The Sand Therapy Training Institute

Dr. Dee’s Reflection:

A therapist’s competency should include:

1. Understanding to distinguish the specific approach (knowledge)
2. A clear intention for use of the approach (purpose)
3. A specific theory  to conceptualize the process (lens)
4. Practice with salient attitude/ skills to engage clients (ability, best practice)
5. Meaningful, personal experience with the specific approach (immersion)
6. Supervision/ consultation to sharpen insights and skills (feedback)
7. Practice shifting states of awareness/ perception with the flow of intuitions, knowledge, ability, and attitude (aesthetic congruence)
8. Personal therapy

Skills and Sensibilities for Narrative Sand Therapy©

Narrative Sand Therapy is grounded in existential psychology and narrative therapy. Philosophy, theory for conceptualization, and engagement are emergent aspects of social construction, existential psychology, humanistic principles, and analytic psychology. Brief core ideas follow.

1. Core Principles — permission, protection, empowerment, and presence
2. Active Imagination – engaging the imagination of client and clinician
3. Aesthetic Congruence – congruent aesthetics — aligning attitude, imagery, story
4. Amplification – exploring/ extending symbol qualities, personal-cultural-evolving meaning
5. Co-Transference – listening/acting to support collaborative intuitions between clinician, client, and symbols
6. Deep Listening – extending Roger’s active listening with existential relevance, depth and meaning
7. Empowerment – responding in authentic, congruent affirming ways that validate client experience, and congruence with emotion, identity, and cultural ways of being and relating
8. Existential – threads of experience underlying sand scenes and stories such as identity, freedom, connection, mortality, hope, trust, and life’s meaning and purpose
9. Externalization – client representations of emotion, experience, voices, and stories in their sand scene
10. Heightened Presence – physical, mental and emotional attunement with client experience, stories and relevant cultural worlds
11. Hermeneutic – the hermeneutic circle as process from immersion to emergence, pacing cycles of a client’s life-world, moving from initial externalization-representation, through symbol dialogues and movement, to reclaim and integrate congruent emotion, story and ways of being with self and others
12. Spontaneity – the ability to be immediate, to flow, creative presence to be innovative-in-the-moment during expressive process
13. Pacing – therapist’s breathing, kinesthetically follows and balances the client’s state of being 
14. Permission – countering client’s self-defeating injunctions with affirming permission, to be/ to exist; freedom to explore alternative ways to Be, to think, feel, relate and create
15. Process Hypnosis – preparation to shift states of awareness
16. Protection – creating safety that is meaningful for the client in terns of internalized and external threats (safety from judgement, shame, marginalization, oppression, alienation)
17. Reclamation – client identifies and owns new aspects of personal/ cultural story 
18. Reflective Images – pictures used to activate imagination 
19. Resonance – experience, a deep presence and attunement with intuition to the three entities involved – client’s mind-body expressions, symbol voices, clinician intuitions/ useful countertransference, and relevant cultural worlds
20. Symbols – any object that is actively receiving projections from client and clinician
21. Validation – verbal and non-verbal authentic acknowledgment of client’s experience
22. Wonderment – ways to engage to avoid interpretation and theory as priority, being alert to projections, reduce questions 

A checklist of questions can be helpful to develop competency and remind us to check on aspects of therapy, training, and consultation that need our attention. When we question our competencies, we see the gaps and can work on weak areas regarding insights, knowledge, special skills, and existential-phenomenological dimensions of clinical engagement.

Checklist of Questions:

• What are you doing? (approach)
• Why are you using this approach? (intention)
• How do you connect clinical perception and experience with intention? (theory)
• What specific skills did you develop to process with clients? (attitude/ skills)
• What personal experience did you immerse yourself in to reach new understandings of experiential, meaning, and countertransference? (immersion)
• How do you know if you are using the approach correctly? (feedback)
• How do you integrate immediacy, presence, spontaneity, innovation, imagination, skilled collaboration, silence, and flow? (aesthetic congruence)
• Is it time to return to therapy to attend to self-care, and unpack your own developmental and existential experience? (self-care)

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