Woven Roots Therapeutic Practice

04/02/2026

🌿 Supporting Children Bereaved by Su***de 🌿

When a child is bereaved through su***de, their grief is often layered and complex. Alongside the pain of loss, there may be shock, confusion, guilt, anger, or a deep search for answers. This kind of grief can feel louder, heavier, and more persistent than other losses.

Children’s grief can present differently to how adults anticipate. Their feelings may come and go, show up through behaviour or play, and resurface at different stages of development. This is not regression — it’s how children make sense of what has happened.

What helps most:
• Honest, age-appropriate explanations that build trust
• Reassurance that the death was not the child’s fault
• Clear messages that the person who died loved them
• Safe spaces to talk, play, remember, and ask questions — even the same ones again
• Understanding that grief is cyclical and may return at anniversaries, transitions, or milestones

Memory-making matters too. Creative tools such as storytelling, memory boxes, drawing, or symbolic play can help children hold ordinary memories, painful memories, and precious memories side by side.

Schools, carers, and professionals play a vital role in offering stability, routine, and compassion — especially during times when grief quietly re-emerges.

There is no right timeline for grief. Healing doesn’t mean forgetting. It means learning how to carry love and loss together, gently, over time.
💛

Specialist book to help families and professionals to support a child or young person following a death by su***de. Practical guidance and activities to help you talk to children about death by su***de, begin to make sense of what has happened and ways to cope. Written by childhood bereavement chari...

28/01/2026

“Neurodivergent children: canaries in the coal mine “🐤⛏️ Key takeaways from Emmie Fisher on school anxiety, systems, and moral strain:

• School anxiety isn’t an individual failing – it’s often a predictable response to rigid, neuro-normative systems that privilege compliance, standardisation, and performance over safety, flexibility, and relationship.
• Neurodivergent children struggles are early warning signals – their distress highlights a wider systemic misalignment with children’s developmental needs. They’re not the problem; they’re showing us where the system fractures.
• Mainstream classrooms can unintentionally punish difference – public reprimands, fixed seating, silent desk work, and narrow measures of “good learning” create fear of mistakes and inhibit curiosity, movement, and self-regulation.
• Epistemic injustice is everywhere – children’s distress is misread as misbehaviour; parents’ concerns are reframed as anxiety; trainees and teachers who question practice are dismissed. Lived experience is devalued.
• The human cost is profound – shame, withdrawal, exhaustion, meltdowns, shutdowns, and for some, thoughts of self-harm. Non-attendance can become a survival strategy, not avoidance.
• This is a moral and political issue, not just an educational one – accountability structures (tests, inspections, league tables) constrain even well-intentioned teachers and narrow what counts as learning.
• The real question needs to shift – not “How do we get this child into school?” but “How do we make school a place this child can safely engage with and want to attend?”
• Psychology has a role to play – it can either reinforce neuro-normative expectations or challenge them by amplifying lived experience and interrogating the systems that produce harm.

👉 Neurodivergent children aren’t failing school. Some school systems, as currently designed, are failing too many children. See link below to full article ;

17/01/2026

As therapists, we are not only story holders and weavers alongside our clients — we are also pattern recognisers, information gatherers, and meaning-makers.

Through our everyday practice, we already generate rich practice-based evidence: noticing what repeats, what shifts, what supports growth, and what causes harm. When this is gathered and reflected on systematically, it allows us to become ambassadors for our field, strengthening the visibility, credibility, and protection of play therapy within wider systems.

I really value Dr Kate Renshaw’s encouragement and the clear, accessible structure she offers here for stepping into a play therapist–researcher identity. This guidance reminds us that research doesn’t sit outside the playroom — it grows directly from it.

Well worth exploring for any play therapist curious about bridging practice, reflection, and advocacy.

As a play therapist you might feel research is ‘not your thing’ - something for academics rather than clinicians…

To strengthen our profession and demonstrate play therapy’s impact, practice-based research isn’t optional - it’s essential

Discover how to step into your Play Therapist-Researcher identity:https://www.playandfilialtherapy.com/_files/ugd/c223a1_44777915fda84f518731f5b384bc2c44.pdf



Natalie Rae Playroom Therapy

17/01/2026

🎬 Reflections on I Swear

This film powerfully brings into focus the core conditions that support human growth — acceptance, understanding, and being held in mind by at least one steady other.

I Swear offers a relational lens, showing how neurodivergence itself is not the problem — but how, in the absence of understanding, it is too often met with misunderstanding, isolation, and damaging responses.

In Why Love Matters, Sue Gerhardt writes about the importance of a “step-in attachment figure” — a single reliable person who helps anchor development when primary relationships are unavailable, inconsistent, or unsafe. This might be a parent, but it can also be a teacher, coach, mentor, or key adult.

In the film, Dottie is very clearly this figure for John Davidson.
Her role isn’t about fixing or correcting — it’s about staying, believing, and offering continuity. And that steadiness matters.

I Swear is also a strong reminder of why psychoeducation is not optional. Understanding neurodiversity doesn’t just reduce stigma — it actively reduces harm. Without it, difference is too easily met with punishment, ridicule, or shame.

Well worth a watch for anyone working with children, young people, or adults — and for anyone interested in how relationships shape nervous systems, identity, and the possibility of belonging. I Swear

An account of the life of John Davidson, a Tourette syndrome campaigner who grew up with the condition in the 1980s Scotland, at a time when it was little known and misunderstood.

17/01/2026

🌿 The Empathy Dial 🌿

If you work with children, families, or people in pain, you probably don’t need help finding empathy.
Most helpers are already deeply tuned in — emotionally, somatically, relationally.

The challenge isn’t having empathy.
It’s knowing how much, and when.

🧠 In Help for the Helper, Babette Rothschild offers a simple but powerful idea:
Empathy isn’t an on/off switch. It’s a dial.

You can turn it up to feel-with, resonate, and attune.
You can turn it down to think clearly, stay grounded, and remain effective.
Most of the time, the sweet spot lives somewhere in the middle.

💡 Why this matters
When empathy stays permanently turned up:
• We absorb more than belongs to us
• Our bodies carry what others cannot yet hold
• Fatigue, fog, and emotional spillover quietly build

Turning the dial down doesn’t mean you stop caring.
It means you’re protecting the relationship — and yourself.

🛠️ What “turning the dial” can look like
• Feeling your feet on the floor or your back against the chair
• Softening your breath
• Leaning back slightly instead of forward
• Noticing when your body is mirroring another’s state

Small physical shifts create psychological space.

For helpers, therapists, teachers, parents:
You can adjust the dial.
You can tend to sustainability rather than depletion.
You can remain human in the midst of this work.

Image: conceptual illustration of an empathy gauge / empathy dial

17/01/2026

Anna Freud’s words sit at the very heart of play therapy practice.

Children do not always have the language to explain what they feel or why they behave as they do. Instead, their inner world often shows itself through play; in stories, symbols, roles and repetition. Within this play, the unconscious gently finds a voice.

In play therapy, we understand play as a bridge to the unconscious. It is where fears can be expressed safely, wishes can be explored without judgement and experiences can be worked through at the child’s own pace. What may feel confusing or overwhelming internally can be communicated, processed and transformed through play.

By attuning to a child’s play, the play therapist offers containment, curiosity and emotional safety, allowing the unconscious material to emerge naturally rather than be forced into words. This is where healing begins, not by asking children to explain themselves, but by meeting them where they are.

Play is not “just play”.

It is communication, insight and deep emotional work in action.

17/01/2026

🌿 When children don’t receive a whole story, their imagination fills the gaps.

Nick Cave reflects on how, after loss, we often live with fragments of information — and how the mind creates “semi-fiction” to make sense of what cannot yet be fully held. This is something we often see in children who have experienced traumatic or ambiguous loss, including bereavement, incarceration, addiction, or sudden separation.

Children rarely receive a complete, coherent narrative. Instead, they gather scraps — overheard conversations, changes in routine, emotional atmospheres, sudden absences — and from these fragments, they do what humans are wired to do: they make meaning.

The risk isn’t imagination itself. It’s when children are left to carry frightening or distorted images alone, without developmentally appropriate explanation or relational support. In the absence of gentle scaffolding, children may assume danger or responsibility, and their nervous systems work hard to contain what feels overwhelming.

Grief-informed guidance, including resources from Winston’s Wish, highlights the importance of helping children put the pieces of the puzzle together — slowly, truthfully, and in ways that meet them where they are.

🌱 Children don’t need perfect explanations.
They need trusted adults and systems who can walk alongside their questions with care and clarity.

16/01/2026

Reading ‘Faith, Hope and Carnage’
Nick Cave writes about the process of songwriting after the traumatic loss of his son — not as a return to storytelling as it once was, but as something altered at the level of form itself. He describes narratives becoming twisted, fragmented, “pushed through the meat grinder.” Still stories — but no longer linear, tidy, or reassuring. The form changes because life has changed.

This feels deeply familiar in the playroom.

Play is creativity in action. In play therapy, children don’t stop telling stories after trauma. Instead, their stories arrive as images, impulses, repetitions, ruptures. Worlds are built and destroyed. Characters split, disappear, return. Meaning doesn’t unfold in a straight line — it circles, fractures, reappears differently each time. This isn’t confusion or regression. It’s the nervous system doing exactly what it needs to do to integrate something overwhelming.

Across music and therapy, creativity becomes a way of both surviving, expressing and healing.

Sometimes what looks messy is actually the beginning of repair.🌱

15/01/2026

Betsy’s Team Here!

Yesterday, Betsy went to Windsor Castle to receive this honour from The Princess Royal on behalf of the King. Many of you know how hard Betsy has fought and continues to fight for the voices of the traumatised and vulnerable to be heard and to bring Trauma Recovery into the heart of the conversation. We’re so grateful for her relentless work & and are so excited that she has received this honour!

“Trauma Recovery is Possible” - Betsy de Thierry MBE

Elizabeth de Thierry MBE - for Services to Child and Adolescent Mental Health and Trauma Recovery as part of the King’s Birthday Honours.

15/01/2026

🌱 When connection requires self-suppression, the body remembers.

Some children learn early—often without words—that closeness comes at a cost.
That being good, quiet, helpful, or in control keeps relationships safe.
That strong feelings need to be tucked away.
That needs can feel risky.

For care-experienced children, this learning is often shaped by instability, loss, disrupted attachment, or environments where adults themselves were overwhelmed. Survival may have depended on staying small, staying pleasing, or staying emotionally alert.

Over time, this shaping can show up not just in behaviour, but in bodies:
restlessness, stomach aches, headaches, emotional shutdown, big reactions to small things, or a constant sense of “holding it together.” It is adaptation.

🎨 Play therapy works because it speaks the child’s language.
Before children can explain what they feel, they show us—through play, movement, stories, symbols, rhythm, and relationship. In the playroom, children don’t have to translate their inner world into adult words. They are allowed to be exactly where they are developmentally.

10/01/2026

🌱 Why consistency and predictability matter so deeply in play therapy 🌱

Garry Landreth builds on attachment theory, and is explicit in his stance:

“The relationship is the therapy.”

In practice, this means that healing doesn’t come from clever techniques or quick fixes (though our work is grounded in extensive training, theory, and diverse therapeutic frameworks). It comes from reliable, repeated experiences of safety within relationship.

Consistency is what transforms the playroom into a secure base:
• the same therapist
• the same room
• the same limits
• the same emotional responses

Over time, this repetition allows a child to internalise something essential:

“This adult remains steady even when I am not.”

Without a predictable therapeutic frame, children often stay:
• defended
• overly controlled
• compliant or superficial

Not because they don’t want to go deeper —
but because their nervous system cannot yet afford to.

At Woven Roots, we hold consistency not as routine, but as care.
Because when the external world becomes steady, the inner world can finally begin to move. 🌿

09/01/2026

🌿 When Rejection Isn’t What It Seems 🌿

In attachment-centred play therapy, clinician and author Clair Mellenthin describes a pattern called the “reject–reject relationship cycle.”

It happens when a child is distressed and the adults caring for them feel helpless, unsure, or overwhelmed. Without anyone meaning to, both can begin to experience the other as rejecting.

The adult may pull back when their nervous system becomes overwhelmed — often experienced as guilt, shame, or shutdown.
The child feels that withdrawal as rejection — confirming fears of being too much or unsafe to need.

No one is choosing this.
It isn’t about blame, failure, or bad parenting.

It’s what can happen when unhealed attachment pain meets stress.

Trauma-informed work helps slow this cycle, name what’s underneath, and support repair — reminding everyone involved that these moments are about protection, not rejection.

At Woven Roots Therapeutic Practice , we hold these patterns with compassion and care, supporting families to find their way back to connection 🌱