Full Question:
You seem to emphasize that therapists should go through their own experience with a technique. I was an intern with no background in sandtray and was encouraged to use sand with my clients. I was in supervision, and I had a personal therapist. Why would personal experience with sand be recommended when it was not a part of my master’s preparation nor for licensure?
Dr. Dee’s Reflection
Each stage of professional development is limited by the goals of the institution. Think of these limits as boundaries for what the institution is allowed to offer. For example, university programs, practicum and internship sites, supervision, professional organizations, reading case studies, and personal therapy all enhance clinical preparation. These all provide a specific preparation component to work with clients. When we skip a stage or have a poor experience, we are unprepared, there will be problems and challenges, risks, and potential damage to clients. At every stage we are careful to avoid using clients as experiments; wounded people to practice clinical skills.
Missing from this thread for professionalization is safe, guided, time-commitment for immersion in the experience of a technique. Workshops often provide time-limited moments for experience. However, immersion with depth, time for exploration, stretching boundaries, leaning into an experience, and personal feedback are overlooked.
Very few traditional curricula for professionalization prepare therapists for symbol work, exceptions are art and play therapy master’s programs and some analytic programs. Yet, we are still missing an immersive process. It would be rare for any institution to have the facility and staff to facilitate depth, to train individuals through immersive experience over enough time to integrate specialized skills and sensibilities for projective approaches. There is no funding for this component.
Therapists take on the responsibility to obtain more training as they take on new approaches. This is a part of the function of required CEs. However, immersive study in self-discovery to work with symbolic and imaginative material lacks funding and time. Therapists do the best they can to rely on their honed skills and intuition and remain mindful of countertransference and scope of practice limits.
For example, we should consider how to be fully present to the complexity and ambiguity of creative processes in therapy. Too often therapists have little to no preparation and very little personal experience with depth in symbolic engagement. A heightened presence engaging the imagination is different from the kind of presence needed for, say, CBT or problem-solving counseling.
Other skills and sensibilities we integrate through immersion include:
Heightened presence to process symbols and metaphor requires listening to layers of meaning, what to notice beyond the obvious, how to breathe and pace, how to facilitate respectful use of silence, ways to avoid therapist unguarded projections and interpretations or use of power to control a process, ways to reduce questions and formulate a special type of wonderment, ways to respond to clients with immediacy, authenticity, congruence and spontaneity, how to engage client and therapist imagination, how to cultivate co-transference, maintain safety, nourish trust, avoid manipulation, avoid using interventions prescribed for a behavioral therapy for projective therapy, practice to offer careful intuitive guidance, and ways to process deep work carefully, in stages. A therapist’s immersion and exploration are a way to develop these skills and sensibilities beyond readings and workshops.
When we are not prepared, we risk re-traumatizing the client. We may default to another theory or therapy, misuse client time, and we risk misunderstanding about the use of symbols and stories. These are still areas that need our attention. Like good science, the therapy field evolves when we open up to acknowledge problems and fund solutions.