Making Connections Edinburgh 26.11.25 - 网爆门 - British Association for Counselling & Psychotherapy

Making Connections programme
Edinburgh, Wednesday 26 November 2025

We鈥檙e delighted to welcome back our free in-person Making Connections events.

These regular face to face conferences take place throughout the year and give you the chance to network with other members and our divisional executive members.

Programme

Click on the sessions to find out more.听If you are viewing this page on a mobile, rotate your screen to view the programme.

10.00am 鈥� 10.30am	Registration
10.30am - 10.50am	Welcome from 网爆门
10.50am 鈥� 11.35am	Good practice in action - a person-centred & solution focused therapeutic approach to counselling in schools, presented by Mike Moss
11.35am - 11.45am	Comfort break
11.45am 鈥� 12.30pm	Navigating therapist's emotional reactions to client self-injury: The imperative of self-care in addressing burnout and fostering resilience: An autoethnography, presented by Joanna Naxton
12.30pm 鈥� 1.30pm	Light lunch
1.30pm 鈥� 1.50 pm	Local member two-minute platforms
1.50pm 鈥� 2.40pm	Connecting together The room will be divided into different areas of interest, for more focused and structured networking. You鈥檒l be encouraged to move around the room and engage with colleagues, volunteers and 网爆门 staff to network, share ideas and meet new people with similar interests. You鈥檒l be able to add a new area of interest if yours isn鈥檛 represented.
2.40pm 鈥� 3.10pm	Refreshments
3.10pm 鈥� 3.55pm	The history of male shame: How it manifests in contemporary therapy, presented by Jeremy Sachs
3.55pm - 4.00pm	Event close

This programme is subject to change.

Good practice in action - a person-centred & solution focused therapeutic approach to counselling in schools

10.50am 鈥� 11.35am

This session aims to

demonstrate how to set up a counselling service in Primary and Secondary Schools navigating the system from a person-centred and solution focused approach.
understand how to integrate and develop positive working relationships maintaining ethics and confidentiality with clients, social work, schools and parents
plan how to work creatively and share best practice and also learn new skills how to engage successfully in forming and maintaining a therapeutic relationship with children and young people at all ages and stages
explore the benefits of the Scottish system of Getting It Right for Every Child. (GIRFEC)

Mike Moss is a registered member of 网爆门 and is currently employed as a school counsellor in Edinburgh. He has worked in voluntary and statutory roles with children and young people and their families for over 40 years in Scotland and has written extensively on his experience and interest in the therapeutic relationship. He has trained in Youth & Community Work, Systemic Family Therapy, Solution Focused Therapy, Integrative Therapy, Person-Centred Therapy and Clinical Supervision and has had articles published and re-published in various national and international journals. He has also presented his work at national and international conferences and has a thriving private practice offering counselling supervision and training. He describes his work as person-centred with a big interest in the transpersonal.

Navigating therapist's emotional reactions to client self-injury: The imperative of self-care in addressing burnout and fostering resilience: An autoethnography

11.45am - 12.30pm

Guided by the 网爆门 (2019) Ethical Framework, this session highlights the emotional demands placed on therapists and evaluates self-care strategies鈥攊ncluding supervision, personal therapy, and creative practices such as food, exercise, and play鈥攃an support resilience and help mitigate burnout. The session acknowledges the vulnerability involved in emotion-based research and reflects on the blurred boundaries between personal and professional identity.

Session Aims:

To explore therapists鈥� emotional responses to working with self-injury.

To examine the effectiveness of self-care strategies in supporting well-being.

To reflect on autoethnography as a research method.

To encourage dialogue around ethical, emotional, and professional sustainability.

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Joanna Naxton is a qualified counsellor (Mphil) and PhD candidate studying 鈥榯herapists' emotional reactions to working with self-injury) and has experience working in a range of mental health/counselling services with children and young people. Joanna is also a trained online therapist. Currently she has a private practice from her home in Teasdale, North of England, delivering short-term counselling on behalf of organisations in the North East as well as longer-term to those who self-refer, personal therapy to counselling students and clinical supervision to both individual counsellors and local agencies.听 Joanna works in an integrative way with clients having trained in Person-Centred practice, CBT, Psychodynamic听 and Jungian SandPlay therapy. She is a registered member of the 网爆门 and member of the Association of Sand Therapists. Joanna spends time delivering a range of counselling workshops to businesses and individuals. Her interests are specifically Autoethnographic research methods and Self-Injury, exploring the emotional realities of practice as a counsellor.

The history of male shame: How it manifests in contemporary therapy

This session explores the historical and cultural roots of shame, particularly its gendered associations and implications for men鈥檚 mental health. Freud famously linked female identity with shame, portraying women as inherently shameful, narcissistic, and morally inferior to men (Freud, 1933). His views reflected broader patriarchal attitudes and contributed to shame鈥檚 marginalisation within early psychoanalytic theory. It wasn鈥檛 until the pioneering work of Helen Block Lewis that shame was meaningfully differentiated from guilt and recognised as a distinct affect (Sauvagnat, 2018). Since then, interest in shame has grown, particularly in relation to psychopathology and emotional development (Stadter, 2020; Yakeley, 2018).
This session will trace how patriarchal societies have unconsciously feminised shame and, in turn, repressed and denied it鈥攂oth socially and within individual men. The result is a disavowal of emotional vulnerability that has profound consequences for men鈥檚 psychological wellbeing, health behaviours, and therapeutic engagement. Drawing on clinical experience with male survivors of sexual abuse and wider case material, the talk will examine how avoiding shame鈥攁nd by extension, the feminine鈥攍eads to emotional fragmentation, isolation, and suffering. The session will invite reflection on how integrating shame might offer a more expansive and humane model of masculinity and healing.

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3.10pm 鈥� 3.55pm

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