We often become excited about the possibility of Sandtray Therapy being able to help everyone, no matter the issue. So has does that look when an adult has suffered pre-verbal abuse and has no ability to verbalise nor recollect their experience using their logical left brain thinking.

You have a client, he has been seeing you on a regular basis for over 2 years now. He prefers talk therapy, you'd like him to get into the sand and experience a more wholistic way of healing. Here's what can happen when you are confronted with a client with pre-verbal trauma.

Your client doesn't mind the sand, says its soothing, but when you invite him or her to create a sand world using the sandtray miniatures, he or she says no there's nothing jumping out at me. You try again the next week and the next. Finally a year has gone by of regular psychotherapeutic sessions and nothing has gone into the sand, only the hands of the client.

Have you failed as a therapist? Did you miss something in your lesson? No, what you are now experiencing with your client is a pre-verbal trauma. Once you get to know your clients story you will have a better idea of where and when the trauma occurred. In some cases you may never know, because your client may have lost contact with family or they their stories may have been taken to the grave.

When we think of pre-verbal trauma you should not limit your thinking to 0 - 1, consider that your client's trauma may be even earlier. A woman who was raped, for example may pass on her feelings of being unwanted to her growing baby. Perhaps the women was not planning a child and the pregnancy was an inconvenience. As you get to know your client you will get the bigger picture of their early life and environment.

Although your client may not place any miniatures into the sand, never underestimate the power you give your client by being the trusted and significant other, who is unconditionally present. The sand tray is the boundary in which they can explore their early traumas. This sensory form of expression will allow the sand player to live their experiences, including a felt sense (abandonment) within the their body which can influence everyday emotional states or ways of being.

Sandtray helps clients towards living a Mindful state of awareness. Even if they are not able to express their trauma verbally, they can re-live this through bodily sensations non verbally. Remember Margaret Lowenfeld used this method for children suffering intergeneration trauma. There were unable to express verbally why the felt and thought and acted they way they did. Instead they brought balance into their neurobiology by expressing through sand worlds.

The mother child unity of bonding is great, a mother and child will share heart resonance, their hearts will beat together as one. It is important to remember here that if your client is a mother who rejected her child, you may be looking at intergenerational trauma. Listen to her story and never judge.

Sandtray is able to work with the whole brain, allowing for the right and the left to talk to each other, which brings about a Polarity of Balance.