How Can Sandtray Therapy Help?

The integration of sandtray therapy with EMDR creates a powerful therapeutic combination that engages the right hemisphere, provides kinesthetic grounding, and offers therapeutic distance from overwhelming material. For clients who struggle with purely verbal processing — whether due to age, developmental level, or the nature of their trauma — this combination opens doors that traditional talk-based approaches cannot.

What Is Sandtray Therapy?

Sandtray therapy, as defined by Homeyer and Sweeney (2011), is an expressive therapeutic modality that uses a sandbox, miniature figures, and objects to allow clients to create three-dimensional scenes representing their internal world. The client selects from a collection of figurines — people, animals, buildings, natural elements, symbolic objects — and arranges them in a tray of sand to depict experiences, emotions, relationships, or conflicts.

The beauty of sandtray work lies in its simplicity and its depth. A child might create a scene showing a small figure surrounded by threatening animals. An adult might build a landscape representing their family dynamics. The scene becomes a tangible, visible externalization of an internal experience — something that can be observed, discussed, modified, and processed.

Why Sandtray and EMDR Work Together

Right Hemisphere Engagement

Traumatic memories are predominantly stored in the right hemisphere — the hemisphere associated with imagery, emotion, sensory experience, and nonverbal processing. Traditional talk therapy engages primarily the left hemisphere (language, logic, narrative). Sandtray therapy directly engages the right hemisphere through its visual, spatial, and symbolic nature, creating a more direct pathway to the material that needs to be processed.

Kinesthetic Grounding

The physical act of touching the sand, selecting figures, and placing them in the tray provides kinesthetic grounding that helps clients stay present during emotionally charged work. The tactile sensation of sand — warm, cool, grainy, smooth — engages the body's sensory system, counteracting the tendency toward dissociation or emotional overwhelm that can occur during trauma processing.

Therapeutic Distance

One of the most valuable aspects of sandtray work with trauma is the therapeutic distance it creates. Rather than speaking directly about their experience ("When my father hit me..."), the client can represent it symbolically through the figures in the tray. This externalization reduces the intensity of the material while still allowing it to be present and workable. The client can observe the scene from outside it, gaining perspective that is difficult to access when speaking from inside the experience.

Sandtray in EMDR Phase 2

Sandtray is particularly effective during the resource development work of EMDR Phase 2. Specific applications include:

• Calm/safe place development: Rather than simply imagining a calm place, clients can build it in the tray — selecting elements, arranging them, and making the resource tangible and visible. This multisensory engagement deepens the resource installation.
• Resource teams: Clients can select figures to represent their nurturer, wise figure, and protector, placing them in the tray in relationship to a figure representing themselves. This makes the resource team visible, concrete, and accessible.
• Container exercise: The container for holding distressing material between sessions can be built in the tray — made visible and solid in a way that enhances its effectiveness as a containment tool.

Supporting Pendulation

The Pendulation Protocol — the process of moving attention between distressing and resourcing experiences — is beautifully supported by sandtray work. Clients can create scenes representing both ends of the pendulation: the challenging material on one side of the tray and the resources on the other. The physical movement of attention between these scenes mirrors the internal pendulation process and provides a visual, spatial anchor for the work.

Training and Competency

Clinicians interested in integrating sandtray with EMDR should pursue formal training in both modalities. While sandtray may appear simple, effective sandtray therapy requires understanding of symbolic language, containment techniques, processing methods, and the theoretical frameworks that guide the work. Combining sandtray with EMDR adds an additional layer of complexity that benefits from supervised practice and ongoing consultation.

Sometimes the deepest healing happens not through words but through the simple act of placing a small figure in the sand and saying, "This is me" — and then, with the therapist's support, rearranging the scene to show what healing looks like.