Introduction

Hi, I’m Heather Maritano. I’m a licensed clinical social worker and a registered play therapist supervisor. And I’d like to welcome you to this course using sand tray in clinical supervision. I began studying sand tray over 35 years ago, and I’ve been a clinical supervisor for over 20 years, and I’m really excited to be able to bring this training to you because utilizing sand tray in supervision has been so helpful with supervisees over the years. It’s an incredibly powerful modality in our clinical work, and as such is also an incredibly powerful tool to use in clinical supervision. It really helps clarify it helps to make case conceptualization so much clearer to come at a case from integration of right brain and left brain process, as well as to identify the person of the clinician and where some of their personal stuff gets messy in the case stuff.

And so it can really clean that out really well. And I wanna orient you now just a little bit to how this course will work after this introductory video. Then there will be a, a short segment on the risks and benefits of using expressive modalities in clinical supervision because anything that is powerful comes with risks and benefits. And so I wanna highlight a few of those for everyone to be aware of. And then you’ll move through to an article that was published in the play therapy magazine that outlines a group supervision process. There are a couple things in there that are just nice in terms of ritual and structure and how that impacts the creation of safety in clinical supervision. But then what the article is really about is going into utilizing Sand Tray with a case that one of our participants had really struggled with, and she had presented it over a couple of months and couldn’t get clarity for herself.

Neither could the other members of the group or myself in really helping her clarify her questions or directions for the case. She is an incredibly intuitive provider, sometimes has a difficult time making that bridge between her intuitive knowing and her cognitive understanding to be able to articulate what was happening so that she could get the feedback from the group. And as you’ll read, it took actually a five tray process in order for the clarity to come. And that that’s a, a fairly quick read and a fairly easy read. I hope that will be engaging for you. But the bulk of this course is actually to be witnesses to an entire session where a supervisee was willing to allow a recorded sand tray supervision session to be utilized for other people’s learning. And so that’s really an entire hour of just watching that process unfurl.

And we’ll take apart some of the pieces of that and highlight what is transpiring for me as the supervisor. What are some points to how we’re separating out the person of the therapist from the case material and how we, how I don’t move into Sara, a therapeutic stance with her, but how to get back into the group of actually providing the clinical supervision and being able to, to parse out the person of the therapist from the clinical work that we that she was doing and to get clarity. So I think her engagement with the process is just so beautiful to watch. And I hope that it will prove to be a really valuable learning. So thank you so much for joining me and let’s jump in.