Meet the Team
We believe that true support requires more than just clinical knowledge. We treat lived experience as expertise. It is a cornerstone of our approach—it balances and enriches professional credentials, and it is what helps men feel understood.
Every member of our team brings a combination of formal training and a profound personal journey. We are here to walk alongside you, not to fix you.
Take your time to read through our profiles. If you are seeking one-on-one mentoring or want to find the right space to connect, we encourage you to send us a message. We will have a conversation to understand where you are at and help you decide who and what will be the best fit for your journey.
Kosta Michalopoulos
Founder
Registered Nurse | Root Cause Therapist | Health Promotion Practitioner
With over two decades of experience in healthcare across both Greece and Australia, I have dedicated my career to supporting individuals through complex physical, emotional, and psychosocial challenges. My journey began with a Diploma in Nursing and service in the medical corps in Greece, which provided a foundational understanding of care and discipline. After moving to Australia in 2001, I built a career as a Registered Nurse and care coordinator, working extensively in community health. For more than 13 years, I had the honor of working with some of our community's most vulnerable people, which profoundly shaped my understanding of holistic, trauma-informed care.
My professional path is deeply connected with my own lived experience. I am not just a practitioner; I am a man who has navigated the depths of grief, divorce, and my own struggles with addiction to alcohol, cigarettes, and online gaming. I know what it's like to feel disconnected and to search for a way back to yourself. I have also had my own sense of safety profoundly challenged, and that experience has created in me an unbreakable commitment to creating spaces where every man is and feels safe. This journey, with all its hardships, has been my greatest teacher, fostering a resilience and self-awareness that clinical training alone cannot provide.
It is this combination of professional expertise and personal history that is the foundation of The Men Spirit. I am currently completing a Graduate Diploma of Health Promotion to further ground this work in evidence-based practice, with a focus on how safe, relational spaces can build resilience and a sense of belonging for men.
My mission is to create spaces where men can be their full selves, without judgment. It's about moving beyond the restrictive scripts of masculinity and building the skills for genuine connection — to ourselves and to each other. This work is my purpose. It is my way of giving back, ensuring other men have the support I once needed.
Shane Brabazon
Facilitation and Community Lead
Clinical Hypnotherapist
Shane Brabazon is a counsellor with more than 30 years’ experience working with individuals and families through community services and private practice. His work is grounded not only in professional training but in his own ongoing journey of personal growth and self-understanding.
Shane holds a Graduate Certificate in Counselling and a Diploma in Clinical Hypnotherapy and Counselling, and has undertaken further training in Critical Incident Trauma Debriefing, Internal Family Systems, and Conflict Resolution and Family Mediation.
Like many men, Shane has faced his own mental health struggles over the years. Rather than turning away from those challenges, he has used them as a path toward deeper self-reflection and healing. This has led him into continued personal development work, including exploring the often unseen parts of ourselves — the underlying beliefs, wounds, and shadow aspects that shape how we live, relate, and show up in the world.
Shane creates spaces where men can speak honestly, support one another, and reconnect with a deeper sense of meaning, responsibility, and inner strength. He believes that when men are given the opportunity to be real about their struggles and their growth, something powerful happens — not just for the individual, but for families and communities as well.
His belief is that every man carries both wounds and wisdom, and that real strength comes from the courage to face both.
Adam Weaver
Clinical Associate
Group Facilitator & Workshop Specialist
Principal, Connected Spirit Counselling
Post Graduate Diploma in Counselling |ACA Member
Adam Weaver brings almost four decades of study in eastern philosophy, meditation, and the human condition to his work at The Men Spirit. As Principal of Connected Spirit Counselling and a member of the Australian Counselling Association, Adam contributes to our group facilitation and specialist workshops, offering a holistic and intuitive approach that draws on positive, solution-focused, and transpersonal models of practice incorporating an individual's spiritual, agnostic or atheist beliefs.
Adam collaborates with clients to untangle from trauma with curiosity and compassion to gain understanding and increased awareness. In doing so, client's make greater peace with past traumas that so often manifest intrusively as anxiety, trauma and depression in the present moment. Sessions include the teaching of self care techniques to support ongoing emotional, mental and physical wellbeing.
To be human is to have suffered, there is no escaping it. And yet it is through suffering that we learn so much, including the power of love and connection as an antidote to pain. Therein lies the foundation of Adam’s success as a counsellor. Having experienced PTSD as a child and ongoing anxiety into adulthood, his keys to healing have been learned and experienced first hand through ongoing study and life experience.
Adam contributes to The Men Spirit through group facilitation and workshops. For individual clinical counselling sessions, contact Adam directly through Connected Spirit Counselling.
Arnie Kirkwood
Group Facilitator & Mentor
Arnie Kirkwood began his journey in men’s work in 2024, following the end of his marriage and a move from Sydney to Melbourne to start a new life. At that time, he realised he did not truly know who he was beyond the roles he had been playing.
Since then, he has immersed himself in men’s work and community, becoming a consistent presence in circles and gatherings. Through both participation and facilitation, he helps hold spaces grounded in honesty, accountability and genuine connection.
Arnie brings a calm, regulated presence that helps men face difficult truths with clarity and compassion. He is committed to spaces where strength and vulnerability sit side by side, and where men are challenged to move beyond performance into responsibility and growth.
For him, this work is collective. It is about men standing alongside one another, offering both support and honest challenge.
His journey is guided by two archetypes he holds lightly, the Embracing Dragon and the Uncaged Phoenix. They reflect a commitment to growth, integrity and grounded masculine presence, creating safety and direction for himself and those around him.