Images of Resiliency: Troubled Children Create Healing Stories in the Language of Sandplay

This is a story of hope and resilience about and by boys labeled by society as hopeless and "bad". The message of this story is that, given a means such a sandplay with which to reach into their imagination, children who have been damaged by violence, poverty, and racism can find valuable strengths and resilient qualities within.

Sandplay is used as both a therapeutic modality and as the child's primary means of communication. The choice of figures, their placement and movement through the trays and the statements that sometimes accompany this action are used in place of standard verbal responses to explore and convey the troubled child's experiences and self-generated resilient solutions.

The stories of four boys in a residential treatment setting, two from African-American and two from Hispanic families, are presented to express the particular resiliency qualities of Social Competency, Problem-Solving Ability, Autonomy and a Sense of Purpose and Future. Fifty-six color photographs of sand tray scenes and extensive quotations of their verbal commentary illustrate the "myths" these boys create. Jungian symbolic interpretations, adapted to the imaginative reality of inner-city children of color, amplify the meaning of the stories.