https://linktr.ee/grainnewarren, https://buytickets.at/grinnewarrenplaytherapy/2096639

Gráinne Warren Play Therapy, Enniskean (2026)

04/03/2026

Parent support is a big part of the work I do, and it’s something I genuinely value.

Parenting a Neurodivergent child can be deeply meaningful and also incredibly hard. There are so many opinions, expectations, school pressures, and professional voices. Over time, it can become easy to look outward for answers and forget that you are the person who knows your child more than anyone.

These sessions aren’t about me telling you what to do. They’re about creating space to pause, untangle what’s been happening, and make sense of your child’s experience together.

Often that means widening the lens.. looking at nervous system patterns, sensory differences, masking, burnout, or school dynamics.. and bringing it back to what feels true for your child and your family.

It’s also a space for you. For your exhaustion, your uncertainty, your instincts, and your capacity.

Parent support sessions can now be booked directly through my website if that feels helpful.

26/02/2026

PDA and demand avoidance are often spoken about as if they are the same thing.

And I understand why.

From the outside, the behaviours can look very similar - delay, refusal, distraction, negotiation, humour, withdrawal. It can all fall under the umbrella of “avoidance,” which makes it easy to assume the same thing is happening internally.

But when we slow down and listen a little more closely, the nervous system stories underneath can feel quite different.

Sometimes avoidance is about capacity.
A nervous system that is tired, overloaded, stretched thin, or holding too many competing demands at once. In those moments, avoidance makes sense as protection of energy and resources.

Other times, avoidance carries relational meaning.
Demands can feel like pressure, loss of agency, or threat to autonomy. What we might interpret as refusal can instead be a nervous system trying to restore safety, equality, or control within a dynamic that feels imbalanced.

Neither experience is wrong.
Neither needs to be pathologised.
Both are forms of communication.

For me, this distinction isn’t about categorising people or creating neat explanations. It’s about staying curious about context - capacity, power, safety, autonomy, and the relational environment surrounding the demand.

Because when we shift from asking “why won’t they?”
to wondering “what is the nervous system protecting or communicating here?”
our responses often change too.

Perhaps the invitation isn’t to define the avoidance, but to remain curious about what sits beneath it.

22/02/2026

A quiet reflection on capacity, permission, and the space we all need sometimes 🤍

16/02/2026

I’ve been noticing how quickly the word anxiety shows up when we’re talking about children and young people.

A child won’t go to school — anxiety.
They shut down — anxiety.
They avoid something — anxiety.
Their emotions feel big — anxiety.

And sometimes that word is exactly right.

But sometimes I wonder what changes if we pause for a second and recognise distress first.

Distress feels different to me.

It doesn’t immediately place the problem inside the child.
It leaves room to ask what’s happening around them.
What pressure they’re under.
Whether the expectations match their capacity.
Whether something in the environment feels unsafe or overwhelming.

When we describe a child as anxious, the questions often turn towards intervention:
How do we regulate them?
How do we challenge the thinking?
How do we build coping skills?

When we recognise distress, we zoom out.
We start asking different things.
What’s the context here?
Where is the pressure coming from?
What isn’t fitting?

Language quietly shapes responsibility.

And responsibility shapes response.

Sometimes anxiety is anxiety.

And sometimes it’s a nervous system responding to chronic pressure, misattunement, or expectations that were never designed with this child in mind.

When we move too quickly to coping strategies, responsibility narrows.
The child adapts.
The system stays the same.

When we recognise distress, we widen the lens.
And widening the lens changes who carries the responsibility for change

13/02/2026

This post feels a bit obvious to me.

But I think it’s important to be transparent about where we’re standing when we work. About what grounds the work we do.

We all work from somewhere.
Sometimes we just don’t say it out loud.

So this is me saying it out loud.

It’s helpful to have it here as a reminder.

01/02/2026

This is Eris. She’s one of my rabbits and sometimes shares the space with me and the children I work with.

She came to us as a rescue and before she arrived, she had lost her sister and her bonded companion.

A lot of loss, a lot of change and a lot of unfamiliar environments and hands.

When she first settled in, I kept describing her as “anxious”.

Not just in my own head, I’d actually introduce her that way to others too.
“This is Eris, she’s a bit anxious.”

That was my way of making sense of what I was seeing: her pulling away when approached, not liking being picked up, retreating quickly and startling easily.

And if I’m honest, my first instinct was to try to change that. To reassure her more. To get her “used to” being handled. To make her more comfortable with things she clearly wasn’t comfortable with.

But over time, something shifted for me.

Instead of trying to soften her reactions, I started paying attention to what they were actually saying. She doesn’t like being restrained. She doesn’t enjoy being lifted. She wants space, predictability, and choice.

In other words, she wasn’t asking to be fixed.
She was asking to be listened to.

When I stopped trying to change her response and started respecting her preferences, everything felt different. Not because she became a different rabbit, but because the relationship changed.

It’s stayed with me, that shift. Because it shows up in the therapy room too. How quickly we reach for labels like “anxiety”, and how often that pulls us toward fixing instead of listening.

Sometimes what’s needed isn’t to make a response smaller…
but to understand it differently. 🐰🤍

27/01/2026

This conversation isn’t really about individual therapists. It’s about the culture of therapy we’ve inherited.

Most of us were trained inside systems that quietly teach us where authority sits, what counts as knowledge, and whose voice gets treated as reliable.

That doesn’t make anyone malicious. But it does mean that “expert positioning” often becomes the default without us ever consciously choosing it.

Not through obvious dominance.
Through everyday structure.

Who sets the frame.
Who decides what’s relevant.
Whose language becomes the official version of events.
What gets written down, shared with schools, passed to services, and turned into plans.

Over time, these small decisions accumulate. And they start shaping whose meaning-making carries weight in the room.

The risk isn’t having training or frameworks. The risk is when those tools become more important than the relationship holding them. When interpretation replaces listening. When certainty feels safer than staying with not knowing. When professionalism becomes something we hide behind instead of something that supports connection.

Clients rarely name this directly. Especially children and young people. What often shows up instead is hesitation, self-doubt, over-reliance on external interpretation, or a quiet loss of trust in their own internal signals.

For Neurodivergent clients, this dynamic can become even sharper. When lived experience is constantly filtered through neurotypical frameworks, mis-mirroring happens. Difference gets translated into deficit. And people leave therapy feeling understood on paper, but unseen in themselves.

This is why ethical practice isn’t just about technique. It’s about power. It’s about positioning. It’s about who we centre in the meaning-making process.

And it’s about being willing, again and again, to step back enough for clients to step forward into their own knowing.

15/01/2026

Making Sense of PDA in the Therapy Room

PDA is being spoken about more in therapy spaces, which feels important and long overdue.

And at the same time, much of the dominant narrative continues to frame PDA primarily through demand avoidance and anxiety. While those lenses can describe parts of what we see, they often place responsibility within the child or young person, rather than the wider relational and systemic context shaping their experience.

What can get missed is how deeply PDA nervous systems are shaped by autonomy, relational safety and subtle power dynamics - the everyday, often unspoken dynamics that are always present in therapy rooms, schools and family systems.

When these dynamics aren’t accurately recognised, even thoughtful, relational and neuroaffirming work can unintentionally increase pressure or undermine safety - not because the work is wrong but because the nervous system logic has not been fully accounted for.

This workshop offers a way of making sense of PDA that centre’s nervous system organisation, autonomy and context, supporting therapists to recognise what’s happening beneath the surface and to hold relational safety with greater precision and care.

This is not a skills-based or an intervention-focused training.

It’s a space to slow down, reflect on what you’re already seeing, and widen the lens when familiar frameworks no longer quite fit.

🕰 Live online | 2 hours
📅 Thursday 5th February, 7–9pm
🎟 €55
📼 Recording of the teaching portion provided

🔗 Booking link below

https://www.tickettailor.com/events/grinnewarrenplaytherapy/2012775?utm_source=ig&utm_medium=social&utm_content=link_in_bio&fbclid=PAZXh0bgNhZW0CMTEAc3J0YwZhcHBfaWQMMjU2MjgxMDQwNTU4AAGn6HtCRxtIvMTKo7sFGS1zDISLRt0eiNXv1oGyPQDjPe9mVmxOiCqdOqWFAMM_aem_vIElCR1C4QRxhxRsQ57mtQ

12/01/2026

I’ve been noticing how often PDA is still explained through demand avoidance or anxiety, even when the language has become more compassionate or autonomy-informed.

And I keep coming back to the same question in my work: what is the nervous system actually responding to here?

For many PDA children and young people, distress doesn’t seem to arise simply from demands or internal anxiety. It shows up in moments where autonomy feels compromised, where decisions feel imposed, or where the relationship no longer feels mutual or safe.

When we locate the difficulty primarily inside the child - as something to be regulated, managed, or reduced - we can miss the wider relational and contextual factors shaping their experience.

This way of understanding PDA isn’t about replacing one framework with another.

It’s about widening the lens, slowing down our explanations, and staying curious about how power, choice, and safety are experienced in relationship.

That curiosity matters, especially in therapy spaces where we hold more influence than we sometimes realise.

06/01/2026

If you’ve noticed I disappear from social media from time to time, that’s my PDA doing its thing.

Consistency here is hard for me, and I tend to share when something has actually landed and feels worth saying.

I’ve been quiet for a while now, not because nothing was happening, but because I’ve been following my own pacing, thinking, and creativity in ways that align with my energy and flow.

Over that time, something kept becoming clearer to me.

I kept noticing how often therapists are being asked to hold huge levels of complexity when working with Neurodivergent children and young people and how little space there actually is to slow down, reflect, and adapt the frameworks we’ve inherited to meet those realities.

Many of those frameworks were never built with Neurodivergent experience in mind in the first place.

Neurodivergent clients were rarely recognised, named, or held in affirming ways and yet therapists are still expected to make them fit.

The Neuroaffirming Practice has grown out of that recognition.

It’s a learning space for therapists who want to practise in ways that are relational, reflective, and affirming when working alongside Neurodivergent children, adolescents, and young people.

It’s shaped by curiosity rather than certainty, and by an understanding that what we’re taught doesn’t always translate neatly into real therapy rooms, real families, or real lives.

Through live workshops, reflective trainings, and ongoing professional conversations, this space offers time to slow down and think deeply, to sit with complexity without rushing to fix, categorise, or simplify.

It’s for therapists who want language that fits the people they work with, ways of thinking that can hold nuance, and space to reflect, particularly around power, context, and the frameworks we inherit.

I’ll be sharing more soon.

Gráinne

10/12/2025

A quiet reflection to close out the year and a small look toward the direction I’m moving in next.

I’ve also made my EAIP presentation available as a written blog (link in bio) for anyone who wants to read the fuller piece.

And to the Neurodivergent therapists who recognise themselves in this, I see you.

This work is not easy, and your experience matters.

❤️

01/12/2025

My Capacity Bubble — A Resource for Neurodivergent Children, Teens & the Grown-ups Who Support Them

We all have days where the world feels spacious, where talking is easy, conversations flow, sound sits softly, and our brain has room to stretch…

And then there are days where even one extra request feels like too much!

That’s capacity - not ability, not effort, not motivation.
Just capacity. And it changes.

I created My Capacity Bubble to help children, teens (and the adults around them) understand, honour, and protect their energy without shame or push-through culture.

Inside the download you’ll find:

🫧gentle explanations of what capacity actually is - energy, emotion, sensory load, expectations

🫧reflection prompts to help children notice when their bubble is big or small

🫧worksheet pages for exploring what fits, what doesn’t, and what helps recovery

🫧self-advocacy scripts for moments when words are hard

🫧a visual “check-in” page for daily use

This resource supports children to recognise limits, communicate needs, and move away from the idea of coping and toward understanding themselves with compassion.

Your capacity bubble doesn’t pop, it shifts to protect you.
You don’t have to stretch it to fit everything in.
You can listen to it. You can say no. You can protect it.
Your capacity matters, and it changes.
That’s not failure. That’s self-awareness.
Knowing your limits is a strength 💪

🫧 Download “My Capacity Bubble” on my website — link in bio.

Gráinne Warren Play Therapy

04/03/2026

26/02/2026

22/02/2026

16/02/2026

13/02/2026

01/02/2026

27/01/2026

15/01/2026

12/01/2026

06/01/2026

10/12/2025

01/12/2025

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