Yahellah Best

Trust, Authenticity & the Freedom to Express Yourself Fully

Yahellah puts trust and authenticity at the center of therapy, and she guides your exploration from there. The goal is for you to feel more empowered over time to take control of your own wellness and healing.

She offers therapy for anxiety, depression, trauma, OCD, and life transitions, and every session is secure teletherapy for clients located in Maryland.

Clinical Focus

Growth is not linear, and Yahellah supports clients through life’s waves, especially the big transitions. In her years in higher education, she worked with students as they left home, started college, became the first in their family to get there, and worked out what came after. She was the first in her own family to go to college, so she knows that path from both sides. She brings that experience to teens (16+), young adults, and adults facing a move, a new school or job, a shift in direction, or a change they didn’t choose.

Anxiety tends to get loudest around change: the weeks before a move or a new job, the first months somewhere new, a relationship ending, a decision you keep putting off. It can look like running through every option at 2 a.m., a stomach that knots up before anything has happened, or snapping at people you love because you have no room left. Yahellah’s first move is to help you see what anxiety is doing and why, in plain language, so the pattern gets easier to catch early and you have something concrete to work with between sessions. Because anxiety lives in the body as much as the mind, she also brings in integrative mind-body practices when they fit. Her work with OCD uses Exposure and Response Prevention (ERP): together you approach the thoughts and situations OCD tells you to avoid in planned steps, hold off on the compulsion each time, and learn that the anxiety passes on its own.

Depression is quieter. Mornings get harder to start, the things that used to matter stop registering, and after a while you begin telling a story about yourself to explain it: that you’re lazy, behind, or just not built like the people around you. Yahellah takes it seriously, and then she looks at it with you. She explains what depression does to energy, sleep, and motivation, so you can stop treating a symptom as a verdict on your character, and that is where her narrative work comes in, with the account of yourself that depression has been writing.

Her work is trauma-informed from the start, which means that if you’re carrying trauma, you set the pace. You decide what gets talked about and when. Trauma can be a single event you can name, or years of something that was never called trauma at the time, and Yahellah builds trust first and lets the processing follow, helping you work through what happened and the emotions still attached to it. She also pays attention to the ways your culture and environment shape what trauma looks like and whether it gets spoken about at all, because they matter to the healing too.

Yahellah also works with grief and loss: grief after a death, and the quieter losses that come with change, like the end of a relationship or leaving a place that was home. And she works with women’s issues, the pressures and expectations that fall on women specifically and the toll they take over time.

Yahellah is especially drawn to working with people of color and LGBTQIA+ clients. Culture has been central to her work for a long time, from her undergraduate study of anthropology and ethnic studies to her years in programs for multicultural, first-generation, and low-income students. Her care is culturally responsive. She works with the whole person, so your culture, your identity, and the environment you live in are part of how the two of you understand what is happening and decide what to work on.

Therapeutic Approach

Yahellah’s approach is eclectic and integrative, and she chooses tools based on who you are and what you’re working through. With Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT), you learn to make room for painful thoughts and feelings and still act on the things you care about most. Narrative therapy fits naturally with how much she values your story. It helps you step back from the version of events that has kept you stuck and notice the strengths and possibilities that version leaves out.

In sessions, the balance shifts with what you need that day: sometimes making sense of things, sometimes simply having room to feel them.

Background, Education & Experience

Yahellah earned her M.S. in Clinical Mental Health Counseling from Johns Hopkins University, an M.Ed. in Education Leadership and Policy from Boston University with a concentration in Higher Education Administration, and a B.A. in Anthropology and Ethnic Studies from Brown University. She is currently pursuing a PhD in Counselor Education and Supervision at Bowie State University, the doctorate that prepares counselors to teach, supervise, and advance the profession.

Across more than ten years in higher education, most recently as Associate Director of the Success Coaching Program in Academic Advising at Johns Hopkins University, what Yahellah valued most was building genuine connections with students through her authentic, affirming, empathetic, and encouraging coaching style. She now uses those same skills to build trusting relationships with clients. Her clinical work has covered a variety of identities, concerns, and diagnoses.

Yahellah is Afro-Panamanian of West Indian descent and a Maryland native. She speaks Spanglish and is working to strengthen her fluency, especially for use in therapy.

She has a background in dance, especially Latin and Afro-diasporic styles. When she isn’t in session, you can find her dancing, enjoying time with her loved ones, or catching a flight. For Yahellah, life is to be lived, and joy can be found when you look with intention.