Gráinne Warren Play Therapy

Gráinne Warren Play Therapy The Neuroaffirming Therapist

🌟Play therapy & Parent Support
🌟Autistic/ADHD Wellbeing
🌟Consultancy & Education
AuDHD
Mum of 3
Cork, Ireland ☘️

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.

These focus groups are small online gatherings for therapists who want space for thoughtful professional conversation.Ea...
23/05/2026

These focus groups are small online gatherings for therapists who want space for thoughtful professional conversation.

Each group is limited to five participants, so there is time to reflect on real clinical questions, explore different perspectives, and think together about the complexities of working with neurodivergent young people.

The sessions are reflective discussions, shaped by what participants bring on the day.

You’re welcome to bring questions, dilemmas, or themes from your work, but there’s no pressure to prepare anything in advance.

My role is to guide the conversation, share reflections from my own clinical practice, and support the group in staying with the nuance that often gets lost in more structured learning spaces.

I’ve been thinking a lot about this weekend since coming home from the Neurodiversity Ireland Summit.There was so much p...
20/05/2026

I’ve been thinking a lot about this weekend since coming home from the Neurodiversity Ireland Summit.

There was so much passion, advocacy, learning, and care in the room all weekend. Spaces like this matter enormously when so many Neurodivergent people and families are still having to fight so hard to be understood, supported, accommodated, and treated with dignity.

And at the same time, I kept thinking afterwards about how heavy advocacy work can become when your nervous system is carrying so much of it personally too.

I think many people in these spaces are carrying both the children they are trying to support now and the children they once were themselves.

Maybe that’s partly why these moments stayed with me most afterwards.

People laughing in the corridors, sitting on floors together, getting excited about things, visibly relaxing into one another’s company for a while.

The summit ended with music and comedy and honestly I think there was something really important in that too.

Because the more I reflect on it, the more I think play and joy are part of what makes advocacy sustainable.

I think nervous systems can only stay in prolonged states of urgency for so long before everything starts narrowing around survival. And sometimes moments like these create tiny openings again.

Especially in Neurodivergent spaces where so many people grew up learning that intensity, excitement, movement, or authenticity were somehow too much.

I think there is something really important about children seeing Neurodivergent adults existing openly in joy too.

These photos made me smile because they captured something I think advocacy spaces need more of. The ability to hold advocacy, grief, humour, playfulness, and connection in the same space.

And a huge appreciation to for the amount of work, care and thought that went into creating a space this ❤️

I think flow state is one of the most misunderstood parts of the Neurodivergent experience.Especially when it gets viewe...
17/05/2026

I think flow state is one of the most misunderstood parts of the Neurodivergent experience.

Especially when it gets viewed purely through behaviour.

From the outside, deep immersion can sometimes look excessive, rigid, avoidant, obsessive, or unhealthy. Adults often become focused on how long a child has spent doing something, how difficult it is to interrupt, or whether the interest appears “balanced.”

But I think a lot of Neurodivergent people are experiencing something much deeper than simple enjoyment inside flow state.

For many Neurodivergent nervous systems, flow can become one of the only places where attention stops fragmenting constantly.

One of the only places where functioning stops feeling forced.

One of the only places where the nervous system is no longer trying to process noise, transitions, social monitoring, sensory input, expectations, interruptions, and self-regulation all at the same time.

And I honestly think that matters enormously when we start talking about burnout.

Because burnout is not only about doing too much.

It is also about spending prolonged periods disconnected from regulation, embodiment, autonomy, creativity, safety, and authentic engagement.

And this is part of why conversations around screen time can become so emotionally charged and complicated for many Neurodivergent families.

Because for a lot of Neurodivergent children and young people, screens can provide one of the quickest, most reliable, and most accessible pathways into flow state.

Especially for children with already reduced capacity.

Especially during burnout.

Especially when the nervous system is already overloaded, fragmented, exhausted, socially depleted, or struggling to access regulation anywhere else.

That does not mean all screen use is automatically regulating or supportive in every context.

But I do think screen-based flow states are often heavily pathologised without enough curiosity about what the nervous system may actually be accessing through them.

Flow is not draining capacity.

Sometimes it is one of the few things actively protecting it.

This is something I come across a lot, both in conversations with parents and in sessions when things are coming to an e...
07/05/2026

This is something I come across a lot, both in conversations with parents and in sessions when things are coming to an end.

I think transitions can get misunderstood really easily because from the outside they can look so small. Stop the game. Put the shoes on. Finish up. Come to the table. Leave the room.

But internally, it can feel like being pulled out of something before your nervous system has actually caught up with what’s happening.

When attention settles deeply into something, it’s not just focus in a surface-level sense. It can feel more like a kind of flow state, where everything else fades out a bit and the body and mind organise themselves around what’s right there in front of you.

And if you think about it from that place, it makes sense that stepping away isn’t immediate.

Not because the child doesn’t understand or because they’re ignoring you. But because they’re still in it.

That’s often how I understand monotropic processing, that pull towards what is meaningful, and the difficulty not always being about starting something new, but about disengaging from what already has your attention.

I notice this a lot in therapy sessions when we’re nearing the end. Sometimes I can almost feel the difference between a child who has reached a natural stopping point internally, and a child whose body is still completely inside the experience even though time is moving on around them.

And I think this is where adults can accidentally speed things up without realising. More reminders, more urgency and more pressure to “move on”.

But often what helps is the opposite.

Slowing things down, joining in with them first, and helping the child find the ending rather than abruptly imposing one.

Because when we’re asking a child to move from one thing into another, we’re often asking for a shift in attention, regulation, sensory processing, emotional organisation, all at once.

And sometimes that just takes time.

This is something that comes up all the time in the therapy room.What gets called “demand avoidance” can end up being ta...
05/05/2026

This is something that comes up all the time in the therapy room.

What gets called “demand avoidance” can end up being taken quite literally, and we stay focused on what we’re seeing without really getting underneath it. PDA often gets pulled into that same space too, reduced to behaviour rather than understood through the child’s experience.

And that’s often where things start to feel a bit stuck or confusing.

But when there’s a clearer understanding of PDA, especially around autonomy and how quickly power dynamics can creep in, something just… shifts. The behaviour starts to make more sense, and that pressure to manage or fix it softens.

From there, the work feels less about control and more about relationship.

That’s really the space this training is opening up.

If this feels like something you’d like to explore, you’re very welcome to reach out or have a look at the link in comments. It’s a small group, so I keep the numbers low.

Reflective practice, for me, is probably the most important part of how I work.Training matters, but training alone does...
04/05/2026

Reflective practice, for me, is probably the most important part of how I work.

Training matters, but training alone doesn’t prepare you for working with real people in the real world.

And that becomes even more true when working with Neurodivergent children and young people, where so much of our training simply hasn’t been built with their experience in mind.

A lot of my learning has come through my own activation.
Those moments where something lands that’s uncomfortable or challenges how I’ve been thinking, and I can feel a reaction straight away.

That’s usually where I’ve had to start.

Not by acting on it or pushing it away, but by staying with it long enough to understand what it might be telling me.

Because if we’re willing to stay with those moments, they often point us toward our own assumptions, blind spots, and learning edges.
And more often than not, that’s come from realising I might not have got something right in the first place.

And when we don’t do that, we risk responding from those assumptions rather than from the needs of the person in front of us.

That’s not easy work.
It can feel uncomfortable.
A lot of the time it feels like s**t.

But reflective practice asks us to stay with that discomfort without immediately defending ourselves, explaining it away, or needing to be right.

It also asks us to notice when we’re starting to centre ourselves.
Because when everything becomes personal, we risk centring our own discomfort over the experience of the person in front of us.

That doesn’t mean we don’t have reactions.
It means we take responsibility for them.

For me, reflective practice isn’t about getting it right.
It’s about being willing to listen… especially when what we hear challenges how we’ve been taught to understand things.

I often come back to the quote, “when we know better, we do better.”

But we don’t come to know better unless we’re actually willing to stay with those uncomfortable moments long enough to really listen.

❤️

I get asked this a lot.And I always feel a pause before I answer, because it’s not a straightforward no, and it’s not co...
26/04/2026

I get asked this a lot.

And I always feel a pause before I answer, because it’s not a straightforward no, and it’s not coming from a place of dismissal either.

Most of the time, the request comes from care.
From people wanting to do something helpful, to create understanding, to make things easier for children who are finding school hard in ways that aren’t always seen.

But the more I’ve sat with it, the more I’ve found myself coming back to the same place.

These conversations don’t arrive into empty rooms.
They land into environments that already hold ways of seeing, ways of responding, and ways of relating that shape what happens next. And children are already navigating that long before any “awareness” session takes place.

So when something like autism is brought into the room to be explained, it doesn’t exist separately from that context.

It becomes part of it.

And that can matter more than we think.

Because sometimes what gets created in those moments isn’t the understanding we hope for, but a quiet shift in how certain children are seen, spoken about, or made more visible in ways that don’t necessarily feel safe.

And at times, it can even echo what is already happening.

The child who has been singled out, noticed, or teased in subtle or not-so-subtle ways… can suddenly find that same difference being named out loud in front of everyone.

And rather than softening things, it can feel like confirmation.

Not always.

But often enough that it’s something I can’t ignore.
For me, it keeps bringing things back to something bigger.

Not just what is said in a single session, but what is lived day to day.

How difference is held, how belonging is felt and what is noticed, what is responded to, and what is left unspoken.

Because that’s where safety actually grows from.

And without that in place, awareness on its own can only ever go so far.

I find “social anxiety” gets used as a kind of catch-all, especially in school and clinical spaces.And sometimes that fi...
22/04/2026

I find “social anxiety” gets used as a kind of catch-all, especially in school and clinical spaces.

And sometimes that fits.

But there are also experiences that get placed under that label that don’t quite sit there.

When you slow it down and really look, some of what’s being described isn’t rooted in fear in the way we might expect. It’s about attention, about processing, about how much is being asked of a nervous system in real time, and whether that actually matches how that young person makes sense of the world.

There’s also history in it. Past experiences of miscommunication, of getting it wrong, of not quite fitting, of being corrected or excluded. That doesn’t disappear when a child walks into a new space.

So what gets called “social anxiety” can sometimes be something much more layered.

And when that isn’t recognised, the support offered can miss what’s actually needed.

These focus groups are small online gatherings for therapists who want space for thoughtful professional conversation.Ea...
16/04/2026

These focus groups are small online gatherings for therapists who want space for thoughtful professional conversation.

Each group is limited to five participants, so there is time to reflect on real clinical questions, explore different perspectives, and think together about the complexities of working with neurodivergent young people.

The sessions are reflective discussions, shaped by what participants bring on the day.

You’re welcome to bring questions, dilemmas, or themes from your work, but there’s no pressure to prepare anything in advance.

My role is to guide the conversation, share reflections from my own clinical practice, and support the group in staying with the nuance that often gets lost in more structured learning spaces.

Link in comments for more information or to book a place.

Address

Enniskean

Website

https://buytickets.at/grinnewarrenplaytherapy/2096639

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