From the author: From my personal website Thanks to my grandmother, who taught me that everything can be invented and arranged. When I studied to become a psychologist, and then to become a Gestalt therapist, I avoided all sorts of workshops about creative madness, play forms of therapy, the use of buttons, stones in therapy, and so on. I, like many, was taught mainly in the conversational genre, I wanted to be a deep, serious and thorough psychotherapist; a wise look, a beard and a pipe fit well into this image, but all sorts of toys, rags and stones did not. Life, as usual, made its own adjustments. My practice developed in such a way that I had to work with children no less than with adults. The children were completely uninterested in my wise look and wrinkles on my forehead, and my beard never grew. You need to play with children, but they bring them to me for therapy. Adults want results, children want it to be interesting, and I want my work to be useful. Ready-made sets of toys and board games were not suitable for therapy with children - after all, you never know how the game will develop, what it will be about with this child. I had dolls and cars in my office, but every child has the same dolls and cars at home, it’s incredible. And I thought - if in my childhood sofa cushions easily turned into ships, bridges were built from newspapers, slippers became sharks and dolphins, and pencils became universal weapons, then maybe this magic will work now? It worked. Pillows became spaceships, felt-tip pens became laser guns, magazines could be used to walk over a precipice, and plastic letters could be used to satisfy hunger (if, of course, you managed to catch them, they are very nimble). But the most important thing I understood is that lightness and spontaneity are important. An adult client will not tolerate falsehood in a conversation if the therapist begins to force questions, remembering what he was taught at seminars, but children do not tolerate pretense and constraint. The highest praise I receive from children is: “You love to play!” Chairs and a blanket become a house, cubes become mushrooms and berries, and here we are sitting in a hole, and outside a blizzard is sweeping, wolves howl, an owl hoots. We are small creatures, but we are in the house, we are safe. Here you can talk about fears, you can be afraid and hide under a shawl, you can repeat this game for a long, long time, several sessions, gaining a sense of security, and when the moment comes, run out for a minute to pick mushrooms, and then for two minutes - into the forest to explore, and then again - to tease the wolf, and quickly return to the house, and figure out how to get rid of him, and next time defeat him, feel your strength and courage, and repeat this many times, and then go with your mother to the doctor and almost no to be afraid and feel brave at school, because this experience - courage, confidence - is already there, and if it is not enough, then at home you can also build a house and sit in it with a flashlight. Further more. If it suits a child, it suits both an adult and a family. The sandbox is an excellent tool for both diagnosis and therapy. I will talk about it in detail in a separate article, here I just want to explain that I work with the sandbox as a Gestalt therapist, for me this is the same opportunity for dialogue (conversation) with the client, as a conversation and a game. And I also use the sandbox differently, depending on the circumstances and the client’s history. You can build castles and fortresses out of sand, you can play out stories with toys on its surface, you can hide and find treasures in it. Each game is unique, individual, each therapy has its own language. By the way, about treasures. Shiny buttons, glass balls, old brooches, beads, keychains are very valuable things. Pirates want to steal them, wizards give them as gifts, and dragons guard them. Buried or hidden, they can be a figure of silence, found - serve as the beginning of a story, gifted - become a thank you. I still remained a serious and deep therapist with wrinkles on my forehead and (I want to believe) wisdom in my eyes. I work a lot with serious problems, difficult ones,.