Why the Toys? A Few Words in Ode to the Sand Tray Therapy

A couple of friends recently saw a photo I posted of my sand tray miniatures and asked me simply: why the toys?

It's a fair question. To the uninitiated, a shelf of small figures, animals, people, trees, stones, bridges, might look more like a charity (I’m hoping antique) shop display than a therapeutic tool.

I've been using the sand tray for years, first in my own therapy and now with clients and I can tell you that something happens in that tray that I have rarely found elsewhere.

I think it begins with the sand itself. The tray is small enough to hold the world and large enough to get lost in. The sand is real, you can run your fingers through it and smooth it. The base is blue, like water, like sky, like something older than either. There is something about touching the earth, even in a consulting room in Hertfordshire far away from the sea, that drops you beneath the noise of thinking and into something more elemental.

The container matters too. It has edges. Whatever you build, whatever you place, whatever falls apart, can stay within the frame. For people carrying experiences that have felt boundless and overwhelming, that boundary is not a limitation. It is a relief.

Then there are the figures.

There is something quietly radical about being able to pick up a small animal, a person, a piece of wood, and place it somewhere outside of yourself. You don't have to find the words first. You don't have to have the insight before you begin. You simply reach for what draws you and place it. Then you look.

I've used the sand tray for years within my own therapy. I say this not to be confessional, but because I think it matters. Not all trainings require this depth of personal work. Mine did, over 45 weeks of personal therapy each year, alongside three years of group therapy. It was at times uncomfortable but entirely necessary.

To sit with another person's pain, really sit with it, not manage it from a safe academic distance, requires more than cleverness. It requires a therapist who has navigated their own interior landscape. Who knows what it feels like to not be able to say the thing. Who has sat with their own defending, their own difficult relationships and their own figures in the tray.

The relational field isn't a concept you can read your way into. You have to feel your way through it.

For me, the sand tray was part of that journey. The relational space of therapy can feel exposing, the sense of being watched, of getting it wrong, of needing the other person to respond in exactly the right way. The tray asks none of that. It simply waits. It is a place to work out what you think and feel before you are ready to say it out loud. A public space, in a way, but on your own terms and in your own time.

And then something shifts. You move a piece. You notice the space that opens up between two figures. As Gaston Bachelard understood in the Poetics of Space, space is never neutral, it is felt and it carries meaning. In the sand tray, that becomes visible.

I tell you this not to impress, but because you deserve to know. When I sit with you in front of the sand tray, I am not watching from the outside. I have been in the sand myself.

Lenore Steinhardt, whose work on sandplay I return to often, writes that "objects communicate with each other on the shelves and form unpredictable combinations in the sandtray." I find this endlessly true. The figures are not passive. They arrive on the shelf carrying something, energy, association, myth, memory and when a client reaches for one, something is already in motion.

Steinhardt also reminds us that the environment matters before the work even begins. The room, the shelf, the objects themselves, all of it influences the unconscious of those who come to work. A client may never even touch the sand, she notes and yet still be moved by the space and what it holds.

This points to one of the cornerstones of sandplay work: the psyche knows what it needs to heal. The client's hand reaches for the figure before the mind has caught up. A scene is built that surprises even its maker. Something is placed, something is moved and in the movement, something shifts.

It is, as Steinhardt puts it, non-verbal and non-rational and that is precisely its power. Not everything that needs healing can be spoken. Some of it has to be placed, witnessed and slowly understood.

That is why the toys.