Welcome back to the next episode from the Lessons from the Playroom podcast. And I have with me another really special play therapist in our field. Marshall Lyles is a gem in our field right now.
He is bringing, in my opinion, new thought, new life, new excitement to different processes and things that we have heard about for years. So he’s specifically going to be talking to us about santre and attachment and trauma. But he has such a special way of integrating the three and talking about them.
So if you’re not familiar with my amazing guest, marshall lives in Austin, Texas. He’s been at this for 20 years, ish over 20 years. He teaches internationally on trauma using expressive therapies.
He also does EMDR. And you’ve done amazing stuff with combining EMDR and expressive therapies, mainly santre, if that’s my understanding. You have published books, articles, and you have a new one that is out, which I know we’re going to talk about and get into.
And I had the absolute pleasure of spending time meeting Marshall three years ago, you were coming through Denver with our mutual friend Robin Goeble, and the three of us met up and we got to say hi and share a meal together. And I’ve loved you ever since. We have kind of a shared signature, sincere do we do.
Marshall, anything else that you would love to share that I didn’t mention as I was introducing? Oh, just that the affection is mutual. I love so much, Lisa, what you’ve done for our community and the perspectives that you’ve brought in. And I know a lot of people in the field who have been really powerfully impacted by your teaching and your mentoring.
And I have a lot of gratitude for your work. Thanks, Marshall. Actually, one thing I do want the listeners to know about you because it’s a really special part of you is that you also love poetry and you write poetry and it’s beautiful and it’s magical.
And I’m actually going to ask if you’re willing to share because you have some poetry that you have written even related to the topic of Santre and trauma and attachment. So if you could weave that in for us, that would be awesome. Absolutely.
Poetry is the natural prosody of speech that I think that we need for attachment healing. And so I’m on a mission to convert all therapists into a loving poetry. That’s beautiful.
Well, Marshall, let’s just start with just attachment wounds and trauma. And working with attachment wounds and trauma, we have listeners from all over the world and everyone is at a different level of their understanding and training in this field and in this profession. So let’s just begin with a discussion on that and then how you use Santre to support the healing and integration of attachment wounds.
What’s amazing to me is how long attachment theory has been around, but that there’s some fresh energy that seems brand new in some way. There’s a lot of discovery happening. So I love that subject.
Yes, that’s one of the reasons why I love you, because that’s my perception of you, is you’re one of the individuals that’s bringing the fresh and the new around these topics. So bring us some fresh and new in this discussion, Marshall, as it relates to play therapy in particular. And I think a lot of our play therapy models are getting to the point where they’re now trying to describe how their concepts are consistent with things from attachment theory.
And I love that. I love that people are reaching for that. And at the same time, attachment theory is far more complicated than it looks on the surface, and I think it’s really worthy to go do some deep dive.
And at the same time, when we do deep dive into the academic part of it, a lot of personal activation comes up because it’s not something that can remain distant. We end up having to filter it all. And I think the best way to organize the search goes back to some of Bolby’s original architecture, is to understand that he said at the most primitive level, when we’re receiving care and the kind of security we need from the caregiving is holding that homeostasis.
The relational balance between our secure base and our safe haven needs that. We have these kind of programmed relational opposites deep inside all of us as humans at birth, where we need someone who’s capable of holding us really close and pulling us in in the tender moments, but also is completely comfortable in believing in our capacity to explore ourselves in the world. And this safe haven being the hold us close and the secure base being allowing us to explore.
And from those two concepts, it just branches into all sorts of complexity and beauty and pain and resilience. And that’s actually how I try to organize all of the ways that I think of Play and sand. You’re highlighting something for me that feels really special, which is that really vulnerable place within the caregiver, or let’s say in our case, us, as clinicians, in the moment when we’re trying to support a healing of an attachment.
Wound that inevitably we’re forced into the mirror of our own relationship with ourselves, with our own attachment history, and how vulnerable that place can be. You’re really just highlighting that that it’s not just, what do we do to help another person heal their attachment wound, but in order to do that, what are we doing within ourselves, which I think because of the mirror, and even know Margaret Lowenfeld, who was someone who really brought some organization into the exploration of Sandus therapy. She called the Santre a mirror.
She said it’s like looking into meeting oneself in the mirror and coming into contact with a slice of reality of who we and I think because of what you said, that we have a burden as therapists to be looking into those modalities as mirrors for ourselves and not waiting only until we’re in session to engage. So this hand tray is a beautiful way to journal as a therapist. And I think that we ought to be looking into the mirror in some time for our own recovery and healing, and not just when we’re with clients for our clinicians that aren’t that familiar with sand tray work.
Will you share just a little bit about how does one, even from your perspective, think about the tray or approach the tray or give us a little bit of from Marshall’s perspective, it’s beautifully sacred. So that there is an understanding that we’re trying to bless this container as a holding space, as a boundaried, protected space for exploration and discovery. And it’s full, of course, of the ground of the sand.
Then we have that sensory element at play that’s providing the base for the bottom up nature of the work that we do. And so before you ever get into worlds and miniatures or symbols or images or beings, whatever language you use for that, the materials, the base materials of just the container and the sand themselves, I think, set the tone for the grounding. Bonnie Badnock says that a lot of our clients, especially those who have attachment wounds, are going to be more at ease coming into relationship with our materials than they are us.
And so the materials then get to be an extension of who we are. It’s part of where we meet each other. And then out of a growing respect for those based materials, you build collections of miniature images that are diverse in nature and representative of any of a number of things.
And clients get to choose as many or as few figures as they need to create what we call worlds in the sand that we then hold in metaphor. We respect the metaphor we explore with that externalization and distance and practice making meaning. And I think a good course of sand trait therapy treatment involves not a client having walked away from a session with someone, having made meaning for them, but they have an increased capacity to make meaning for themselves.
And that’s the beauty. That’s where you really watch that reflective functioning development from an attachment point of view start to flourish. I don’t think we should be focused just on solving a problem.
It’s what are the mechanisms and infrastructure that this person deserves to know they have access to so that they can address both this problem and many future ones that will be related. How do you see children using the tray to explore their attachment wounds? What are some of the ways they approach it? What are some of the common things that we see? Yeah, you get so much attachment information a lot of times just from watching their fingers touch the sand, the ones who are all in and it’s no longer just hands, but now we’re up to our elbows and the whole body’s in their heads in. I’ve had kids that have tried to actually climb into it and then pour it on top of them.
Yeah, absolutely. And there’s something so life giving like that information is so helpful from a sensory seeking point of view that we get to hold. But then you also see the other kids who the minute they touch it, their fingers arch back away from their hands.
And then even after the sand is off their fingers, they continue to rub it off their hands for minutes to come. So there’s something just from a sensory level that we get information that’s not always about attachment woundedness, but is often connected. And then at the very least it lets us know some deep nervous system needs that they have and what co regulation is going to look like before worlds are ever built.
You have right off the bat this wonderful communication of what their body needs us to know. But then after that developmentally, you start to see such a range of how kids will let you know what you need to know about their woundedness, some based on age or based on need or maybe even attachment stream. They create a world and then it’s in continued motion, like it’s just a dynamic, ever evolving story that never gets to a conclusion.
And that feels a lot of times more like traditional play therapy, where you end up reflecting and tracking and holding and amplifying, but then you have some who are at a different developmental place, and they get to a static place, and that creation time is a little quieter. And so you’re getting the information from the quiet about what they’re putting into the world that attunement gets so thick in those quiet moments of creating. And then in the narrative, in the way that they reveal the narrative to you, you get a sense of where’s their coherence? Where do they lose coherence? Where does the pace change in relationship to what theme is being revealed? And just data upon data of important themes, even though we don’t always know what it means as therapists, it’s clues that they’re leaving at your feet and just begging for you to understand about their system.
So, beautiful as we’re talking here, I’m reminded that sometimes there is, I think, an assumption that play therapists make that the sand feels good, right. And it’s fun to play in the sand tray. And sometimes that’s true and sometimes that’s not true.
And I’m hearing this invitation also to not make assumptions about what it is like for the child or where the child needs to go, or what the meaning is, or how it even feels on their hands or whatever. Because you use the word sacred, right. It’s their experience, which may be totally different than our experience of it.
Will you speak a little more about that? Because I think sometimes there are a lot of assumptions that are made about the tray and what shows up in the tray. Oh, yeah. I think we even have so many assumptions about our rooms.
I know not everyone can see me, but you see behind me, I have very full shelves and an all open shelf display. And part of the theory is for many people that communicates welcome and choice, that is overwhelming for a large percentage of the people. There are assumptions I think we have made all along the way in setup and enjoyment and ease that are not equally true.
I’m really grateful for the literature that’s coming out on neurodivergence and helping to widen understanding that there are lots of legitimate needs and they’re not all things for us to fix. Sometimes this is some of the most beautiful parts of how someone’s wired, and it’s to be respected. It’s not something we’re meant to try and change.
And those assumptions usually lead us into agendas, and there’s just no room for agendas in therapy. Marshall, will you take us into the place where we started in the conversation about the therapist’s own journey, and as we are facilitating someone’s process, or as we are thinking about doing more sand tray work like our own journey? And how do we navigate our own inner landscape as we’re being activated with our own experience of the sand, whereas we’re observing a child’s experience of the sand? Can we go into that part of this? Oh, yeah. That gives me feelings.
Hardest part it is I go back in time. We said, I think at the beginning of grad school, if you would have told me that one day an eight year old would pick a toy off a shelf and put it in the sand tray and that it would immediately create some Dysregulation in me. I would have called you a liar to your face because that just sounded so absurd to think about.
But there’s such energy in the room when the client starts moving towards choices and moving towards parts of themselves, especially when they’re going to the shelves to choose things. And that really is asking us to be a secure base. And then I am trying to stay attuned and my brain, my mirror neurons forget sometimes that what I’m taking in from them is them.
Sometimes it thinks it’s me, and sometimes it touches things that were true about me. And there are little clues that we have to develop of when we’re substituting our own story for the one that’s trying to be shared with us, like beginning to notice in the moment of you’re thinking they’re doing it wrong. If that thought happens, then that’s probably because you had a story based in your own lived experience that you were watching play out, and then when it didn’t go, how you thought it was upsetting to your narrative, or if you start to experience a confusion, like a wash of confusion coming over you.
I think that’s when a lot of times we’ve moved into our own story and we’ve dropped the story that our clients are asking us to to, we’ve both got to have. This is something Robin and I used to teach about together in a workshop we did. We both have to have the abilities and santre and all kinds of expressive play to notice in the moment when things are happening and to notice out of the room when those things are happening related to certain people in our lives.
And they’re different skills, they’re different parts of our nervous system. So it’s part of why I believe as much as possible. If you can carve out time to create your own world in the sand, as a therapist, you’re reducing the risk of those miniatures accidentally bringing part of your story into the room with a client.
That’s out of your awareness that we’ve kind of fallen into relationship with all of our materials in a way that we can differentiate when this is me versus not. In fact, in the book that Dr. Holmeer and I wrote, she encouraged me.
She knew that I’d gone through a journey some years ago of making I decided to make very public. I’m introverted, right? So I don’t live a lot out loud. I have to work really hard to put myself out there.
And I was feeling like we need maybe as therapists to be seeing each other do our own trays. So I did many days in a row of sharing trays. I was making and writing, kind of making my journaling public.
And she asked if I would put some of those in the book, because we have a chapter specifically on the person of the Santa therapist. And what practices are you developing to monitor your own person? And it was really scary to include that in the book, knowing that once it happens, it’s out there. But that vulnerability, I think, was important for me, and I hope others will understand that it’s not an option.
We don’t get to do this job and be invulnerable. Those just aren’t compatible. Right, exactly.
The days of the blank slate or check yourself at the door. Not quite like that, no. I really wish that was true about our brains.
I would probably, in a vote, try to make it happen. It’s just not real. Where would you get all your material for your poetry, Marshall? I’d just write about fine.
Marshall, you just referenced your beautiful book with Dr. Linda Homeyer. Will you tell us a little bit about your you know, dr.
Holmeier and Dr. Sweeney had written together a book that’s going into a fourth edition now on Santray therapy basics. And she and I had been doing some teaching together for the past many years and came up with this idea of having an advanced kind of follow up to that book that specifically was going to be going deeper with some of certain basic aspects of Santre and then specifically looking through an attachment and trauma lens.
So there is some material in there on neurodivergence and getting to talk to people who are experts, know, working with those on the autism spectrum and how that shows up in Santre, those who are gifted, how that shows. Up in Santre, then talking a lot more about understanding how the history of traumatology and trauma theory and attachment theory were developing around the same time that Sanchez therapy was and starting to look at some of the natural overlaps as well as what are some of the thought leaders in our field saying that goes a step deeper and so that we don’t just keep in our field reproducing the same basic skills. Because it starts to sound like there’s not much to expressive play therapy.
It starts to really sound really just all foundational, and it’s not especially, I think, the clients that you and I would share in common. They deserve for us to be nuanced. They’ve earned the right for this to be far more complicated than it often looks on paper.
And so we wanted to take a crack at that. So beautiful. I want to make sure that I have the name correctly, but it’s Advanced Santray Therapy.
Isn’t that the name of the book? Yeah. The subtitle that I’m going to read, because I always forget, is digging deeper into clinical practice. Beautiful.
So, listeners, if you are a Santre practitioner, even if you’re not, and you want to get more curious, please go check the book out. I know that it’s available now for you to order. Marshall, this conversation is so beautiful for me, even just where you just ended with just this idea of we have to keep stretching ourselves and we have to keep being willing to go into deeper nuances of our understanding of our clinical work.
But even as I say that what I love and what I know that you teach is that right next to that is the parallel of as you go deeper into the work with the child, you also have to go deeper into the work with yourself. And they go hand in hand. You can’t separate out one from the other.
What a big ask that we as play therapists have been handed. I mean, ultimately it’s, are you willing to transform yourself so you can be of service to a child? Yeah. Every job description for a therapist should say something like, are you willing to cry multiple times a week? Are you comfortable being on the edge of a breakdown without actually having a breakdown? It is really difficult to describe to aspiring therapists the aspect of our work that requires us to cultivate a constant reflective practice.
I had no understanding of what that meant or was going to look like. It was not easy to step into. In fact, I remember in grad school, even being about halfway through in a class where we were doing a million genograms and me thinking, I want to tap out.
I don’t want to talk about this anymore. Especially the way that it was starting to show up for me is I was being challenged to have compassion for people in my life that I didn’t think had earned the right to have compassion. And then I started realizing kind of the dismissive nature of that.
And there were always going to be people trusting me with their care that were going to remind me of traits of these people I was trying to withhold acceptance from and that my mind wasn’t going to automatically know the difference between them and others. So I had to find a way to be comfortable extending peace to all the parts of me and I didn’t understand. Lisa that’s what I was signing on know.
Marshall when I first got out of graduate school, actually while I was still in graduate school in my internship and I was asked to work with a child, I had a freak right. There was a part of me that was like, I do not want to work with kids, which is so funny for me to say now with what I do. But I was terrified of working with children.
And I very quickly realized that it was because I intuitively knew that I was going to allow the mirror to be revealed through a child that there was something. So I’m going to use the word innocent or clear about the mirror in a small form of a five year old or a seven year old or ten year old, that there was going to be a part of me that was going to be willing to let them in. And so it wasn’t that I was actually afraid to work with children.
I was so afraid for me to look at myself. I was so afraid to look at the parts of me that attracted me to being wanting to be a therapist in the first place. Let’s name that for all of us, right? There’s a reason why we want to be therapists.
We’re bringing our own stuff into this, and inevitably we meet up with it in the playroom. Inevitably. You named that really beautifully.
I didn’t realize I was born with muscular dystrophy, and so I’ve had this illness my whole life, and it wasn’t something I spent a lot of time thinking about until I started working with kids. And that mirror starts coming in, and they ask their very innocent questions about leg braces or about cane or about your surgical scars or what have you. And in those early days of it is, I started having to realize how self conscious I really held myself in space.
And even if I’m real honest, it opened the door to me realizing some of the marginalization that was a part of my story that I just didn’t identify with. And they were really poking at that, which was a big part of some years ago when I started doing the Journaling is I spent probably a solid month just making Santaries about my body, about my physical body, because I was becoming very aware that that was my biggest hindrance and my biggest opportunity to connection with people is I know pain. And if I can be at peace with the thing that causes pain, then people are going to find peace in me.
And that came from kids. I think you’ve referenced your Santre work as a journal now a couple of times in this conversation. So can we invite the listeners actually into a practice of that? And do you have suggestions on what that can look like? I mean, I’ve heard you say, take the time, but are there other tips or things that you could offer our listeners if they really wanted to? Okay, I’m going to really look at what would it mean to embody Santre as a way of journaling? What does that look like? Yeah, absolutely.
There are several things that come to mind. One is just putting it on your calendar, like saying, instead of scheduling this hour, I’m going to leave it open for me. And I don’t think there’s a right time of day.
I’m a morning person, so I need like a 06:00, a.m. Slot. That’s when I’m most alive and most thoughtful.
But some of my colleagues would say they can’t open something up and then have a workday, so they need it in the evening. So I think part of it’s just knowing you, but setting aside the time, having no agenda, having no preconceived notion, just kind of whatever is in you, whatever’s on your mind, that is what prompts you towards beginning. And then take your time with every single step, including sitting with the empty tray, just seeing the emptiness, feeling the sand to the degree that you’re comfortable, building slowly, then checking for completion, thoughtfully looking at it.
Dialoguing with yourself. If you’re a journaler, write from it. And if you’re not, then ask the pieces to have a dialogue.
Voice them. Some people are more somatic and so. They might find a yoga sequence in their world that they build by finding the posture of certain figures that they need to hold and recreate to make contact.
Others will create art out of it. It will then inspire some painting or drawing. And in the poetry world, that’s called nesting.
You write a poem and then you keep going back to it and pulling phrases and you rearrange words and you find all the new combinations of what that original poem had to say. I think a Santray entry is going to be the same and based on all the other things. My primary personal art form that I use outside of writing is clay.
So I would often take something that had come up in class in a tray and I would take it to my one on one class with my clay teacher, and I would tell her about it. It wasn’t just in therapy or in consultation. My hands need to do something with this.
I just know I’m needing a bigger container than a pinch pot can hold, or I’m needing this for my world. And then she would help me construct something that would then go back to my original world. Whatever is your rhythm? If you can find a group of like minded clinicians and you can do worlds and then come together, kind of a person of the therapist consultation group, I’ve been a part of a few of those and doing one now, virtually, that’s really fulfilling for me.
So, yeah, whatever you can find, whatever rhythm you can get into would work. That’s so awesome. Marshall, I’m curious, as we are making our way towards our closure and this discussion, would you be open to sharing a little bit of the poetry that you wrote in the Advanced Santoi book to kind of help bring this conversation together? Yeah.
Dr. Homeier was really kind to indulge, and I wrote a poem that is a complete piece on its own, but then each stanza became the introduction to a chapter, and so I’d be happy to read that for you. It’s called digging deeper.
There is room for you here, room for your joys, your fears, room for your victories and your doubts. This is your world for the making each world deserves witness every story worth hearing the pages we turn together reveal this very moment began long ago connecting to sand and water balance arrives, allowing images to show the way to possibility. Questions join as guide but not needing answer direction does.
Not depend on perfect. Knowing your guide is true not because of a life pain free, but because woundedness made way for compassionate curiosity. Seeds of difference sowed brought a harvest of strife.
So we return to ground and water to remember sweet sensitivity’s gift. In the stillness we hear whispers of relationships past. And you find freedom to choose if there is room for them in this world.
Reclaiming power over world where terror once landed. But we reimagine stories art, even when words arrive on delay. In this world you create, fueled by mystery and light, you find your inner witness that delights as you bravely dig deeper.
Got some tears, Marshall? You can just feel the reclaiming of the self as you read that. That’s just what I heard. So beautiful.
Can almost hear the attachment healing through the poem. I think that’s my biggest hope. And it goes back to an original attachment term.
But when we trust ourselves to show up in the worlds we create, our internal working model gets revealed to us. But only in the amount that we can tolerate seeing. Like when Santre is held in a co regulated, metaphor respecting way.
We get to come back to making deeper and deeper insight connections into how we were know and all the things that we were taught were true that came from these early relationships get to be reevaluated and our identity is no longer automatically decided. But what was most primitively implicitly placed in us that we have all this new data, and we find that in these worlds that we have power over magical. Marshall, this has been an extraordinary conversation.
Thank you for doing what you’re doing out in the world and for reminding therapists to come back to themselves to look a little deeper, dig a little deeper, as you were just saying. Yeah, it’s my pleasure and thank you for having me. And thanks for grateful.
So grateful. Listeners, please go check out Marshall’s new book. Please check Marshall out.
You can go to his website. Marshall, what is the website? They could go it’s my name smushed together. Marshallilens.com
beautiful. If he is in your area live someday or virtually. His workshops are really profound and amazing.
I encourage you to spend some time with him. Thank you again, Marshall. I can’t wait until our paths cross again.
And yes, we can have another meal and share some more sarcasm together. I can’t wait. Awesome.
And everyone, wherever you are in the world, remember to take some breaths, take care of yourself. Remember that you are the most important toy in that playroom.
