Multicultural & Relational-Cultural Sandtray

Multicultural counseling competency

The multicultural counseling competency framework, developed primarily by Derald Wing Sue and colleagues (Sue et al., 1982; Sue & Sue, 2016), holds that effective counseling requires three dimensions of competency: awareness of one's own cultural assumptions and biases; knowledge of the worldviews and life experiences of culturally different clients; and skills to adapt interventions to be culturally congruent.

These are not add-on competencies for working with specific populations. They are foundational to all competent practice. A clinician who has not examined their own cultural assumptions brings those assumptions into every session, every intervention, and every interpretation — whether they know it or not.

Cultural considerations in sandtray specifically

The figure library as cultural text

Every sandtray figure library reflects the cultural assumptions of the people who built it. A collection heavy with Western religious imagery, Euro-American family figures, and animals from North American ecosystems communicates something to clients from other cultural backgrounds — before a single figure is placed. Clinicians should audit their figure libraries periodically and consider what is missing, what is overrepresented, and what assumptions the collection implies about whose world is normative.

When a client cannot find a figure that represents their experience — a figure that looks like them, a building from their cultural context, a symbol from their spiritual tradition — this absence is clinically relevant and worth naming: "I notice we don't have [X] in our figure set. What would you use if we did?" That conversation is itself part of the therapeutic work.

Meaning of symbols across cultures

The same symbol carries different weight in different cultural contexts. A snake can represent evil (Christian tradition), healing (medical/Greek tradition), wisdom (many Indigenous traditions), or rebirth (multiple traditions). A dragon is terrifying in some Western contexts and auspicious in many East Asian ones. A clinician trained in Jungian sandplay who interprets symbols according to Western archetypal assumptions may impose a meaning on a figure that is entirely foreign to the client's cultural frame.

The safest interpretive stance — and the one most consistent with multicultural competency — is the client-led one: "Tell me about that figure. What does it mean to you?" This is not the absence of symbolic awareness; it is the subordination of the clinician's symbolic framework to the client's.

Non-verbal communication and cultural norms

Eye contact, physical proximity, direct expression of emotion, and interpersonal disclosure vary significantly across cultures. A child who does not make eye contact during the build is not necessarily dissociated or avoidant — they may be showing culturally appropriate respect. A client who builds in silence and offers no explanation is not necessarily resistant — they may be from a cultural context in which reflective silence is the natural mode of engagement. Polyvagal and attachment-informed reading of these behaviors must be held alongside cultural humility.

Relational-Cultural Theory

Relational-Cultural Theory (RCT) was developed at the Stone Center at Wellesley College, primarily by Jean Baker Miller, Judith Jordan, Irene Stiver, and Janet Surrey (Miller, 1976; Jordan et al., 1991). RCT begins from a critique of Western psychology's emphasis on autonomy, individuation, and independence as developmental ideals. These ideals, RCT argues, are culturally specific, class-specific, and often gender-specific — and they pathologize connection and interdependence, which are central to healthy development and well-being for many people.

RCT's central concept is growth-fostering relationship — the kind of mutual, empathic, power-aware relationship that produces what Miller called "the five good things": increased zest, clarity, sense of worth, productivity, and desire for more connection. The therapeutic relationship is not a vehicle for delivering techniques; it is itself the agent of change.

Disconnection and relational images

RCT understands distress as rooted in disconnection — the experience of being unable to bring oneself fully into relationship and still be met. Relational images are the working models of what connection is safe to attempt — built from accumulated experiences of connection and disconnection with significant others. In the tray, relational images often appear as the patterns of proximity, contact, and isolation between figures.

Power and the therapeutic relationship

RCT is explicitly attentive to power dynamics — between client and clinician, within families depicted in the tray, within the cultural and institutional systems that shape clients' lives. A clinician working with a student of color in a predominantly white school counseling context, or with a child from an undocumented family, or with a child navigating poverty in a resource-abundant setting — that clinician is not in a culturally neutral relationship. RCT asks clinicians to acknowledge power rather than act as if it doesn't exist.

Culturally responsive sandtray practice

The following practices reflect multicultural and RCT principles applied to sandtray work:

• Begin with cultural curiosity, not assumption. "Tell me about your family. Tell me about what's important where you come from." This information shapes how you receive the tray.
• Name what you don't know. "I'm not sure what this figure means in your experience — can you tell me?" The clinician's uncertainty is not a failure; it is an invitation for the client's expertise about their own culture to enter the room.
• Attend to what's absent. What cultural groups, experiences, or contexts are not represented in the figure library? What does a client do when they cannot find what they're looking for?
• Hold interpretation loosely and later. The more culturally distant a client is from the clinician's own background, the more tenuous any symbolic interpretation becomes. Default to the client's own meaning-making.
• Notice power in the tray and in the room. Whose figures dominate the tray? What institutional forces are represented or absent? What's the relationship between the figures of power and the figures of vulnerability?

Intersectionality in the tray

Kimberlé Crenshaw's concept of intersectionality — the understanding that race, gender, class, ability, sexuality, and other identity dimensions interact to create distinct and overlapping experiences of advantage and disadvantage — is relevant to sandtray practice in at least two ways. First, it reminds the clinician that a client's experience cannot be understood through any single identity dimension alone. Second, it frames the tray as a space where the full complexity of a client's social location can be present — where the student who is simultaneously navigating racism, poverty, disability, and family instability can build a world that holds all of that, without the clinician reducing it to any single frame.