Sandtray Therapy: The Method, the Evidence, a Session Sheet
Sandtray therapy asks a person to build a scene in a tray of sand using small figures, then works with what has been built rather than with an explanation of it. This guide covers where the method came from, how sandplay and sandtray differ, what a session involves, what the research supports, and includes a processing sheet for clinicians.
Reviewed byMichael Callans, MSWA sandtray session, step by step
- Set up before the client arrives: tray with sand at an even depth, water available if you work wet, the full collection visible and reachable, a camera, and a clock out of the client's eyeline.
- Give one invitation and then stop talking. Open: build a scene, or build your world. Directed: build how this week has been, build the relationship as it is now, build what is in the way.
- Witness the building without commenting, correcting or filling silences. Ten to twenty minutes is normal. Note the order of placement, hesitations, figures picked up and rejected, and the use of the sand itself.
- When the client signals it is finished, ask permission to come closer, then work the scene on its own terms first: what is here, who is this, where is this place, what happens next.
- Only then bridge to the person's life, and let them make the link rather than offering it. Ask what they want to change in the tray, and let them move it.
- Close deliberately: photograph with consent, agree what happens to the scene, and give a few minutes of ordinary conversation before the client walks out into the street.
Processing prompts for the built scene
- Tell me about this scene. Where does it take place?
- Who is in it, and who is in charge here?
- Which figure went in first? Which one took the longest to choose?
- Is anything protected in this scene? Is anything exposed?
- What is buried, hidden, or turned away from the rest?
- If this scene had a title, what would it be?
- What is happening just outside the edge of the tray?
- What happens next here, if nobody intervenes?
- Is there anything missing that should be here?
- If you could move one thing, what would you move, and what would change?
- Does any part of this scene feel familiar from your own life?
- What do you want to say to this figure, or have it say to you?
Clinician record: what to note after the session
- Date, session number, invitation given (verbatim), directed or open: ___
- Build time, and whether the client used wet or dry sand: ___
- Order of placement and notable hesitations or reversals: ___
- Use of the sand itself: flattened, mounded, dug through to the blue base, divided, untouched: ___
- Categories of figure used, and any category conspicuously avoided: ___
- Client's title for the scene, in their words: ___
- What the client linked to their own life, unprompted and prompted: ___
- Affect during building and during processing, and any shift between the two: ___
- Changes made when invited to move one thing: ___
- Photograph taken, consent recorded, storage location: ___
- Hypotheses held lightly, and what would disconfirm them: ___
- Plan for the next session: same invitation, a development of it, or a return to verbal work: ___
Sandplay or sandtray therapy: two traditions
Sandplay (Kalff)
Jungian in theory. Largely non-directive: one standing invitation, then silence. Meaning read symbolically and across a series of trays rather than discussed at the time. Standardized tray, blue interior. Certification through the International Society for Sandplay Therapy and its national bodies, requiring the therapist's own sandplay process.
Sandtray therapy (Homeyer and Sweeney)
Theory-neutral and usable inside person-centered, Adlerian, cognitive behavioral, narrative, Gestalt or systemic work. Often directed, with a specific prompt, and processed verbally in the same session. No protected title: learned by workshop and supervision on top of a clinical license.
What they share
A contained tray, sand, an open collection of figures, uninterrupted building time, and a therapist who witnesses before asking. Both treat the scene as the client's, both avoid fixed symbol meanings, and both rest on a long clinical tradition with a thin research base.
Key terms
Setting up a tray and a collection
- Tray: Kalff's standard is about 28.5 by 19.5 by 3 inches, shallow enough to see the whole scene at once, with the inside painted blue so that clearing the sand shows water or sky.
- Sand: fine, clean, and enough to move. Many clinicians keep one dry tray and one that can be wetted, because wet sand holds shape and dry sand does not.
- A collection broad enough that nobody has to compromise: people of varied ages, skin tones and roles, families, animals both domestic and wild, buildings, vehicles, trees and plants.
- Objects of boundary and connection: fences, walls, gates, bridges, doors, ladders.
- Objects of threat and protection: predators, weapons, monsters, soldiers, and also shields, nurses, shelters, fire.
- Objects of meaning and ritual across more than one culture, plus the mundane: furniture, food, tools, mirrors, treasure, rubbish.
- Storage that shows everything at once, on open shelves rather than in boxes, and arranged by category so choosing is possible rather than a search.
A note on the evidence
Christian Roesler's 2019 review in The Arts in Psychotherapy collected the available research on sandplay therapy and found 16 randomized trials and 17 effectiveness studies reporting significant improvements with moderate effect sizes, most of them small, with few reporting effect sizes and outcome measures too varied to compare. The direction of the findings was positive; the quality and quantity do not support a claim that this is an established treatment for a named condition, and there is no large multi-site randomized trial.
Treat sandtray work accordingly: a long-standing clinical practice with a thin evidence base, reasonable as an adjunct or as a route in when verbal work has stalled, not a substitute for the trauma treatments that carry large trial evidence. Saying so to a client costs nothing and prevents a false expectation.
Training, consent and documentation
Sandplay in Kalff's lineage is formally certified by the International Society for Sandplay Therapy and national bodies such as Sandplay Therapists of America, which require coursework, supervised cases and the therapist's own completed sandplay process. Sandtray therapy has no protected title, so the relevant question to a practitioner is which specific training and supervision they have had on top of their clinical license.
Three practical points. Get explicit consent for photographs, say where images are stored and for how long, and treat them as clinical records. Build a collection that does not force a client to represent their own life with figures that exclude them. And keep interpretation provisional in your notes: write what was placed and what the client said about it, and keep your own reading clearly marked as a hypothesis.
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About this tool
Sandtray therapy is a method in which a person builds a scene in a shallow tray of sand using miniature figures, and the therapist works with the scene that results rather than with a verbal account of the problem. People search for it under several names: sand tray therapy, sandplay therapy, sandtray work, or simply sandtray. Those names are not interchangeable in the field, as the section below explains. What they share is the core arrangement: a contained space, a choice of figures, a person given time to build without being questioned, and a therapist whose first job is to witness rather than interpret.
The method begins with Margaret Lowenfeld, a British pediatrician turned child psychotherapist, who put a tray of sand and a cabinet of small objects into her London clinic in 1929 and called what happened the World Technique. She had taken the idea in part from H. G. Wells's 1911 book Floor Games, about the elaborate worlds his sons built on the nursery floor. Lowenfeld's interest was in a medium through which a person could show an inner state directly, without translating it into adult language first, and she was deliberately cautious about imposing meaning on what was made.
Dora Kalff, a Swiss analyst who trained with Carl Jung, encountered Lowenfeld's work in 1956 and went to London to study it. What she built from it, which she named sandplay, is a distinct Jungian method: the tray becomes what she called a free and protected space in which the psyche can move toward its own repair, the therapist holds silence rather than asking questions, and the series of trays across a treatment is read for symbolic and archetypal development. Kalff standardized the tray itself, roughly 28.5 by 19.5 by 3 inches with the interior painted blue so that moving the sand reveals water or sky.
Sandtray therapy, as Linda Homeyer and Daniel Sweeney set it out in their practical manual, is the broader and more theory-neutral descendant. It keeps the tray, the sand and the figures, and drops the requirement of a Jungian framework: the same materials can be used within person-centered, Adlerian, cognitive behavioral, narrative, Gestalt or family systems work, and the therapist may give directed prompts, such as building the family as it is now, or the obstacle, or the week. The practical difference is that sandplay is largely non-directive and symbolic, while sandtray therapy is often directive and worked verbally in the session.
The reason clinicians reach for it is distance. A difficulty placed in the tray is in front of the person rather than inside them, which makes it describable, movable and survivable in a way the same difficulty is not when it is being recounted. The figures carry what the person is not yet ready to say in the first person. Building also engages the hands and the body, which gives someone a way into material that goes quiet under direct questioning. These are clinical rationales rather than proven mechanisms, and they should be offered as such; nobody has demonstrated that scene-building changes a brain in a way talking does not.
Read the diagram as text
Two matched scenes. On the left a person speaks, with the difficulty drawn as an accented tangle inside their outline, and an attention arrow pointing at the person and the account. On the right the same person stands beside a shallow tray of sand in which the same accented tangle now sits as one placed object among a tree, a house and a small figure, and the attention arrow points at the tray. The accent is the difficulty itself: between the two scenes only its position changes.
Distance is what the tray is for
Conceptual contrast, not a trial result
the same difficulty, the same person and the same hour
Told in words: The difficulty stays inside the person, where it is hard to move or to look at, and the therapist's attention is on the account.
Built in the tray: The same difficulty stands outside the person as one object among others, where it can be moved, described and witnessed, and the therapist's attention is on the scene.
A session has a predictable shape. The tray and an open collection of figures sit ready. The therapist gives one invitation, often very open, and then stops talking: building takes 10 to 20 minutes and is not interrupted, including the long pauses. When the person signals that it is finished, the therapist moves from witnessing to curiosity, asking about the scene on its own terms before asking what it has to do with the person's life. The scene is usually photographed with permission, and how it is dismantled matters: some therapists leave it, some invite the person to change one thing, and nobody clears it away briskly while the person is still in it.
Sandtray therapy is used with adults far more widely than its reputation suggests. It suits adults who find talking therapy effortful or who have talked for years without movement; people whose difficulty predates language or sits outside it, including developmental trauma and loss; people who intellectualize fluently enough to stay out of reach of their own feelings; and couples and families, where two people building one tray reveals the relationship faster than an hour of reporting on it. It is also used with children, where most of the published literature sits, and this page is written for adult work and for clinicians.
The evidence is the weakest part of the picture and should be stated plainly. Christian Roesler's 2019 review in The Arts in Psychotherapy gathered the available sandplay research and found 16 randomized trials and 17 effectiveness studies reporting significant improvements with moderate effect sizes across a range of child and adult problems, alongside real limitations: small samples in most studies, few reporting effect sizes, and outcome measures too varied to compare. Signals were positive, but the body of work does not support a claim that sandtray or sandplay therapy is an established treatment for any specific condition, and no large multi-site randomized trial exists. For post-traumatic stress in particular, trauma-focused cognitive behavioral therapy and EMDR have incomparably more trial evidence.
That does not make the method unusable; it makes it a reasonable adjunct chosen for clinical reasons rather than a first-line treatment chosen for its trial base. A fair way to put it to a client: this is a well-established clinical practice with a long history and a thin research base, we are using it because talking has not been reaching the material, and if it is not getting anywhere in a few months we will change approach. Anyone marketing sandtray work as a proven trauma treatment, or as a faster route than the therapies with large trials behind them, is overstating what exists.
Training is where the two traditions separate most sharply. Sandplay in the Kalffian sense is credentialed: the International Society for Sandplay Therapy and its national societies, including Sandplay Therapists of America, certify practitioners only after extensive coursework, supervised cases, and the therapist's own completed sandplay process. Sandtray therapy in the Homeyer and Sweeney sense has no protected title; a licensed clinician can learn it through workshops and supervision, and many play therapists hold the Registered Play Therapist credential instead. Ask a prospective therapist which training they completed, and expect a specific answer.
Two misunderstandings are worth clearing. First, the tray is not a projective test: the figures have no fixed meanings, a symbol dictionary is a way of getting a client's inner life wrong with confidence, and the meaning of a snake or a bridge belongs to the person who placed it. Second, it is not play for its own sake and not a children's activity performed on adults; the structure, the silence and the processing are the method. The sheet below gives clinicians prompts and a record format for sandtray work, and Art Therapy Activities covers the adjacent expressive methods that use drawing and collage instead.
References
- Lowenfeld M. The World Technique. London: Allen & Unwin; 1979.
- Kalff DM. Sandplay: A Psychotherapeutic Approach to the Psyche. Cloverdale, CA: Temenos Press; 2003 (first published in German, 1966).
- Homeyer LE, Sweeney DS. Sandtray Therapy: A Practical Manual. 4th ed. New York: Routledge; 2022.
- Roesler C. Sandplay therapy: an overview of theory, applications and evidence base. The Arts in Psychotherapy. 2019;64:84-94. doi:10.1016/j.aip.2019.04.001
- Mitchell RR, Friedman HS. Sandplay: Past, Present and Future. London: Routledge; 1994.
- International Society for Sandplay Therapy. On the History of ISST. https://www.isst-society.com/history/ (accessed 2026).
Cite this source
Psychology.com. (2026, November 6). Sandtray Therapy. Psychology.com. https://psychology.com/tools/sandtray-therapy
Sandtray Therapy FAQ
What is sandtray therapy?
Sandtray therapy is a method in which a person builds a scene in a shallow tray of sand using miniature figures, and the therapist works with what was built rather than with a verbal account of the problem. The invitation is usually brief, the building happens without interruption, and the conversation afterward starts inside the scene before it connects to the person's life. The point is distance: a difficulty placed in the tray can be looked at, described and moved in a way the same difficulty often cannot while it is being recounted.
What is the difference between sandtray therapy and sandplay therapy?
Sandtray therapy and sandplay therapy are related but distinct. Sandplay is Dora Kalff's Jungian method: largely non-directive, worked in silence, with meaning read symbolically across a series of trays, and formally certified through the International Society for Sandplay Therapy. Sandtray therapy, as Linda Homeyer and Daniel Sweeney describe it, keeps the materials and drops the theoretical requirement; it can be directed with a specific prompt, processed verbally in the same session, and used inside almost any therapeutic model. Practitioners often use the names loosely, so ask which one they trained in.
Is sandtray therapy only for children?
No, although most of the published literature concerns work with children, which is where the reputation comes from. Sandtray therapy is used extensively with adults, and particularly with adults for whom talking has not been reaching the material: people who have talked for years without movement, people whose difficulty predates or sits outside language, and people who explain themselves fluently enough to stay out of reach of their own feelings. It is also used with couples and families, where building one scene together shows the relationship faster than reporting on it does.
Does sandtray therapy work?
The honest answer is that the method is long established in clinical practice and modestly researched. Christian Roesler's 2019 review found 16 randomized trials and 17 effectiveness studies reporting moderate effect sizes, with small samples in most of them and outcome measures too varied to compare, and no large multi-site randomized trial exists. Results point in a positive direction without supporting a claim that sandtray therapy is an established treatment for a named condition. For post-traumatic stress, trauma-focused cognitive behavioral therapy and EMDR have far more trial evidence and should be considered first.
What happens in a sandtray session?
A sandtray session starts with the tray prepared and the figures visible. The therapist gives one invitation, open or specific, and then stops talking while you build, usually for ten to twenty minutes, pauses included. When you are finished, the therapist asks about the scene itself first: what is here, who is in charge, what happens next. Only then does the conversation move to your own life, and you make that link rather than having it offered. The scene is often photographed with your consent, and how it is taken apart is decided with you.
Do the figures in the tray have set meanings?
No, and treating them as if they do is the main way sandtray work goes wrong. There is no legitimate symbol dictionary: a snake, a bridge, a wall or a baby means what the person who placed it understands by it, which may be the opposite of the textbook reading. A competent therapist asks rather than decodes, holds any interpretation as a hypothesis, and marks it as one in the notes. Sandtray therapy is also not a projective test and produces no score, so nothing built in a tray can be used to diagnose anything.
How do I find a therapist who does sandtray work?
Start with the credential question, because the training routes differ. For sandplay in Kalff's lineage, look for certification through the International Society for Sandplay Therapy or a national body such as Sandplay Therapists of America, which requires supervised cases and the therapist's own completed process. For sandtray therapy there is no protected title, so ask a licensed therapist what specific training and supervision they have had, how often they use a tray with adults, and whether they work directed or open. A clear answer is a good sign.