Drawing Lines In the Sand... in The Irish TImes


Article author:

Ursula Somerville

Ursula is a Psychotherapist, Child Psychotherapist and Play Therapist and is an accredited member of several associations including the European Association for Psychotherapy and the European Association of Integrative Psychotherapy.

www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/health/2009/0901/1224253581049.html

Sand therapy has been found to be particularly effective for clients who don't know their personal blocks or traumas.

There has been a subtle yet significant shift in psychotherapeutic approaches in the past number of years. And while talk therapies and approaches such as cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) still hold sway, some psychotherapists have added new tools and techniques which come from both Eastern and Western traditions.

Sand therapy is one such approach that a group of Jungian therapists are finding to be of great value to clients at both ends of the spectrum - those who tend to talk and rationalise too much and those who don't like talking at all.

"Therapies such as CBT show immediate results. They give people a way of operating but they don't always reach reach the deeper parts. Cognitive behavioural therapy tends to help people adapt but it doesn't transform previous experience," explains Orla Crowley, a Jungian psychotherapist who teaches and uses sand therapy in her private practice. 

When clients use sand therapy, they are introduced to a sand box and an array of miniatures - figurines, plastic animals, glass birds, religious symbols, semi-precious stones, shells and all sorts of other small objects. The client then selects certain items to put wherever they like in the sand box. They can also choose to sculpt the sand by adding water to it.

"People are symbolically drawn and repelled by certain pieces, " explains Ursula Somerville, another counsellor and psychotherapist who uses the sand tray as a tool in her private practice with both adults and children. "Each therapist will have lots of human figures, wise old men, witches, magicians, cats, owls, and animals that are fierce and tame, wild and domestic," she adds.

During sand therapy, the therapist is there to simply observe and witness the process and not to comment on it. "The therapist is the guardian of the space. Her main task is to keep the space safe so that nobody will disturb the process," explains Crowley.

"It works organically," adds Somerville. "I tend to let it happen. The sand tray tells a sacred story. I stay out of it as much as possible and only come in when I'm invited. The client doesn't break up the tray before leaving and I try to photograph it so we can use it for reference later in therapy," she explains.

Sand therapy has been found to be particularly effective for clients who don't know their personal blocks or traumas. "People can go out of their bodies to cope with a trauma and sand therapy helps them to revisit it. It releases it in themselves in a non-threatening way because it is witnessed by another person,"explains Somerville.

Sand therapy was developed by Swiss-based Jungian analyst Dora Kalff who gave talks and seminars in the approach in various parts of the world in the last century. Originally, the work was done with children in a large  sand pit with toys as the therapy tools. Sand therapy was brought to Ireland in the 1980s by Prof. Judith Atherton, a Jungian psychotherapist who practices in Dublin and Gibraltar.

"Carl Jung sent his children to Dora Kalff because he said that sand therapy was the only road into the unconscious other than through dreams," says Atherton.

"Sand therapy is particularly useful for those who haven't been heard and for those for whom talking therapy would take a long time to break through. It's very useful for children and adults who have been abused" explains Atherton.

"The value of sand therapy is that there is no criteria for it. It's non-judgemental, tactile and visual. Even a six-year old child knows what's good when it comes to music, art, and dance, but sand is very freeing in that there is no standard, " she adds.

All therapists agree that this means people are not fearful of disclosing things on the tray and the story itself can be healing.

Sand therapy has also been used as a means to diagnose brain injury. This particular application was discovered by a Jungian psychotherapist whose client used only one-half of the sand tray in therapy, following an accident.

More recently, neurological studies have found that when a painful experience has been blocked, the brain itself is restructured. "It's very difficult to reach certain kinds of trauma in a rational way because even if you explain to someone the effects of abuse or an accident, they are still traumatised after the explanations, " says Crowley. "But, sand therapy promoted the development of new neural pathways that aren't blocked by the trauma. It also gives the client a physiological experience which helps new neurological pathways to be formed," she adds.

copyright The Irish Times 1st September, 2009

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