Regulation, Autonomy & Safety
An eight-week online coaching programme for parents of PDA, ADHD and autistic teenagers.
Parenting a demand-sensitive teenager can feel like living in constant uncertainty. What works one day stops working the next. Ordinary advice often backfires. You’re caught between trying to take the pressure off and trying to hold everything together, and you’re carrying far more than most people around you realise.
If you’ve been told to be firmer, more consistent, more “boundaried”, and it’s been clear for a long time that none of it fits your child, this programme is for you.
What this programme is
Over eight weeks we explore what’s really going on beneath the surface: how demand-sensitivity actually works, what invisible load really means, and why so much standard advice makes things worse.
It isn’t a course that talks at you. Each week you get material to read in your own time, then we meet online in a small group to talk it through and work out what actually helps in your own home. The material is yours to keep, and by the end it builds into a handbook you can come back to whenever you need it.
Across the eight weeks we cover:
- Invisible load, and how the nervous system runs the show
- Regulation when your teenager resists control
- Structure that protects autonomy instead of suffocating it
- Communication, power, and how to repair when it goes wrong
- Meltdown, shutdown, panic and burnout
- Boundaries: which ones genuinely matter, and which can go
- Shame, identity, grief and the toll on the whole family
- Discernment, advocacy with schools, and a way forward
Above all, this is about understanding that your teenager’s behaviour as a specific nervous-system response, learning to parent in a way that respects this, meets them where they are, and helps them build their own resilience, so that home feels calmer and safer for everyone in it.
What this programme is not
This is not group therapy, a diagnostic pathway, or a crisis service. It’s a group coaching programme, grounded in clinical knowledge and lived experience, and it is not about making your teenager comply.
Who it's for
Parents and carers of autistic, ADHD and otherwise neurodivergent teenagers, especially where there’s:
- PDA-style demand sensitivity
- School distress or school refusal
- Overwhelm, shutdown or burnout
- Meltdowns, panic or high-intensity emotional states
- Escalating conflict at home
- A sense that family life has narrowed right down
If you’ve been fobbed off by more than one service, are worn thin, and just want answers that actually fit your child, this is for you.
About me
I’m Marion Pilling, a UK-trained consultant psychotherapist and accredited coach specialising in autism, ADHD and demand-sensitive profiles.
I hold a professional diploma in psychotherapy and counselling, a Postgraduate Diploma in CBT, and an MA in Autism from the Tizard Centre at the University of Kent. I’m a trained autism assessor, a member of the International Coaching Federation, and registered in France as a specialist consultant. I’ve worked in this field for over 25 years, as a psychotherapist, researcher and coach.
I’m also a late-diagnosed AuDHD woman, and the parent of two now-adult autistic children. For the first 13 years I raised them as a single parent in France. There was support, but not the right support: psychiatrists and psychoanalytic therapists whose approach was about changing my children, not understanding them. I had to learn the hard way, and it was very hard.
My assessment and one-to-one therapy and coaching clients come mostly by word of mouth, families passing my name to other families. What I bring to this isn’t theory alone. It’s decades of sitting with families, understanding how their children work, and knowing what actually helps when everything else has failed. I can only see so many people one to one, so I built these coaching programmes to reach more families, and so that other parents don’t have to go through what I went through.
“Working with Marion has been an incredibly positive and transformative experience for me as a parent. Her 8-week parental coaching course gave me not only practical tools but also a deep sense of support and understanding.She helped me make sense of my daughter’s PDA profile and autism, and guided me in recognising what lies behind her difficult days and behaviours. Marion gave me strategies that were compassionate, realistic, and effective — from de-escalation techniques to low-demand approaches that reduced conflict at home.Equally important, Marion reminded me that my own wellbeing matters too. Through her guidance, I’ve learned how to manage stress, prevent burnout, and take care of myself so I can show up as a calmer, more confident parent.Marion went above and beyond: she listened without judgment, tailored everything to my situation, and always offered encouragement at the moments I needed it most.I am deeply grateful for her expertise, warmth, and dedication. I would wholeheartedly recommend Marion to any parent navigating the challenges of raising a neurodivergent child.” TN
The details
- Eight weekly live sessions on Zoom, 90 minutes each
- Thursdays, 19:30–21:00 CEST, from 3 September to 22 October 2026
- A maximum of eight parents
- Weekly module material that builds into a handbook you keep
- An optional peer support group for the eight weeks
- Sessions are live, and recorded so you can catch up on a replay if you miss one
The Cost
€695 for the full eight weeks.
Prefer to spread the cost? Pay in three instalments of €240 instead (€720 in total): the first on sign-up, then on 1 September and 1 October, all cleared before we finish.
The first instalment secures one of only eight places, so it’s non-refundable, though it carries over to a future cohort if something changes and you can’t take part. The rest is refundable up to four weeks before we start.
I also keep one or two supported places each cohort for families who genuinely can’t manage the full fee, so if that’s you, please ask rather than count yourself out.