What happens in a sandplay therapy session?

A sandplay therapy session unfolds in a space deliberately designed to hold two things simultaneously: freedom and protection. The client enters a room containing a shallow tray — roughly 57 by 72 centimeters, its interior painted blue so that when sand is pushed aside the impression of water appears — along with a wide selection of miniature figures: human beings, animals, buildings, vehicles, plants, stones, fantastical creatures, spiritual symbols. The client is invited to create whatever they wish. No directive is given. No interpretation is offered. The therapist sits as a witness, present without judgment, and the work begins.

What follows is not primarily a verbal exchange. The client touches the sand, moves it, adds water if they choose, and places figures into a scene that externalizes something from the interior world. Dora Kalff, who founded sandplay therapy in 1956 after training with Jung and spending time with Winnicott, called this container the "free and protected space" — a phrase that names the therapeutic stance as much as the physical arrangement. As Wiersma and colleagues (2022) describe it:

In the safe presence of the therapist, an individual makes images using sand, water, and miniatures, accessing conscious and unconscious processes and the natural healing capacities of nature and the psyche to advance psychological development.

The session typically moves through two phases. In the first, the client constructs the picture — a process that is itself the primary therapeutic event, not merely a prelude to discussion. In the second, the client may choose to share a story or associations about what they have made, and the therapist may ask gently about particular figures or the scene. Roesler (2019) notes that in Kalff's classical approach, interpretation is used only very cautiously — and often not at all. The emphasis falls on the spontaneous, dynamic quality of the creative act itself, not on decoding its symbols.

This matters because the work is reaching something that language cannot easily access. The act of touching sand and arranging figures engages what trauma researchers call implicit memory — the somatic, procedural, and emotional residue of experience that does not arrive with a verbal narrative. Ogden (2006) describes this register as memory that "does not feel like memory to us. It feels more like who we are." Sandplay creates conditions in which this preverbal material can take form without requiring the client to translate it into words first. For clients who have difficulty verbalizing their experience — whether due to trauma, developmental history, language barriers, or simply the nature of what they carry — this is not a workaround but the method itself.

Over a series of sessions, patterns emerge. Certain figures or configurations recur, then shift. What begins in chaos or fragmentation often moves, across the arc of a therapy, toward greater coherence and order. Weinrib (2004), cited in Roesler, observes that the sandtray process allows clients not only to express emotional content but to directly modify and restructure their inner world by giving it visible form. The containment of the tray — its fixed dimensions, its blue floor, the presence of the therapist — regulates the fear of being overwhelmed, so that regressive and unconscious material can surface without flooding the client.

The neurobiological dimension of this is increasingly documented. Wiersma et al. (2022) report that sandplay activates multiple brain systems regulating sensory input and the stress response, and that neuroimaging studies have found improved synchrony in frontotemporal networks following sandplay treatment — potentially facilitating the retrieval and reprocessing of memories with an optimal degree of cognitive control. The limbic system and prefrontal cortex both show measurable improvement in anxiety populations.

What the session does not do, in the classical form, is rush toward resolution. The therapist does not interpret the symbols as they appear, does not redirect the client toward insight, does not impose a narrative arc. The psyche is trusted to move at its own pace, through its own images. This is the inheritance from both Lowenfeld's World Technique — which gave children a means to express their inner state without adult interpretation — and from Jung's conviction that the unconscious contains constructive forces that, given adequate space, will work toward integration. The session is, in this sense, an act of hospitality toward what the soul is already trying to do.

Dora Kalff — portrait of the Swiss analyst who founded sandplay therapy
Active imagination — Jung's method of engaging unconscious material through creative expression, the theoretical ancestor of sandplay
Individuation — the process of psychological wholeness that sandplay is understood to advance
Implicit memory — the preverbal, somatic register that sandplay reaches beneath conscious narrative

Sources Cited

Wiersma, Jacquelyn K. et al., 2022, A Meta-Analysis of Sandplay Therapy Treatment Outcomes
Roesler, Christian, 2019, Sandplay therapy: An overview of theory, applications and evidence base
Ogden, Pat, 2006, Trauma and the Body: A Sensorimotor Approach to Psychotherapy