The Mask and Mirror: Identity, Shame and Expressive Tray Work

Shame is a powerful, organizing emotion that significantly shapes how children, adolescents, and adults experience themselves, their relationships, and their sense of identity. In this workshop, participants will examine how sand tray therapy and expressive modalities support clients across the lifespan in externalizing shame-based narratives, disrupting maladaptive self-perceptions, and reconstructing more coherent and compassionate identities.

Symbolic themes such as masks, concealment, fragmentation, and distorted or broken mirrors commonly emerge in tray and expressive work when clients grapple with issues of worthiness, belonging, or identity injury. Through experiential activities, clinical applications, and case-based dialogue, clinicians will learn developmentally attuned interventions for facilitating self-awareness, fostering resilience, enhancing self-compassion, and strengthening identity integration within the tray.

Learning Objectives:

• Describe the developmental and neurobiological functions of shame and how it impacts identity formation in children, adolescents, and adults.
• Identify symbolic representations of shame—including masks, concealment, fragmentation, and mirror imagery—as they appear in sand tray play therapy and expressive therapy processes.
• Differentiate how shame-based narratives manifest across developmental stages, and articulate how these differences inform treatment planning in expressive, play, and tray-based work.
• Demonstrate at least three sand tray play therapy or expressive interventions that support clients in externalizing shame-driven beliefs and reconstructing more adaptive self-identities.
• Apply trauma-informed and culturally responsive approaches when working with shame, identity injury, and self-worth concerns across the lifespan.
• Explain the therapeutic role of projection, distancing, and symbolic play in decreasing shame activation and increasing emotional tolerance and self-compassion.

Continuing Education:

My Crossing Paths Training Center has been approved by NBCC as an Approved Continuing Education Provider, ACEP No. 7253. Programs that do not qualify for NBCC credit are clearly identified. My Crossing Paths Counseling Center is solely responsible for all aspects of the programs.
My Crossing Paths Training Center is approved by the Florida Board of Clinical Social Work, Marriage and Family Therapy, and Mental Health Counseling. Provider # 50-37274.

​My Crossing Paths Training Center has been approved by the Association for Play therapy, APT No. 23-705. Programs that do not qualify for APT credit are clearly identified.

​My Crossing Paths Training Center, has been approved as an Association of Social Work Boards Approved Continuing Education (ACE) Provider. ACE provider approval number is 1877. Training that are ACE approved with be identified on the training material with correct CE credit and type.

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Host or Publisher Julia Knach, My Crossing Paths Counseling Center