These Suffering kids

I was drafting the case notes on a sandplay session and half way through I needed a break, a breather. I needed some resourcing and got up to look at the plants and flowers in the garden and to breathe in the freshness of the air after the rain. The story played out by the child client is too heart wrenching and sending out very distressing messages of hidden pain and hurt.

For some children sandplay is such a powerful media for expressing inner issues. There is no way a child or even an adult can articulate verbally the internal strife, especially when there are struggles between rationale & conscience on the one hand versus emotional avalanche & helplessness on the other. A child caught up in the conflicts between separated parents often vacillates between acceptance and angry denial or wishful nostalgia. The child I just had a session with is of course exceptionally psychic and projects her pain vividly in stories that symbolise her inner torment and confusion and her struggles to understand which world is "real", the one before or after her parents' separation.

Of course very few children are able to reflect and project a story so intuitively and spontaneously as this child. However her experience further strengthens my conviction that sandplay is a great media for kids to express their hidden feelings which they can not articulate or sometimes repressed by the conscious self. In another children's home that I volunteered with the children are definitely less able to tell a long flowing story also because they are limited by language and words. However I now think that putting a picture or story in the sand tray provided an outlet even when there is little rhetoric. I was puzzled and bored when one girl at the home played time and time again a scene of a crowded home with lots of beds sometimes stacking on one another. She kept on asking me to provide more beds. I knew there was a longing for home but only after reading an article in a Sandplay journal where there was a similar need by a child did I realize that the bed could symbolise the assurance that a bed is waiting for her back home.

Bless all these suffering children.