Tiffany Yaker M.S.
Address: 1200 N Federal Hwy Suite 200, Boca Raton, FL 33432
Phone: 561-270-6370
Email: www.therapyattiffanys.com
About Tiffany:
Tiffany’s practice focuses primarily on children and young adolescents and their families. She helps with healing after divorce, academic difficulties, school related challenges, building resiliency & self-confidence, managing difficult behaviors, responding to peer pressures, and rebuilding families that have been broken. Her approach is eclectic. She see each client as a puzzle. Sometimes the pieces fit together perfectly and other times it is necessary to put our heads together to find the right piece to complete the puzzle. In so doing, she uses a variety of techniques and strategies – play therapy, cognitive-behavioral therapy, expressive therapy, family therapy, eye movement desensitization and reprocessing and the list goes on. She believes that adolescence is part of a larger system, including parents, siblings, schools, etc., and therefore, she strives to work with and include all aspects of the family in treatment.
Her practice is open to all age groups. Many adults seek her support after recognizing that their needs are just as significant as their families. She has been trained in Eye Movement Desensitization & Reprocessing to work with individuals who have been faced with trauma.
EMDR is often helpful for clients who have dysfunctional memories storied from their past. The relief that is experienced from the process of “digesting” the negative thoughts and replacing with the positive reality is very empowering.
She has worked for many years in schools, with 17 years as a School Counselor in Montgomery County Public Schools in Maryland, with a special education undergraduate degree from University of Arizona and a master’s degree in School & Clinical Counseling from Johns Hopkins University. With close to two decades of experience in public schools, she fully understand special education services as they apply to 504 & IEP accommodations and services. She has worked in Pre-K through 12th grade classrooms and has supported teachers, administrators, parents and students with social-emotional, behavioral and academic needs.
When she moved to Florida in 2016, she dedicated three years to familiarize herself with Applied Behavioral Analysis and Behavioral Therapy, while working directly with children, tweens, teens and young adults with Autism.
Tiffany has a passion for helping families to learn many effective ways to cope with various levels of learning needs, along with the typical stages of child development. Together, Tiffany works as a team with families to improve communication, social skills, conflict resolution and positive reinforcement. She works to enhance trust in relationships and to offer a safe space to share openly in response to family turmoil.
Tiffany Yaker is trained in the most current & relevant modalities of treatment and techniques for helping children & adults overcome their fears and challenges. She has provided clinical interventions on both the individual and group level focused on family turmoil, grief and loss, divorce, oppositional behavior, anxiety, Autism Spectrum support, ADHD support, and anger management.
Tiffany also offers academic tutoring services, “multisensory learning”, using Orton-Gillingham inspired strategies to enhance educational achievement and specifically reading fluency. She has been running groups for elementary and middle school aged students, over the summer, to provide social skills & expressive therapy. She is proud to provide ongoing support groups for women interested in healing past wounds so they can be free to create healthy relationships in work, love, and play through woman’s expressive therapy groups. As a professional artist, Tiffany brings her creative and artistic skills into all groups to ensure that her clients have access to various modes of expression both in groups and in individual therapy.
Tiffany’s experience as a therapist has included work with intact, divorced or separated families, blended families, multi-racial families, adoptive and foster families. She has worked with children raised by grandparents, same sex couples and children of single parents. Families have been trusting and counting on her services for two decades to strengthen their family units and to bring harmony into their homes. She welcomes new families, individuals and group members and offers an over the phone consult, prior to planning our first session, to ensure the fit is right without paying a session fee.
Last, but not at all least, is her emotional support dog named Stella. She is a brilliant young hypoallergenic Labradoodle. Stella has been trained to provide comfort, nurturing and Tiffany shares that her puppy has a very soft coat to rub. Having a therapeutic support dog available to join in on sessions is a real comfort for families who know the love and unconditional support a dog has to offer.