Advanced Psychotherapy Training

The CE track is grounded in theory, ethics, and practice with symbols in sand. This is an integration of analytic, existential, client-centered, and narrative practices.
Approaches include Sandplay therapy, client-centered Sandtray therapy, symbol activation, active imagination, therapeutic metaphor, poetics, process hypnosis, narrative techniques, I-Thou dialogues, and Gestalt. 16 CEs can be earned.

Course Theme

Centered on existential themes in sand scenes. Poetics will highlight archetypes and metaphor for identity, meaning/purpose, developmental/ existential experience, and the flow of time.

Process

Participants will create individual sand scenes and explore representations of existential themes, personal consultation, small group reflections, and journaling.

Description

Time, identity, and meaning are powerful ways we experience the world. They are existential experiences, brackets of mortality that influence how we connect with ourselves and others, the ways we cope with trauma, find hope, define meaning and purpose. Participants will explore the influence of time, the continuance of identity, representations of meaning and purpose through metaphor, poetics and symbols in sand.

This course offers the space and time that is rarely available to therapists to immerse themselves in expressive and play therapies with time for depth, meaningful personal experience, enhance empathy and aesthetic congruence.

We ask, how does time influence the therapy process, life decisions, relationships, and identity in the context of existential and cultural experience? How is time represented in sand scenes and in symbol dialogues? How is the perception of time different for client and therapist?

This three-day experiential process will focus on the nature of time, reflections on identity, honoring the limits and gifts of mortality, inside the clinical moment and outside in collective myths, symbols and rituals.

Objectives address therapist preparation for existential depth and attunement to culture, therapist-client collaboration, and therapeutic spontaneity, imagination and invention for play and expressive therapies. We will engage with images and metaphors through silence, symbol voices, and stories.

A constructionist, existential framework for narrative sand therapy is especially helpful with grief, reclaiming developmental moments from shame, establishing safety to process client trauma, and finding hope and meaning. Symbol work will demonstrate play therapy process to help reclaim identity, build authentic connections, align purpose with congruent meaning, and integrate validation for developmental stories.

This training is ground in therapeutic permission, protection, heightened presence, empathy, authenticity and non-judging wonderment. An experiential process, participants will immerse in active imagination, symbol activation, engage symbol voices and silence, practice invention in the moment, spontaneity, and wonderment for the remarkable phenomena of time, identity and meaning.

Objectives

• State three potential therapeutic effects when facilitating symbol process with themes of identity, mortality/ time, meaning/purpose.
• State three competencies to facilitate sand therapy process relevant to client and therapist readiness.
• Regarding culture, ethnic identity, intersubjectivity, and intersectionality, state three approaches when using symbols and metaphors.
• State three limits for the use of sand therapy relevant to countertransference.
• State two concerns regarding the amount of time available to facilitate sand therapy in different play therapy settings e.g. school, clinic, home visits, virtual, homeless shelters, hospice/hospitals.
• State two limits to the therapist’s purpose/intention/selection of play therapy materials when using symbols and sand trays.
• Describe two limits regarding time-allowed to develop the necessary and adequate training to achieve play therapy and sand therapy competencies.
• State three ways to activate and process symbols and metaphors regarding identity, meaning, and time.
• State three aspects of time as an archetype and metaphor represented in sand scenes.
• Describe two practices outside of the therapy session to ground salient attitude and skills for the use of symbols in sand, especially relevant for play and expressive arts therapists.
• State three therapist responsibilities to ground a safe setting and therapeutically meaningful experience with sand therapy, especially relevant for play and expressive arts therapists.
• State two differences between collaborative play therapy engagement and traditional talk therapy regarding power and the potential effects on facilitating narrative sand therapy. (e.g. client power, therapist power, power representations in a sand scene)
• Explain three ways to use time metaphors and symbols during case consultation and supervision. (with no sand tray)
• Explain three ways to use metaphors and symbols for identity and meaning during case consultation and supervision. (with no sand tray)
• Describe two insights from the retreat’s small group exercise regarding perception of the flow of time (intuition, knowledge, attitude, ability) for aesthetic congruence.
• Describe three approaches for group therapy using narrative sand therapy.
• Describe two ways to use narrative sand therapy and symbol process during couples’ therapy
• State two ethical concerns regarding scope of practice when using symbols in sand, no matter your theoretical orientation.
• State three clinical competencies that are salient for scope of practice using sand therapy, especially within the context of expressive therapies, play, art and drama projective approaches.
• Define aesthetic congruence and describe the relevance for developmental and cultural symbols in play therapy when using narrative sand therapy.
• State two clinical competencies that are strengthened when the therapist immerses in their own experience in narrative sand therapy.
• State two existential experiences that may be represented in a sand scene reflecting the archetype of time, identity, or meaning/purpose.
• Describe three ways a client may engage with symbols in their sand scene regarding existential concerns e.g. identity, freedom, connection, mortality, meaning, responsibility.
• Describe two benefits for clients and the clinical process when therapists immerse themselves in approaches they use with clients for art, drama, play and expressive therapy.
• State two risks when therapists do not immerse themselves in the expressive therapy they use.
• Describe three strategies to engage with symbols and metaphors in a sand scene mindful of the projective process during expressive and play therapy.
• State two ways to incorporate ethnic and cultural identity during expressive and play therapies using Kalffian Sandplay therapy.
• State three core ideas from developmental psychology and their relevance facilitating symbols in sand.
• State two factors of perception during the creation of a sand scene e.g. timing, pacing, focus, flow, internal voice.
• State two factors of perception that change during amplification of symbols in sand.
• State two factors of perception that change with active imagination during narrative sand therapy process.
• Explain two ways symbols in sand reflect the connection of mind-body-imagination-culture.
• State two core ideas from social construction that guide narrative sand therapy process.

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