Trauma comes in many forms, often simplified to two broad categories.  With PTSD (post traumatic stress disorder), the traumatic experience you had has produced a set of symptoms of suffering that are lingering long past the trauma, and are hindering your ability to function and stopping you from living how you used to be able to.  With ‘small t trauma’, even if you don’t meet criteria for full PTSD, you are still altered and hurt by the trauma you experienced, and find that it is changing how you live and respond to people and things in your life, and want freedom from how it seems to be altering you.

EMDR is arguably the most studied and empirically validated approach to trauma therapy currently practiced.  It uses a standardized approach to first map out a course for treating the trauma, and then proceeding to first desensitize you to the traumatic memory, so that in recalling the memory, you are not responding as if it is happening now, again, but instead able to experience it as a ‘distant memory’ with only low tones of emotionality.  After desensitizing the weight of the trauma, EMDR then helps reprocess the traumatic experience to help you make sense of what happened and adapt it into your worldview so that the world ‘makes
sense again’.

For children (and for adults as well), sometimes the trauma is experienced in a way that is too hard to word out, or for children, they don’t have the vocabulary to use words to make sense of their traumatic experience.  In this case, EMDR-Sandtray is a way to help you use images and figures, rather than just words, to achieve the same goals of EMDR but in an image-figure based way of ‘speaking’.  While successfully used for adults, it is especially useful for children that lack the ability to use words in therapy due to their age.