I decided to copy and post this here besides in the therapy message board because it is also about and for Dissociative disorders not limited to but also for DID -

For the last few days I have been on very rocky ground from my last therapy session. Im doing much better now that things have slowed down. Thanks (((((((((Kimmy))))))))) ((((((((((Sky))))))))))))) and so many others that gave me hugs, and thier shoulders and ears on the boards, by pm and by email. I really appreciated it.

Some asked what "earthquake" dared to mess with Myself. LOL I couldnt go into alot of details with some because I didn't want to trigger anyone.

Now that things are calmer I thought I would post on my blog and here on the boards a low keyed version of what happened to me.

What follows is a very unique untraditional spin my therapist has put into an old therapy technique used on very young children - play therapy with sand trays.

I say "untraditional" because for the two weeks before LL and I did this activity I hit my research avenues and my friends and could not find anyone who worked with teens and adults with sand trays let alone combining hypnotic techniques.

For myself I don't regret doing this activity and even though it rocked and shook things up I will be doing this again because it pushed the process of co consciousness and integration forwards for me. For those that do not know what co consciousness and integration is -

Co consciousness is being aware of the here and now - the present - what is going on around you - seeing hearing and so on the room you are in, the people around you in your present life and the situation that is going on - the therapy session, AND at the same time being aware of what memory you are experiencing and experiencing that memory with all your senses and emotions.

Integration is also the process of co consciousness. when a person experiences a forgotten memory by being aware of the memory replaying and staying aware of the here and now at the same time the brain automatically moves that memory from being stored at the unconscious level of thinking to the conscious level of thinking.

It's kind of like when you get an email on a computer. Before you open and read the email the server automatically puts that email into the in box folders and then after opening the email you click a button and the computer automatically moves that email into your permanent files where you can open and look at the emails any time you want.

When a memory is in the unconscious level the person has no idea what that memory is until they "open" it and then it is moved from the unconscious level of thinking and put into the conscious level of thinking. Then the person can think about that memory any time they want. and once this happens DID people no longer act out the memories without being aware of what is going on and can control their behavior by using grounding techniques.

Anyway my therapist LL took the old idea of using sand trays for very young children and added her own spin to it of using her relaxation visualization activities and created a therapy activity that benefits her teen aged and adult clients and her DID, Dissociative clients also. This is what I experienced when doing the activity -

Sand Trays -

I am always on the lookout for new things to add to my therapy program. Alot of those things that catch my interest are things that are “hands on” type activities.

Boy did something different come my way. Sand Trays. I have been with the same therapist now for just over two years. About six months to a year ago this therapy agency bought another building next door to the one where my therapist LL worked out of. She was given one of the rooms in the “new” building. It’s a nice room with a little bit of room for her and her clients to spread out. One of the great things about this room is the wall length built in bookcase.

On the bookshelves she keeps many things. Some of her clients have their own “spot” where they can keep things used during their sessions. She also has her own things to decorate the room on those shelves.

Well one day a couple weeks ago I found myself standing looking at the pile and basket that was in “my” spot and I was drawn to this little knick knack of LL’s nearby. It has been on that shelf for some time but that day I was just amazed by it.

It was a little 3X5 or maybe 5X5 beach scene of a male figure at the beach, a lawn chair, umbrella, and beach ball. the scene looked like it contained real sand. I could not resist I had to touch it to see if it really was real sand. It was real white beach sand.

I guess LL noticed I was touching it. I had thought she was busy writing up my appointment card. Anyway the end result was her telling me it was a sand tray and the agency had a larger one at the main office building a block away and asked if I wanted to give working with the sand tray a try.

Immediately my curiousity was sparked. I had no idea what “Sand Tray’s” were or what to do with them but having seen the miniature one on the shelf I couldn’t pass this up. So I said sure why not. and asked her what the sand tray was like hoping to get an idea of what working with a sand tray was like.

She told me it stood about 3-4 feet high and demonstrated by holding her hand out. and then she said “you take yourself down” and it’s a way to process things and others to be a witness to that. I’m pretty used to the way LL talks and so I knew that by “you take yourself down” she meant relaxation techniques her and I have used together in the Depression Management Class and during my therapy sessions, and in the therapy field “witness” is a word sometimes used to describe the therapist. So I looked at this mini “sand tray” beach scene and thought how does that fit in with the relaxation visualizations that we have been doing? I was a bit confused but hey I’m game for it and told her again - yea lets do it.

The amazing part was we had already scheduled my next appointment date by this time and she picked up the phone and called the main office building and asked about scheduling the use of the sand tray. The next available time and day was exactly the time and day we had already scheduled for my next appointment. Our adding the sand tray to my therapy sessions was obviously meant to be. What a coincidence it was just amazing and I like how that sometimes happens to me in life.

For the next two weeks before my next appointment I wondered what “sand trays” were and how you use them and how did that miniature scene fit in with what I was doing.

I finally found out a couple things through friends - “Sand Trays” are inside sand boxes used for play therapy with small children. You can’t just go out and bring in a load of sand and dump it on the therapy room floor and it’s not always the right time of year or enough time in the session to take the children to playgrounds to play in the sand so therapy rooms have a box they call a “tray” that sand is put into. But my friends had no idea what my therapist meant when she said “you take yourself down” they had never heard of therapists using relaxation visualizations with sand trays. To find out that I had to wait until my therapy session.

Doing relaxation visualizations with LL for some time now I knew what that was and now I knew what a sand tray was and putting the two ideas together was something I could not logically fit together. I came up with two ”assumptions” or as some people call it ”hypothesis” .

One was she was going to do a relaxation visualization with me and she wanted me to act that out in building a sand tray scene.

The second one was that sand is something you touch so she wanted me to use the sand tray while using my hypnosis techniques (relaxation visualizations) to stimulate my sense of touch,

A third one came to me at my next appointment and was closer to what LL had planned.

We walked over to the main building and on the way over I told LL what I had figured out about it. She told me working with sand trays with teens and adults is different then how therapists work with children and sand trays. Children just play.

I was on the right track about the stimulating my sense of touch because she went into a little bit of detail about how memories are stored unconsciously by the senses of touch, taste, smell, hearing and sight and working with a sand tray will get in touch with those memories.

Once we were at the main office and in the room with the sand tray and she unlocked a cupboard that had some toys that can be used in the sand tray and pointed out some baskets with even more toys and positioned the sand tray in front of me.

Then she said she needed to prepare me and set the scene. I thought ok heres where she is going to explain what my goal is with this activity and then we would do the relaxation visualization”

Well then it got a bit confusing. She started using words like saying the sand tray was “sacred and blessed”. Now I know there is a God but I bounce in and out of religion so when she used those words I started pulling away from the idea of doing the activity.

I remained calm and sort of sarcastically asked her “sacred and blessed huh”.

Then she brought her wording back to normal telling me that she meant that the sand was a special sand. It wasn’t just any kind of sand that someone at the agency went out and dug up and dumped into the tray. Sand tray sand goes through a process of being cleaned and treated so that it doesn’t contain the normal stuff found in normal sand.

I started giggling because normal sand can contain all kinds of things from fleas to being used as an animal bathroom and so on. So basically LL was letting me know that my using the sand tray was not going to give me any diseases, flea bites and so on.

At one point she uncovered the tray and showed me the tray holding the sand sat in a wooden frame like a stand and the tray itself was blue so it could be for the sky or water on the bottom or whatever I wanted it to be.

I can’t remember if showing me the tray happened before or after she attempted to do a relaxation visualization.

I say attempted because it was not working for me. Maybe it was because we were in another room then we usually used for our relaxation visualizations, or it could have been that the last time I had been in that exact room had been with SKR so being there with LL felt alittle odd, or it could have been LL’s wording.

LL seemed to be a bit stiff as if she had never done relaxation visualizations before and I knew and experienced when she had done them with the depression management group and we had worked together in sessions before with these type of hynpotic techniques (even though at that point she didn’t realize what she was doing was hypnosis).

The only time she was stiff in sessions doing this stuff was during the first recording session so my first thought was “great we’re being recorded did this room have a camera I can’t remember”

I decided the best thing to do was ask her what she was trying to do. so I asked her if she meant we were doing like the relaxation stuff we’ve done before, and in the process I ignored my urge to look around for the camera. She said yea a shorted version.

So then I knew why she was acting formal and stiff - she was trying to cut to the quick of the relaxation visualizations we did before but still have the same effect - me totally relaxed where I would not be censoring my thoughts, just floating and going with the flow.

So I took her out of her misery of trying to shorten her usual process by letting her know I can go into my tunnel area at will if that is what she was aiming for. She said yes that might be what she was trying to do and asked how to help me do that. I told her to just keep talking I can do that on my own I just needed a focus point if I was doing it without being triggered. She kept talking and I focused in on her earring and then the window blinds and turned on my music in my head and within a few seconds I started feeling floaty and far away.

Then she told me that when I was in my tunnel area she was going to sit back and be quiet and I could do anything I wanted with anything in the room as long as it was not inside a drawer.

I let her know that that was not going to work. I was already in my tunnel area and when I’m in here all I do is watch and float. Things are far away and blurry and she asked me if I could move.

that was when I thought oh “%#@&#! we’re doing it right now, we’re going to level one. and I didn’t see it coming until it was too late to fight or block it. Sneaky and I fell right into it with my curiousity for new hands on activities.”

The thought didn’t upset me It was a catch the breath moment and it just amazed me because rarely does LL take the sneaky unpredictable route.

I knew she was capable of it because she caught me once when I thought I could predict what she was gonig to do with a depression management class activitiy and she sprung the opposite goal of it on me and the class. Its just been so long since then that I forgot until that moment that LL CAN be unpredictable in a sneaky but good way.

SKR and I had been working on this goal of going after the nightmare while in that totally relaxed state of the relaxation visualizations but we had never actually made it to the point of carrying it out due to the government cutbacks, lay offs and so on going on during our working on the plans. And the way SKR was during therapy time was doing these unpredictable things like springing topics and so on on me when I least expected it so that I could not fight or block the thoughts and memories. When she did that I trusted her 100% so I just went with the flow.

So anyway I asked LL which way she wanted me to go to her or towards my music. She said to come back towards her so then I knew we were not going to level one. She wanted me in that co conscious area where SKR and I had done work with my being aware of her and also being able to tell her about the flashbacks and memories that I was seeing.

So my work with SKR kicked in and I went with the flow and focused on LL remembering she was wearing earrings and looked for that I let her know I could see and hear her and then she handed me a bowl and asked what I wanted to put into it.

I listend to what the voices and thoughts were and nothing matched what she was saying. In fact what I did hear I was able to match that voice with the clothes that LL was wearing so I looked away from her and asked for the first thing I saw - a basket of animal figures. The voice about her clothes stopped and there were no other vioces right then so I gave up on the animal basket I think I might have told LL theres nothing in the basket that is saying pick me - a little joke on my not being able to match anything in my head with anything in the basket and then I just touched the sand with my fingers.

Sand was for touching so maybe that would get the voices triggered again.

Touching the sand got the voices going again and I told LL what I was hearing and seeing. I don’t know if I told her “this is what I am seeing and hearing..”. I just said what it was going on and LL like SKR did started asking me questions and I answered the questions based on what I was seeing and hearing for as long as I could.

At one point the voices containing the words “shut up” and “don’t tell started in. Then the static in my head got loud and I headed off for la la land. When I came back from listening to my music and floating on my mental clouds LL was asking me if I wanted to shake the sand down in the sand tray with her. It was time to go back to her office and schedule my next appointment. I figured that was probably LL’s way of getting me to reconnect with being completely aware again but I was already focusing on how the chair felt and pushing my foot onto the floor so I told her - no she could do it.

Overall the sand tray activity was a good thing. I love exploring new activities especially hands on things. At first it was a bit strange I was basically told there were no expectations and goals just do whatever I want however it came to me the object was to just relax and let the memories and thoughts lead me. But then once I was able to understand it was the same thing that I had already been working on - co consciousness - it was just another way to do that - the actually doing the activity was easier.

And the end result - well it definately shook things up. I have been having some pretty confusing flashbacks and nightmares. On the one side this is good because this has given me a push forwards into activating my memory process again but yet it’s not so good because being flooded with feelings and thoughts and flashbacks and so on is not a fun thing.

Bottom line enter Sand tray therapy at your own risk because it will definately shake your world and challenge you into having to use each and every one of the coping skills learned in therapy for days afterwards.