Kira Brooks

Kira Brooks

Marriage and Family Therapist Trainee

Watsonvile Office

Before entering the counseling profession, I taught environmental education for over two decades, leading children and teenagers on hikes while sharing my love of ecology and helping them foster a deeper connection to nature and themselves. This experience is infused in my therapeutic practice by way of mindfulness, somatics, playfulness, and a deep reverence for the natural world. 

Along the way, I dove into personal development and became certified as a Master Practitioner of Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP), yoga teacher, and Law of Attraction Life Coach. I also earned certifications in Emotional Freedom Technique and hypnosis. As a life coach, I helped my clients clarify their goals, uncover their unconscious limiting beliefs that were blocking their success, and then program in new, empowering beliefs. 

I am now working on my Master’s degree in Clinical Mental Health Counseling at Palo Alto University. In my therapy sessions, I combine my coaching tools as well as aspects of solution-focused, Existential, Adlerian, Constructivist, IFS, Psychodynamic, and Choice approaches. I also enjoy facilitating mindfulness-based solo hikes for clients and therapy sessions outside. 

Through empathetic and active listening, I help my clients become aware of their often unconscious self-talk (making the unconscious conscious, as Freud said), develop a more positive and effective mindset, reprogram harmful self-stories, and become more cognizant of the language they choose to use. 

I believe that we all have strengths and parts of ourselves that protect us. Often, protective strategies were created in our childhoods, when we lacked many resources and life experience. Those strategies, which were once effective, often become maladaptive in adulthood. I help my clients to recognize their strengths and understand why they behave and react as they do so that they can deepen their understanding and compassion for themselves and from that place, intentionally forge a new path ahead. 

Being our authentic selves and being lovable are often felt as being mutually exclusive. Through therapy, an achievable goal is to be both simultaneously.

 

 

Request an Appointment

To Request an Appointment at Shine a Light or NPCC, please fill out this form. We respond to inquiries Monday through Friday. All inquiries we receive on the weekends or holidays will be processed the next business day. Thank you for your patience. If you need immediate services, please call 911.

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This form is for agency information. If you want information about counseling for yourself or your family, use the other form. Thank you.

New Office in San Francisco!

Shine a Light Counseling Center is please to merge with New Perspectives Center for Counseling. NPCC has been serving the San Francisco community for thirty years. Now NPCC is transitioning to become the San Francisco site for Shine a Light. NPCC will retain its name, character and history. For information about NPCC or counseling in San Francisco:

 

New Perspectives Center for Counseling (link)

Emergency Contact

Shine a Light does not provide crisis services. If you have a mental health emergency, call 988 or 911. Or  click here  for more Crisis Resources

Telephone Contact

You can call Shine a Light at 831-996-1222, but we encourage you to use the email forms to the left. If you call, please leave the following:

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FAX us at: 831-417-0443

Good Faith Estimate

You have the right to receive a “Good Faith Estimate” explaining how much your therapy sessions will cost. Your fee will be set according to a sliding scale, in collaboration with your therapist, prior to your first counseling session. Total costs depend upon the number of sessions you choose to utilize.

If you have private health insurance and we are not in-network with your plan, please be aware that your costs for therapy may be less by using an in-network provider. This will depend upon your plan's deductible amounts and co-payments. In some cases, counseling at Shine a Light is less costly than using private insurance.

If you hope to use "out of network" benefits through your private insurance, please be aware that many plans will not reimburse for services provided by trainees. Please request an Associate level therapists for out-of-network billing.

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Shine a Light Counseling Center

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