Use the power of play to heal our inner hurts
Sand play therapy can help support people in distress, Sharyn Greshner writes.
Monday marked World Mental Health Day, an initiative with goals of education, awareness and advocacy. The theme this year was “psychological first aid” to support people in distress.
Society has come a long way from nearsighted solutions, which blame distressed victims.
Life can get messy. The music can get too loud. You can stagger and fall on marshmallow cement. While mental health is more than an absence of mental illness, problems are monumental. There is trauma, neglect, depression, abuse, addictions, stress, dementia, heartache, bereavement and still more problems caused by structural inequalities like poverty, violence, homelessness, hunger and discrimination.
But there also are ways of working toward mental health using creativity and play.
On my dining room floor there is a tray of play sand. It measures 38 x 60 x 10 centimetres. There’s also a blue shovel and a green rake, although I prefer to use my hands. I built two medieval-style castles, added a Holstein cow and palomino horse and put in a smiling rhinoceros and baby alligator. A blond Barbie doll in a pink ballerina dress sits in the corner. We are family.
This is sand tray therapy, which is one of many therapies used in working with children and adults.
The items are symbolic. Only I can give them meaning. Past, present and future merge in playing with sand this way. The goals are numerous: strengthening relationships, making choices, resolving conflicts and accepting oneself. The exercise is purposeful, non-verbal, nonthreatening and dynamic. Mental health is the overall concern.
Children and artists know play is fun. A.A. Milne’s Winnie the Pooh was modelled after son Christopher Robin’s bear. H.G. Wells wrote Floor Games as a result of playing on the floor with sons George and Frank. Pearl Buck sculpted the heads of her children in plaster and clay, a “tender memory” for her later years.
Play heals. Sand tray therapy dates from the 1920s psychotherapy of Margaret Lowenfeld’s “wonder box” and “world technique.” Dora Kalff introduced a variation in the 1950s. She emphasized Carl Jung’s psychology and called it sand play therapy.
My version dates from the delightful Virginia Axline’s Dibs: In Search of Self. Ideas were nurtured through teaching (and learning) in a course with social work students in a war-torn 1970s Rhodesia. The course, titled “Mental and Behavioral Problems,” carried rigid colonial stereotypes of abnormal behaviour, together with an archaic ring of stigma, exclusion, hopelessness and despair.
We reworked it all. We included the creative arts in our mental health curriculum. We negotiated the drama of culture and the ugliness of war and tried to make sense of psychiatric labels. We took risks in a safe environment.
I would like to think we connected our heads, hands and hearts as we struggled with whatever it is that makes for mental health.
We would put away the books and play. We relived the games of childhood, making contact with the child within. Like nursery rhymes and fairy tales, children’s games have similarities across cultures.
We used indigenous literature to anchor our realities. Literature is a great source of case studies. I recall Charles Mungoshi’s Coming of the Dry Season and later, Sheila Gordon’s Waiting for the Rain. Still later, it would be Noerine Kaleeba, Sunanda Ray and Brigid Willmore’s We Miss You All.
Athol Fugard’s Blood Knot lived in John Haigh’s Sundown Theatre. And yes, the power of touch was in traditional crafts and in Shona stone sculpture.
With World Mental Health Day, we have a day where we actively contribute to mental health for everyone. It is an achievement with positive spinoffs throughout the year. Sharyn Greshner is a former social work educator.
With World Mental Health Day, we have a day where we actively contribute to mental health for everyone. It is an achievement with positive spinoffs throughout the year.