🐚 Module 10 — The Stages of the Sandplay Process | Sandplay Therapy Course
- Jul 28
- 8 min read
Free Course by Everything IFS Academy | Therapeutic Modalities Series
Module 10 — The Stages of the Sandplay Process
Ask a sandplay therapist what a client's tray means and the honest answer is often: ask again in four months. This is not evasion. It is the method's most important structural fact: in sandplay, the unit of meaning is not the tray. It is the series, the whole sequence of worlds a builder creates across months, and that sequence tends to move through recognizable territory on its way from wounded to well. This lesson teaches the process across time: why the series outranks the tray, the three-stage map Dora Kalff adapted for the journey, the broader arc practitioners describe in plainer words, and the remarkable ritual that closes a completed sandplay therapy.
One Tray Means Little, a Series Means Everything
Take a single frame from the middle of a film: a woman stands in a doorway, coat on, face unreadable. Is she arriving or leaving? Beginning something or ending it? The frame cannot say. It is perfectly sharp and almost perfectly mute, because the meaning of a moment lives in the motion it belongs to: what came before, what comes after, where the story is headed. Now run the reel, and the same frame becomes eloquent. She has stood in that doorway twice before and turned back both times. This is the third time. She goes.
Sandplay therapists read reels. A single tray, however striking, is a frame: a wolf at the center, a walled garden, a flooded world, each vivid and each nearly mute on its own. The identical flooded tray means one thing as a builder's first world, another as the fifteenth in a series that has been slowly filling with water, and something else again as the one storm in a long calm process. Meaning in sandplay is direction, and direction only exists across trays.
This is why the method has the temporal architecture this course has already assembled piece by piece: sessions accumulating over months, every tray photographed so the sequence is preserved, and a therapist who banks understanding instead of spending it, letting each new tray revise the meaning of every earlier one. It is also the ground under this lesson's deepest reassurance: dark trays are frames, not verdicts. A world full of graves is a moment in a motion, and the motion is what the method trusts.
Kalff's Three Stages
Watching hundreds of processes run their course, Kalff observed that the reels tend to move through recognizable territory, and she found her map for it in the work of Erich Neumann, the Jungian thinker this course first met in the free and protected space lesson. Neumann had proposed that consciousness itself develops through ordered stages in early life; Kalff's striking discovery was that a deep sandplay process often retraces that same sequence in the trays, as if the psyche, given its second chance at the ground floor, reruns its own construction. She named three stages, each with imagery that tends to mark it:
The animal and vegetative stage. The early deep trays are frequently worlds without people, or nearly so: forests, meadows, animals grazing and roaming, growing things, water and stone. Life is present and abundant, but it is life before conflict and before human complexity, a world running on instinct and vegetation. Builders in this territory often produce trays of surprising peace, and the stage is not a delay before the real work; it is ground being laid. Something in the person is re-establishing the basic layer of aliveness on which everything else will have to stand.
The fighting stage. Then, in many processes, the armies arrive. Trays fill with battle: soldiers in ranks, knights against dragons, animals in combat, monsters confronted at last, fortresses attacked and defended. The struggle stage can be startling to outside observers, especially in children's processes, where week after week of pitched warfare can look like something going wrong. Practitioners read it as something going right: opposites in the psyche have finally taken form and met on a field with edges. Conflict that had been formless dread now has combatants, and battles in a bounded tray are how the psyche fights its way toward strength. The fights often evolve across weeks: chaotic melees become organized battles, hopeless odds become contests, and eventually someone begins, tray by tray, to win.
Adaptation to the collective. In the third territory, the world rejoins the world. Trays begin to fill with ordinary human life: villages, roads that go somewhere, markets, schools, farms under cultivation, people at work and at play together. The energy that was locked in battle is now building infrastructure. Kalff read this imagery as the psyche turning outward again, ready to take its renewed strength into actual life among actual people, and processes in this territory are usually approaching their natural end.
Within this map, Kalff watched for one event above all others, a particular kind of tray that the deepest processes pivot around, and it is significant enough that it has its own lesson, next in this course.
Now the humility, taught as part of the map and not as a footnote. Real processes are messier than any three labels. Stages arrive out of order, overlap, repeat; a builder deep in village-building returns without warning to the battlefield for a month; many complete and genuinely healing processes never display the textbook sequence at all. Kalff's stages are a practitioner's orientation, like a hiker's knowledge of a mountain's typical weather, not a schedule the psyche has agreed to keep. The map serves the watching; it never grades the journey.
Chaos, Struggle, Resolution
Alongside Kalff's formal stages, practitioners commonly describe the same journey in three plainer words: chaos, struggle, resolution. This is not a rival system; it is the same mountain described by a different hiker, and the two lenses are worth holding together because each catches light the other misses.
Chaos names the early territory as many builders actually enter it: not always the peaceable animal-world of Neumann's first stage, but disorder given form. Early trays are often wounding trays, worlds that show the damage: flooded landscapes, populations in disarray, figures buried or abandoned, barren stretches, scenes that can be hard for a newcomer to look at. Practitioners receive these trays with something close to relief, because the wound that can be shown has entered the one place it can be worked with. The chaos on the sand is chaos that is no longer only inside.
Struggle names the long middle, whether it looks like Kalff's armies or like something quieter: a builder wrestling the same configuration week after week, a wall built and unbuilt, a figure that cannot find its place. The work of this territory is engagement; the psyche has stopped displaying the trouble and started contending with it.
Resolution names the turn that healing trays announce: order emerging without being forced, worlds with room to breathe, care appearing (figures tending, feeding, planting, rebuilding), connection where there were barriers, and often a quality of light that witnesses report before they can justify the word. Wounding trays and healing trays are not diagnostic categories; they are the felt poles of a process, and the movement between them, jagged, looping, but trending, is the healing itself, visible on sand at roughly one frame per week.
The Final Review of the Photographs
A completed sandplay therapy closes with a ritual almost no other therapy possesses. Builder and therapist sit down together, and the photographs of every tray, taken after every session across the entire process, are laid out or paged through in order, from the very first world to the last. The builder watches their own journey run like the film it always was.
The power of the review comes from what this whole course has been assembling. The builder was inside the process while it happened; now, for the first time, they stand outside it and see the motion whole: the flooded first tray, the months of walls, the battles turning, the bridge with its first traveler, the villages. People routinely see their own arc land in a way no verbal summary of "progress" ever achieves, because the evidence is theirs, made by their own hands, and it is all there.
And the review is where the therapist's long-held silence finally spends itself. The delayed interpretation this course taught in the silent witness lesson was banked for precisely this moment: with the process complete and no longer interruptible, understanding can at last be spoken, offered rather than announced, and traded in both directions, because by now the builder is the reigning expert on their own series and frequently sees things the therapist missed. What was held for months or years is laid gently on the table beside the photographs. Many builders describe the review as the single most moving hour of the entire therapy: the journey, visible; the silence, explained; the world they built, witnessed one last time, all at once.
Below this lesson, you'll find a Sandplay Therapy practice built around one of the skills you just learned, along with a few ways to begin noticing and practicing it in everyday life this week.
Sandplay Therapy Practice: Running Your Own Reel
The series principle, meaning lives in the sequence, not the single frame, can be practiced directly on material almost everyone already has: the accidental series your life has been recording.
You'll need fifteen minutes and your phone's photo library, a journal, or any other dated trail of yourself.
Choose your reel. Good options: your camera roll filtered to photos you took (not received) over the past year, a journal you have kept, even your playlists or the books stacked by your bed in date order. Pick whichever trail is longest and most honest.
Pick a span of at least six months and move through it in order, quickly, the way a therapist pages through tray photographs. Do not stop to relive individual entries. You are watching for motion, not moments.
Watch for direction rather than events. Ask the series questions, not the frames: What keeps appearing? What gradually disappears? Does the world of these photos fill up or empty out across the months? Does anything migrate, from the edges of your attention toward the center?
Find one "single frame" you would have misread alone. Locate one entry (a hard week, a strange purchase, a bleak journal page) that looks very different now that you can see what came before and after it. Notice, from the inside, why no single tray gets interpreted.
Name the territory, loosely. Without forcing your year into anyone's stages, ask gently: does this stretch of the reel feel more like ground-laying, like struggle, or like rejoining the world? Mixed and unclear are honest answers.
Close with one sentence about the motion: "Over these months, something in me was ______." Direction, not diagnosis. If the reel visited painful territory, ease off where you need to; a reel can be closed and returned to another day, and heavy stretches of it are worth walking with a professional beside you.
This Week
When a hard day tempts you to treat it as a verdict, deliberately ask: is this a frame or the film? What direction was the week actually moving?
Notice one "battle tray" moment in someone you love, conflict that looks like things getting worse, and consider whether it might be formless trouble finally taking a shape that can be fought.
Catch one small "resolution" image in your ordinary life this week: something tended, repaired, planted, or reconnected, and let it register as the direction it is.
Disclaimer:
Everything IFS Academy is an independent educational platform and is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or connected to the IFS Institute. While we strive for accuracy, errors can occur, and users are encouraged to cross-reference critical information. These courses, lessons, skills, and practices are offered for educational and self-reflection purposes only. They do not constitute therapy, mental health treatment, clinical training, or crisis support, and they should not be used as a substitute for professional mental health care.
Crisis Support: 🚨
If you are experiencing a mental health crisis, feel unsafe, feel at risk of harming yourself or someone else, or feel too overwhelmed to safely use self-directed practices, please pause this material and reach out for immediate support. Contact a licensed mental health professional, call or text 988 in the U.S. or Canada, or use your local emergency or crisis resources.
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