self in this tray we have a central fire surrounded by a ring of seeded Native Americans they&#39;re both men and women at the circle some of the women have children surrounding this inner circle are two quantities a square of trees of four trees and then a square of for religious masks from two traditions the Hindu and the Navajo people the both are very remote from the consciousness of this young Jewish boy it&#39;s very interesting that the masks from the Hindu tradition come from the well love story of the Ramayana where Lord Rama and we see his green face in the far right corner and seated across from him as his beloved wife Sita her face is turned away from us here in the picture Rama adored Sita and Sita was born out of a furrow in the earth so she is the very essence the quintessence of the feminine and Rama is the quintessence of the masculine well what happens then is this demon who we see with the little sort of butterfly wings in that the hint of yellow around over here by the serpent he steals Sita away and the tail has to do with Rama recovering Sita and getting back and honoring the feminine as the center part of his life above the tray on the far edge is a little girl the Native American girl that Aaron described as the spirit of a princess who died a long long time ago she stands by a moon and he said they are actually hanging over the fire so here Aaron psyche accesses the collective unconscious to bring about the precise myth that he will need to release those feminine energies and his spiritual energies from that encased man into a 1 this is Aaron&#39;s final Trey Trey 15 I saw him for about 30 sessions over a year and a half and he averaged one Trey every other session in this tray you&#39;ll notice that he&#39;s divided the world in half with this arcing River and on the right side sits a woman on a park bench in the far right corner he later said that&#39;s his mother on the left side we see a statue in the front left a gold statue Aaron said this is the statue of a guy who fought what Aaron&#39;s done here is return many of the bad guys or adversaries that he fought in his previous trays if we take a look behind the three-headed dragon we&#39;ll see the penguin that we met into a1 the other figures came along in his other trays you notice that both halves of the world are connected with the bridge and that a little blue car leaves the side of the conflict towards the home side or the peaceful world side along the river hanging over the tray on a hook Aaron constructed a way to hang the rocket man figure who patrols the river so this is a very safe place we have the car leaving the site of the conflict returning to the normal word world and on the left side we have a dark train leaving or exiting the scene as well in a final tray we do what mrs. cult called return to the market place the psyche returns to the ordinary world here Aaron moves out of the arena of conflict and returns to the feminine the woman in the corner here we see a very fit and tiny boxer next to what in proportion is a gigantic victory cup of silver so what we have we see here in Aaron&#39;s final tray is a man next to some silver medal it reflects the silver medal encasement of the night in tray one but here what&#39;s happened is it&#39;s transformed into a victory Cup and the man is no longer encased in it his spirit has been released and he is returning to normal life when he was 15 years old Aaron and his mother returned to my office for a session to review Aaron Sam play case at that time he was able to tell us what was going on within him in each tray was a very moving experience it worked out that Aaron was doing very well in school he was quite popular with the girls he was on the football team and not surprising from the content of his sand play case he was deeply spiritual and religious boy it was an honor to have worked with Aaron and to follow up and to hear of his success at this point we&#39;re going to look at a different case vignette that of an older man whom I&#39;m calling Harold he was in his 60s he entered therapy because his wife told him to she complained that he had violent angry outbursts this was his third marriage he had several children of all variety of Ages he was a professional and he entered that profession because his first wife told him to his mother was still living his father was unknown and he complained that his mother tried to control him Harold didn&#39;t want to do sand play he did sand play because I told him to as you can tell hit from his biography his history has to do with being powerless around women his mother in particular still being alive in her 90s and still telling him what to do so I brought that into the room by directing him to do a sand play he all up and said he didn&#39;t want to be in therapy but knowing his history with women telling him what to do I did not let him off the hook I was going to wait for him to come forward and say I am going to stop therapy as we first sit with Harold stray we may have a feeling of depression sadness a sense of hopelessness lifelessness the landscape itself is barren and there isn&#39;t a great deal of life in it we have a dead cow skull from a cow that had died long time ago a lizard in a very tiny little pond what water is present is rather sketchy and ill-defined there is more life in the back left corner where we have this voluptuous young woman the colorful house and the little green tree across from her is this very old sick man it&#39;s actually a statue of Lazarus directly after he was raised from the dead we can see that he&#39;s very skinny he&#39;s got wounds all over his body raw sores he&#39;s on crutches and from the looks of him I doubt that he&#39;s going to be able to make this journey across the bridge in addition there&#39;s a boa constrictor next to him and given his appearance of weakness I think he is very much under threat of being strangled Harold had always identified himself as a ladies man he was debonair sophisticated good-looking he didn&#39;t have a father so he said he modeled himself after Cary Grant in the movies and he charmed ladies his entire life but now he&#39;s old and he&#39;s confronting it appears his mortality as this very wounded man just raised from the grave looks at this voluptuous young woman across the tray in the center of the tray we have a tall mountain peak surrounded by three flying white birds the bird is frequently a symbol of the spirit because it ascends to the heavens and then returns to the earth perhaps something of the Spirit will help Herald accept himself as he is well he&#39;s always envisioned himself as a ladies man he&#39;s actually powerless around women Harold has always carried a false persona he&#39;s been acting his whole life he&#39;s been Cary Grant well in his first tray here the psyche poses this conflict in this false identity in stark on get over Abel terms and yet central is this beautiful mountain peak with three birds three being a dynamic number something on the move from this first tray it appears then that Harold&#39;s healing or transformational direction in his sand play process will be to surrender this false identity and to access deeper resources that are aligned with the self Harold is much more grounded and focused by tray five the trays much more full of life it feels a lot more real in a sense than tray one to track the process the psyche moves through during sand play work we look at what remains the same from tray d&#39;etre and what changes what remains the same here in this tray is that we have an old man and we have a woman here she&#39;s the Venus de Milo what has changed is that the man is a real old man it&#39;s no longer wounded bleeding Lazarus but it&#39;s a real old man seated appropriately in his garden on a bench directly in front of him he sees that this woman is not a woman it&#39;s an archetypal form she&#39;s not real it&#39;s very clear now the table is set for a banquet his psyche is feeding itself it has food now to move on outside of the circle is an empty cage perhaps he&#39;s out of the cage now as he&#39;s moved more appropriately into his own central garden his home is much bigger and we have the impression here it&#39;s definitely his home on the right he&#39;s erected a tower with a golden egg on top of a Mayan figure of a corn God after the tray was over he said that this reminded him of the sign at the shopping center which is kind of sad because that&#39;s how he always entertained himself was by buying things but now we see that it&#39;s outside the circle it&#39;s not inside the circle with this old man perhaps the only power that Harold felt he had was purchasing things but now he&#39;s fleshed out he&#39;s a real man and he no longer knew leads this tower in Harold&#39;s final tray tray 8 a caravan of elephants is celebrated us and welcomed home by a cheerleader the mountain from tray 1 returns its center front and the venus de milo returns now erected as a statue in the centre of the village the home is present and a little devil figure lurks behind the house in the upper right-hand corner a very funny old man has taken a superwoman figure to bedroom and set out cocktails and Harold just laughed and said that&#39;s an impossible situation as the homecoming is celebrated here the psyche portrays an image of this man that&#39;s funny it&#39;s uh it&#39;s a silly figure there&#39;s a sense of humor injected into the situation looking at how he had identified himself before in very humorous terms perhaps the sets of humor that he has about his situation is that little devil that lurks behind the house sort of the knowing little devil by this time Harold was exhibiting much more personal strength in his relationship with his wife and with his mother he actually told his mother no on a few occasions and he was much more clear with his wife about what his needs and feelings were he&#39;d his bouts of anger and outbursts had remarkably decreased and by this time then Harold was able to tell me that he was ready to leave therapy and I agreed with him yes indeed you are Harold did not live to many years after I finished working with him but how wonderful it was that he was able to resolve these issues psychically before he met his death when we&#39;re doing Sam play with adults we generally have a parallel process going on with verbal therapy the verbal therapy being far more conscious mostly conscious rational and so on while the Zen play aspect of the therapy is mostly unconscious at that point and is way in advance of the consciousness that the clients currently working at so what happens is the the work from the sand trays is like images from a dream that comes up and makes almost like stepping stones I&#39;ve said to help us follow our path to healing and wholeness but it trails along in consciousness so that will emerge in consciousness what&#39;s happening in the sand play will emerge in consciousness later on down the line so the sampling process may be advanced like this and the verbal process trails behind like that the theory used to support the sand play processes the personality theory of Carl Gustav Jung and for those of you that aren&#39;t familiar with his personality theory just very simply Jung believed and saw that if given the appropriate circumstances the human psyche had a natural tendency and was in fact compelled to heal and to grow or further develop to become more of who it is to become more of the self to integrate more of the self Jung also saw early in his work with his patients two levels of thinking going on at the same time he saw the ordinary thinking the conscious verbal or communication talking level of consciousness and then he saw this other unconscious non conscious level of thinking whose language was symbols and and mythologies the stories those symbols tell this is how he developed his theory of the conscious and unconscious minds well thus and play allows us to directly access the unconscious mind so when the person is working in the sand tray child or adult they&#39;re actually working moving the psyche the psyche is actually moving as these symbols and figures come together and form symbolic statements or imagery the psyche is actually moving so as this moves it comes from the Shelf and comes here the psyche is actually moving that needed element to that position and in this relationship with these other figures so when we look at a sand tray or sand play we&#39;re not looking at an artifact of the psyche we&#39;re looking at what was actually going on in that psyche at that moment it&#39;s it&#39;s uncanny but we have to really get that while we&#39;re working in sand play we directly access the unconscious and given that natural tendency to heal and develop the psyche moves where it needs to it brings up conflicts that that are in our way we address them we move through them we access new materials and we transform and become whole recent research in neurosis that the real healing that goes on in therapy in spite of what modality we use it really happens in a less conscious level of brain functioning in fact what they&#39;re finding out is that real healing and growth in the psyche or the brain takes place in the right hemispheric functions and often the limbic functions so what we&#39;re doing in healing is very really unconscious and that&#39;s the level we access with the with the sand play therapy so the verbal therapy is quite conscious the sampling therapy is largely unconscious the verbal therapy often has a hierarchical relationship between the therapist and the client the client often regards the therapist as a an authority or of someone better bigger or whatever and the sand play on the other hand is it&#39;s a mutual witnessing of what goes on the witnessing itself is very important because it&#39;s much like learning and and learning theory when something is seen when I tell you something that I&#39;ve been thinking or suspecting or feeling and you you get it you understand it then it becomes cemented in reality it becomes real for me Sam plays operating at the same in the same way it the symbolic construction emerges and is fixed in the three-dimensional place and the witness therapist sees it and then thereby validates it if we draw from quantum theory we might say that the external witnessing consciousness of the therapist and I say external because it&#39;s outside of the clients psychic construct the external consciousness of the witness actually helps what the quantum theorists call collapse the non manifest into reality so this witness helps make this real by witnessing and honoring it now the therapists need not understand everything that&#39;s happening in the clients and play I asked mrs. golf this question at one point and she said this it was so poignant I actually remembered it she said you need not be engaged in understanding everything in the sand play but you must remain engaged in coming to understand what is transpiring in the sand play so we remain engaged by learning studying the symbols studying personality theory how these symbols are carrying out of the psyche moving the psyche what theory how we would apply theory to these we remain engaged in that way in fact it was years and years and years into my work in sand play before I could look at a sand tray and have any concept at all of what was going on but it kept working because I honored it and respected it very profoundly it worked for the clients as well as in my own process of course well Dora called claimed what she call the free and protected space of sand play these are the conditions Yoda said the psyche needs to grow towards the self to exercise that natural tendency that that compelling a urge to grow and develop and heal the free unprotected space is free because you have available to you by combinations by making things anything you need all parts of life and fantasy are represented in the collection and we also have a number of building materials in case you need something that isn&#39;t there we&#39;ve got paper string scissors you know glue tape wood blocks tiles any kind of thing a person might need to make something they can&#39;t seem to find in the collection and the collection by the way I know I&#39;m going off on a bit of a and here but the collection need not be as as extensive as mine a small collection as long as it&#39;s got a wide range of figures is quite adequate and works just as well the psyche will find and do what it needs to do I have an excellent list of the figures to have in a beginning collection in my handbook of sand play therapy if you&#39;d like to refer to that so we&#39;ll go back to the free unprotected space it is completely free because you are told by the therapist you can do whatever you need to do and if we stop and think about it that is an awe-inspiring direction because an opportunity where in life do we have the freedom to do whatever we need to do where do we give us that space ourselves that space to do it well in Sam play that&#39;s what you do I always tell the children you can do anything you want but you can&#39;t throw sand at dr. barb and they laugh sometimes they say that to the to the adults I&#39;ll tell them you do whatever you want but I always tell the kids you can&#39;t throw sand at me they get a kick out of it but they get the idea you can do anything you want and and so they do now the other aspect of the free and protected space is the protection it&#39;s very safe it&#39;s safe in a number of ways the construction of the tray itself is safe because it has delimited boundaries the size and shape of the tray is such that it fills the field of vision without having the client needing to turn the head or extend the body it just fills the field of vision so that&#39;s why it really compels us to a deeper place the size of the tray is also in the handbook another and very critical safety feature of sand play is the presence of the well trained and experienced certified sand play therapists it takes years to understand what&#39;s going on here and to know to recognize the signs when someone is heading into unsafe territory it&#39;s very easy to evoke a psychotic process with Sam play for the unknowing therapist I&#39;ve seen it it&#39;s very dangerous and my and my opinion is highly unethical to the client I tell my students that of all of these wonderful toys from all over the world all of these building materials these trays of sand and so on the most important tool in the sand playroom is the therapist the quality of their presence because that is what makes this very safe and if that presence isn&#39;t there the sand play will stop or it will go into a very dark direction so that&#39;s why thorough training is needed so let&#39;s talk a minute about what&#39;s needed to train in sand fly therapy if you happen to live live in a region that has a branch of the International Society for sand play therapy isst we call that you will follow their training guidelines if you are not in a region that has an isst branch I suggest that you follow it particularly if you train with me will you follow the sand play therapists of America on trading guidelines for one of two credentials and the first is the sand play practitioner this is where we start the sand the certified sand play therapist is the second credential and that takes for more experience in time let&#39;s talk a minute about the sand play practitioner to do that to become a sampling practitioner first you must be licensed as a mental health professional because we are dealing with the depths of the psyche this is not a tool for teachers or for kindergarten teachers or anything like that if there are daycare people this is a tool for the trained psychologist or psychotherapist so to train and cycle in sand play therapy with me I always say you must either be lye or you must be on a licensing track in other words if you are in graduate school working toward licensing and you want to study sand play fine with me but you can&#39;t practice and you can&#39;t get your practitioner certification until you&#39;re licensed secondly we work on the level 2 levels in training one is the rational cognitive level that&#39;s the learning and knowledge aspect of things and of the important level is the precognitive non rational symbolic level and this is where you do your own sand play process with a certified sand play practitioner Oh No certified plant sampling therapists excuse me excuse me and a process can be anywhere from 15 to 35 trays it can actually even be less than that it could be far more than that it just depends on what piece of work the psyche undertakes in that particular process so you do your own process and then the studying requires minimum of 36 hours of training with a certified sand play therapist and 18 of those hours must be a course entitled introduction to sand play therapy you must also then be in consultation with a certified sand play therapist and this is when you start practicing therapy in your your clinic or school or practice and you&#39;re working towards your your practitioner status you work under consultation with the certified sand play therapist and with the advantages of Skype these days it is no longer very difficult to get face-to-face consultation with the therapist because we can do it through Skype so that&#39;s wonderful this requires there certain numbers you have to fulfill and you can check these numbers online we&#39;ll have resources for you at the end of the tape but I believe we get you can have 20 hours over 25 hours or 25 sessions rather of a group station and a consultation group has a maximum of six people and during those twenty five sessions you must have presented your case material from your practice at least five times so you practicing and you must have about three people doing sin play or three sand trays a week on a fairly regular basis to give you enough material to get some experience and you may take digital photos of these and you bring them to consultation and your group and you with your therapist the sample a certified template therapist and you review the material and learn for your own material and support your own work with your real quiets you can do individual consultation 15 hours of individual consultation is the minimum requirement a combination of group and individual I believe is twenty hours and you must present at least think four times during those twenty hours combination group sessions and individual well we&#39;re coming to a conclusion here and I heartily heartily encourage you to join our training introduction to Sam thing perhaps some advanced trainers as well even if you don&#39;t plan to practice sand light therapy I think it&#39;s a very wise and it&#39;s a wonderful experience to get inside sand place so to speak and understand what it is so you know what people are talking about when they then when they tell you that they are a sand play therapist or you know when a child an adult could really benefit by referral to a sand play therapist I thank you for listening today and join me in my office it&#39;s an honor to have you here and I hope to meet many of you in our upcoming trainees I&#39;ve been practicing same play therapy now for over 20 years and I must tell you very sincerely I never ever tire of it no to sand rays aren&#39;t ever the same no to sand plays ever feel the same even if I lose a picture somehow and have to reconstruct a tray for a record it never ever feels like the real thing it cannot be replicated sand play constantly keeps me on the edge of my chair so to speak the cutting edge of myself having to learn more about my own inner workings and deal with more and more of my issues as I learn more and more about symbols and myth I have found sampling to be highly effective in a wide variety of clinical presentations anything from depression to repression anxiety oh just down the list down the list relationship issues anything in lots of trauma work I&#39;ve done a lot of trauma work it&#39;s very effective for healing well bye for now and I hope to see you at the upcoming true Oh

Transcript for:Dr. Barbara Turner on Sandplay Therapy

Transcript for:
Dr. Barbara Turner on Sandplay Therapy