SANDTRAY THERAPY Sandtray Therapy for Oppositional Defiant Disorder

Abstract

The purpose of this research is to examine the effectiveness of group sand tray therapy at school with preadolescents identified with behavioural difficulties. This is a pretest-posttest control group design.

Sandtray Therapy for Oppositional Defiant Disorder

Introduction

Sandtray Therapy, a modality of play therapy, has been used in defiant disorder as the treatment intervention with different theoretical approaches; however, there is a very limited amount of empirical research.

Discussion

The mental health of children and adolescents has increasingly become a serious concern nation wide. Sand tray therapy, more commonly called Sand tray therapy, is a form of therapy that was first developed by Dr. Margaret Lowenfield, a child psychiatrist in London who was looking for a way to help children express the "inexpressible”.

Sandtray Therapy is now used by therapists for defiant disorder for children around the world in their work with children, adolescents, adults of all ages, families and couples. Some therapists even use sand tray in group therapy. The process of Sand Tray Therapy is to use sand and miniatures to make a world of your own in the sand. I like to compare it to art therapy, where you make pictures or craft projects to express your feelings or represent aspects of your personal experiences and world beliefs. In Sand Tray Therapy, you do the same thing, except there seems to be something more transcendent about this process.

Children with defiant disorder have always delighted in playing in the sand, bringing their inner and outer worlds together through imagination. Different cultures have also used sand in imaginal rituals of visioning. The Dogon medicine men of Mali draw patterns in the sand and later read the paw prints left in the night by the desert fox to divine the future. Tibetan Buddhist monks spend weeks creating the Kalachakra sand mandala, which is used for contemplation and initiation into Tantric practices (MacLennan 2007).

Whether the makers of these sand creations are children, healers, or priests, potent and ineffable energies can be stirred on an intuitive, non-rational level. Sand opens the door to the unconscious world. In western European folklore, the sandman puts children to sleep by sprinkling sand into their eyes. Sand is impressionable, mutable, and impermanent: "Dancing on sands, and yet no footing seen," Shakespeare wrote in Venus and Adonis. So it's not surprising those psychotherapists as contemporary healers stumbled upon playing in the sand as a therapeutic method.

Sand Tray Therapists who work in the way Kalff taught differentiate sand tray from Sand Tray Therapy. Sand Tray Therapy is a more generic term referring to a variety of effective ways of using sand, figures, and a container from different theoretical perspectives. Sand Tray Therapy emphasizes the spontaneous and dynamic qualities of the creative experience itself (Sweeney Minnix & Homeyer 2003). The essence of sand tray is non-verbal and symbolic.

In what Kalff called the "free and protected place" provided by the tray and the relationship with the therapist, children and adults play with sand, water, and ...