Why Play Is Healing: Play Therapy and Sandplay Therapy Explained

When children don’t talk about their feelings — they play them.

Many parents come to my practice with a very understandable question:
“My child is struggling — but why are they playing in therapy?”

We often picture therapy as something that happens through conversation. Adults process by talking, reflecting, and putting emotions into words. Children do it differently. They process through movement, images, roles, stories, and imagination. They process through play.

And play is not a detour. For children, it is often the most direct path.

Play is a child’s natural language. It can be the most honest and precise way they communicate what is happening inside. Especially when feelings are big, confusing, or still hard to name, play becomes the place where the inner world shows up.

A child who feels anxious might create a scene where someone is being chased. A child who feels powerless might play battles. A child longing for closeness might bring figures home again and again — or make them disappear. From the outside, it can look like “just playing.” But for a child, it is expression.

Play Therapy: The Language Children Use When Words Are Not Enough

There are different forms of play, and they tend to appear depending on age, development, and what a child is working through emotionally.

Some children regulate themselves through sensory and movement-based play: kneading, pouring, pushing, building, jumping, repeating motions. This kind of play supports the nervous system. It helps children feel grounded in their bodies and often creates the first layer of safety.

Other children explore through testing, curiosity, and boundary-seeking. This exploratory play can look impulsive or controlling, but underneath it often holds a deep question:
“Is the world safe? Can I trust what happens next?”

Construction play is also meaningful — building, creating, organizing. It can express self-efficacy (“I can make something”), a need for structure, or an attempt to restore inner stability. Some children build carefully; others build and destroy repeatedly. Both can be important. Sometimes a child needs to experience:
“I can break something — and the relationship still holds.”

Then there is pretend play: fairy tales, superheroes, monsters, animals, magic worlds. This “as-if” space allows children to express what might feel too overwhelming in real life. A child may not be able to say, “I’m scared something will happen to my mom,” but they can play: “The mother figure gets taken away.”

Role play is especially powerful. Children often show relationship experiences through roles: Who has power? Who is helpless? Who is invisible? Who rescues? Who is punished? Who is allowed to be angry? Through play, children regulate social contact, experiment with closeness and distance, and repeat emotional patterns until something new becomes possible.

Sandplay Therapy: When Feelings Are Too Deep for Words

One of the most powerful ways to support children in therapy is Sandplay Therapy.

Many emotional experiences are not primarily verbal. They are image-based, dreamlike, and symbolic. Sometimes they are preverbal — formed before a child had language. Sometimes they are transverbal — too deep, too layered to be captured fully by words.

Children often cannot “explain” what is happening inside. Not because they don’t want to — but because there is no sentence for it yet.

Sandplay takes that seriously.

How Sandplay Therapy Works

In Sandplay Therapy, a child creates a scene in a specially designed sand tray using miniature figures and materials: people, animals, nature elements, buildings, fantasy characters, symbols.

This is not about doing it “right.” It is not about performance. It is not about forcing meaning.

It is about giving the child a way to make inner experience visible.

Sandplay offers an additional layer of expression — beyond language. The child becomes active in creating their own images, rather than having to explain their inner world in words.

Why Sandplay Can Be So Healing

In the seemingly aimless nature of play, something profound often happens: tension softens. Anxiety loosens. Fixed inner images begin to shift.

Sandplay creates a bridge between conscious and unconscious experience. It can activate self-healing capacities because the child is not only talking about a problem — they are shaping it, moving it, transforming it.

Many sand scenes feel dreamlike. Some are calm and beautiful. Others are chaotic, intense, or frightening. And yet they often carry an inner logic — a symbolic order.

A central idea in Sandplay Therapy is that when psychological development has become stuck, symbolic expression can help bring movement back. Something that felt frozen can begin to flow again.

Regression Is Not a Setback — It Can Be a Necessary Step

A word that is often misunderstood in therapy is regression.

Regression means a child returns inwardly to earlier emotional states — not because they are “getting worse,” but because something needs to be revisited, repaired, or completed.

Sometimes children need to return to where safety, protection, or emotional support was missing. When that experience becomes possible in a therapeutic relationship, the path forward opens.

Regression can become the doorway to progress.

What About Teenagers?

Although Play Therapy is often associated with young children, the core principle remains deeply relevant for teens.

Adolescence is a time of identity development, individuation, belonging, self-worth, body changes, and intense relationship experiences. Not everything teenagers feel can be said immediately.

Many adolescents benefit when therapy is not only talk-based, but also includes creative and symbolic ways of working: imagery, inner scenes, metaphor, visual expression, and reflective exploration.

Therapy in adolescence can support emotional maturation — helping a young person become more connected to who they are, and more capable of relating to others without losing themselves.

What Parents Often Find Most Reassuring

It’s normal to feel both hope and uncertainty when starting therapy for your child. Many parents wonder:

Will my child make progress if they don’t talk much?
How will I know therapy is helping?

Play Therapy is not “just play.” It is a developmentally attuned form of psychotherapy. It creates a safe space where a child does not have to perform. They can show themselves, experiment, withdraw, return, and try again.

Change often appears quietly in everyday life: fewer emotional explosions, more flexibility, more closeness, better sleep, less anxiety, more confidence. These are often early signs that something inside has begun to move.

Because sometimes the goal is not that a child can explain everything.
Sometimes the goal is simply that they can grow again.