Gráinne Warren - The Neuroaffirming Therapist

Gráinne Warren - The Neuroaffirming Therapist Neuroaffirming Child/Adolescent Therapist
Accredited Play Therapist
Clinical Supervision & Parent Support
Education, Training & Resources

grainnewarren.com

🌿This is an ongoing battle for me!Half the time I have absolutely no idea whether I’m exhausted or under-stimulated beca...
07/07/2026

🌿

This is an ongoing battle for me!

Half the time I have absolutely no idea whether I’m exhausted or under-stimulated because, annoyingly, they can feel almost exactly the same.

My ADHD brain needs stimulation constantly. Then being Autistic means I can become overstimulated ridiculously quickly. And good old PDA can have me stuck in freeze, unable to do the thing that might actually help either way.

So I can spend hours doing absolutely nothing because I’m convinced I need to rest, only to eventually realise I was bored out of my mind and needed to leave the house, move my body, talk to someone or find something interesting enough to wake me up.

And other times I convince myself I just need a bit of stimulation, push myself to do something, and discover that no... I was actually exhausted and have now made everything worse. 😂

I still haven’t figured it out.

I think that’s why I come back to capacity so often. When I can’t work out what I need, it gives me somewhere to start.

Is this likely to restore capacity, or chip away at it?

Strategies carry agendas.PDA has made me think much more deeply about that, but I’m increasingly convinced it is somethi...
05/07/2026

Strategies carry agendas.

PDA has made me think much more deeply about that, but I’m increasingly convinced it is something we need to consider across all of our practice.

Before we refine the methods used to achieve an outcome, I think we need to examine the agenda underneath it.

Success cannot be measured by whether we got the outcome we wanted without also examining who carried the cost of getting there and where the power landed.

Over the past few years, I’ve found myself becoming increasingly uncomfortable with where much of modern Western psychot...
29/06/2026

Over the past few years, I’ve found myself becoming increasingly uncomfortable with where much of modern Western psychotherapy begins.

So often, we start by locating distress within the individual. Once that’s where we begin, it’s easy for our attention to stay there too. We reach for coping strategies, emotional regulation, resilience, distress tolerance, behaviour management and anxiety reduction because we’ve already decided where the problem is.

The more I’ve reflected on my own practice, the more I’ve found myself questioning that starting point.

I’m not suggesting we stop supporting individuals.

I’m wondering what happens when we stop looking at them in isolation.

Because distress doesn’t emerge in a vacuum. It takes shape through the interaction between neurotype, nervous systems, relationships, environments, systems and power.

The more I zoom out, the more difficult it becomes to ask, “How can this person adapt?” without also asking, “What are they being asked to adapt to?”

For me, this is what becoming genuinely neuroaffirming has come to mean.

It’s been much less about changing my language than changing the lens through which I understand distress.

Because if we continue to individualise distress, we’ll continue to individualise the solutions.

And when the burden of adaptation repeatedly falls on those with the least power, I think we have to ask whether we’re seeing the whole picture.

22/06/2026

I’ve been seeing a lot of posts recently about summer.

Posts about creating memories, reducing screen time, prioritising connection, planning activities and making the most of the holidays while our children are still young.

And while most of them are well intentioned, I’ve found myself wondering whether some of them are quietly creating another thing for parents to get right.

What strikes me is that many of these conversations seem to assume children and parents are arriving into summer with plenty of available capacity. Ready to connect, engage and make the most of things.

But many Neurodivergent families aren’t arriving into summer from that place at all.

Some children are arriving exhausted after months of masking, adapting, coping and surviving. Some are carrying the effects of burnout. Many parents are exhausted too after a year of advocating, supporting distress, navigating systems and trying to hold everything together.

When I look at it through that lens, I find myself wondering whether summer is sometimes being treated as something that needs to be optimised.

Because what if summer isn’t a project?

What if summer is recovery time?

The other thing I keep coming back to is how often these conversations assume there is a right way to connect, to play and to spend time together.

Yet connection looks different in every family.

For one child, it might be a family day out. For another, it might be sharing videos about something they love. For one family, play might mean adventures and activities. For another, it might mean everyone staying in their pyjamas all day and finally exhaling after a difficult year.

Maybe parents don’t need another voice telling them what their summer should look like.

Maybe they need permission to trust themselves, trust their child and block out some of the noise.

Because for some families, recovery is the plan.

As I wrap up client work for the summer, I realised I haven’t actually shared all of these resources in one place.Some o...
19/06/2026

As I wrap up client work for the summer, I realised I haven’t actually shared all of these resources in one place.

Some of these started as workshops, out of questions I kept being asked by parents and therapists or things I found myself exploring many times in sessions, supervision and training.

None of them were actually created because I wanted to create resources but because there were things I wished more people understood.

So if you’ve followed my work for a while, attended a workshop, or found yourself wishing there was something you could revisit in your own time, I thought I’d gather a few of them together here. I’ve popped a link to my shop in my bio or you can find them on my website.

And thank you to everyone who has supported my work so far. Every workshop attended, resource downloaded, post shared and conversation started has helped make this work possible.

Gráinne ❤️

One of the reasons I wanted to share this reflection is because I think PDA is often discussed through the language of c...
15/06/2026

One of the reasons I wanted to share this reflection is because I think PDA is often discussed through the language of control.

And while I understand why that happens, it has never fully captured my own experience.

When I think about the passenger seat now, what strikes me isn’t that I wanted to be the person making the decisions. What strikes me is how differently my nervous system responded when my experience was treated as relevant information rather than something to be dismissed, corrected or overridden.

The outcome affected me too.

What happened next mattered to me too.

The experience belonged to both of us.

Yet one person held significantly more power over how that experience unfolded.

I think this is partly why PDA can be so difficult to understand through behaviour alone. From the outside, the person arguing, negotiating, refusing or questioning can look controlling. Yet sometimes what we are witnessing is an attempt to create a more collaborative experience. An attempt to have some influence within something that feels imposed. An attempt to restore a sense of equity when the nervous system perceives a significant imbalance in power, autonomy or agency.

The more I learn about PDA, the more I find myself thinking about coercion, hierarchy, collaboration and shared decision-making.

I find myself wondering what happens when a person repeatedly encounters experiences that affect them directly while having very little say in how those experiences unfold.

And I find myself wondering how often we misunderstand the moment they stop fighting.

Because from the outside that moment can look like acceptance.

Sometimes it may be something very different.

This is one of those posts that comes from a place of genuine frustration.I spend a lot of time reading and listening to...
07/06/2026

This is one of those posts that comes from a place of genuine frustration.

I spend a lot of time reading and listening to conversations about PDA, and I keep finding myself coming back to the same question.

Why are we still so focused on the demand?

A child reacts to a demand and immediately the conversation becomes about how we can make that demand feel smaller, softer, easier, or less direct.

And sometimes those approaches help.

But I can’t help wondering whether we’re looking in the wrong place.

Because when I think about my own experiences, and when I listen to PDA adults describe theirs, the thing that stands out isn’t usually the demand itself.

It’s the expectation underneath it.

It’s the feeling that somebody already knows what should happen next.

It’s the sense that an outcome is already being held in mind and that I’m expected to move towards it.

And the strange thing is that I can create exactly the same experience for myself.

I can be genuinely excited about a book, a project, a workshop, or an idea and then watch my relationship with it change the moment it becomes something I feel I should do.

Nobody else is involved and nobody is forcing me.

Yet my nervous system still responds to that shift.

That feels important.

Because I think it tells us that there is something much bigger happening than demand avoidance alone.

I don’t think I’ve reached the end of this line of thinking. If anything, writing this post has probably left me with more questions than answers.

But I do know that the conversations I find most helpful are the ones that move beyond demands and become curious about autonomy, agenda, power, and what safety actually feels like inside a PDA nervous system.

I actually nearly didn’t post this because I kept thinking “sure everyone already knows this.”But the more I sit with it...
01/06/2026

I actually nearly didn’t post this because I kept thinking “sure everyone already knows this.”

But the more I sit with it, the more I honestly think many of us have been trained to recognise distress mainly once it becomes externally visible or difficult to contain.

And because of that, I think some children can spend years being understood as coping well simply because they are coping quietly.

I notice this so much in children who are deeply attuned to the adults around them. The children who pick up very quickly on what feels acceptable, what gets praised, what makes life smoother, what keeps other people comfortable, what keeps them out of trouble.

Sometimes those children become so good at holding themselves together externally that adults stop realising how much effort it is taking.

I think that’s partly why I’ve become much more interested in nervous system cost over external presentation.

Because two children can both appear to be “managing” a school day while one of them is moving through it with far more sensory overwhelm, vigilance, self-monitoring, exhaustion, and internal strain underneath the surface.

And from the outside those children can look incredibly similar for a very long time.

Until eventually one child starts falling apart in ways adults can finally see, while the other keeps disappearing further and further into coping.

I think one of the things that shifted my understanding most over the years was realising that many Neurodivergent child...
27/05/2026

I think one of the things that shifted my understanding most over the years was realising that many Neurodivergent children are not actually disengaged from learning at all.

Often they are learning constantly.

The difference is that the engagement is frequently being driven internally rather than externally.

And honestly, once you start seeing that, so many things begin making more sense.

The child who can spend hours researching something in extraordinary depth but cannot begin the worksheet.

The child who appears to “switch off” during externally directed tasks but becomes completely immersed once curiosity or genuine interest enters the picture.

The child who absorbs enormous amounts of information through self-directed exploration while simultaneously being described as lacking focus or motivation.

I think many Neurodivergent children are carrying nervous systems that engage most naturally through intrinsic connection, immersion, meaning, interest, and depth. And yet so much of the world is structured around externally imposed attention and importance-based expectations.

Over time, a lot of children become incredibly skilled at overriding that difference. Pushing themselves through things using anxiety, urgency, pressure, perfectionism, or fear because those states can temporarily force access into place.

But I really think there is a huge nervous system cost to functioning that way long-term.

And I think this is partly why interest-led activities are so often misunderstood too. Sometimes what adults are seeing is not avoidance of learning, but one of the only places the nervous system is experiencing genuine coherence, regulation, engagement, creativity, or recovery.

This overlaps so much with flow state, monotropism, burnout, self-directed learning, and the way many Neurodivergent children naturally come alive through immersion rather than external pressure.

I also think many adults reading this may recognise themselves here too.

I think one of the hardest parts about fluctuating capacity is how invisible it can be to other people.There can be this...
25/05/2026

I think one of the hardest parts about fluctuating capacity is how invisible it can be to other people.

There can be this assumption that if you managed something yesterday, or even earlier that same day, then the same access should still be there. But for many Neurodivergent people, capacity is constantly shifting underneath the surface depending on sensory load, emotional processing, cognitive demand, social interaction, masking, uncertainty, environment, and recovery.

And sometimes those shifts happen incredibly quickly.

For me, one of the things I find most disabling is how suddenly my nervous system can move from feeling relatively organised into feeling completely overloaded internally. Unexpected emotional intensity in a room can do it very quickly. Too much back-and-forth conversational processing in groups can too, especially when my attention is being pulled in multiple directions at once.

What often changes first for me is speech. Not necessarily disappearing completely, but becoming much harder to access. Almost like my thoughts are still there somewhere, but the pathway between thought and language suddenly becomes much harder to reach.

I think many Neurodivergent people become incredibly skilled at compensating long before anybody else notices anything is wrong, which means collapse often appears “sudden” from the outside.

But usually the nervous system has been carrying far more than people realised for a very long time.

And honestly, I think simply having these experiences understood more relationally and neurologically instead of morally can reduce so much shame.

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