Written in the Sand: Trauma, Healing and Return

Lynne L. Ehlers, PhD, CST-T

Abstract

A story of a journey to wholeness and integration through a sandplay process conducted almost entirely without figures. The client was a young woman suffering from fear of crowded, enclosed spaces, panic, alcohol abuse and unexpressed grief at the death of her mother when she was a child. During an intense and poignant nine-year therapy, she created seven sandtrays, using just three figures in her second tray. Although she claimed to have little capacity for symbolic thinking, and used only a sharp tool to draw in the sand, her seemingly aimless “doodles” express her despair and self-hatred; mirror the seismic upheavals going on in her psyche and between us; illustrate her struggle to bring irreconcilable opposites together; and express her triumph over anger and despair. Ammann’s Quadrant Theory, Gareth Hill’s Play of Masculine and Feminine Opposites in the psyche, and Klein/Ogden’s developmental leap from Paranoid/Schizoid to Depressive Position are discussed. Through the client’s suffering and mine, the divides between rage and buried grief, hostility and intimacy, shame and trust were gradually bridged, and ruthlessness was transformed into ruth, self-destructiveness into genuine self-care, and self-hatred into love.

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