TaKenya Clark-Jefferies has spent sixteen years sitting with people in their hardest seasons. Her message for the women who hold everyone else together is simple, and it is not selfish: you are on the list too.
Self-care is not selfish. Everybody else is already taking care of themselves. The people who struggle with it are the givers and the people pleasers, and they need it most.
The line between mental wellness and mental illness is thin. Chronic stress, chronic people pleasing and pouring from an empty cup are how anxiety, depression and substance use get a foothold.
Terra Vista Counseling treats mental health with the same seriousness as physical health: individuals, couples, families and groups, in Grand Terrace or by secure video anywhere in California, with most major insurance accepted.
Her book, The Next Chapter: Journey to Healing Through Grief, Loss and Disappointment, is a faith-based, clinically grounded guide to drawing a new life map. A second book is on the way.
There is a woman reading this right now who has not said no to anyone in a month. She said yes to the extra shift, yes to hosting, yes to the friend who needed a ride, yes to the aunt who needed a call, yes to the kid, yes to the church, yes to the group chat. She is proud of that, and she should be. She is also running on empty, and somewhere under the pride there is a question she has not let herself ask out loud: who is taking care of me?
TaKenya Clark-Jefferies has an answer, and she has been giving it, one session at a time, for sixteen years.
"The best thing that we can probably all do for our mental health and mental wellness is to prioritize self-care," she says. "A lot of people think it is selfish to take the time to take care of you. But the reality is that everybody else is taking care of themselves."
TaKenya Clark-Jefferies, LCSW, DBH, founder of Terra Vista Counseling in Grand Terrace. Photo: Terra Vista Counseling.
WHOLE WELLNESS STARTS WITH THE PART WE SKIP
We have gotten good at the visible parts of wellness. We know our step counts. We know what is in the smoothie. We book the physical, the mammogram, the dentist. And then the one part of us that runs all the others, the mind, gets whatever is left over, which is usually nothing.
"Mental health deserves the same care as physical health." That line sits at the front of Terra Vista's own description of itself, and it is the whole argument in nine words. Whole wellness is not a spa day plus a gym membership. It is the body, the mind, the spirit and the relationships, tended on purpose, by you, before the crisis and not only after it.
Terra Vista Counseling is built around that idea. The practice's tagline is "The road to healing begins here," and the road is wide on purpose: anxiety and stress, depression and mood, grief and loss, trauma and healing, chronic illness, relationships and family, life transitions, parenting, codependency, self-esteem, spirituality, career stress. Read that list again slowly. Most of us are carrying three of those at once and calling it a normal week.
THE GIVERS ARE THE ONES WHO RUN DRY
Here is the part of her message that lands hardest, because it names the exact women who will never name themselves.
"The people that have trouble with taking care of themselves are usually the people that are givers and people pleasers," TaKenya says. "Those are the people that find it hard to say no to other people. But if you are saying yes to everybody, and everybody else is saying yes to themselves, who is looking out for you? You are responsible for taking care of yourself."
“We have to love us more than we fear disappointing someone else.”
Sit with that sentence. Not the version of it you would put on a mug, the real one. Every yes you give away when you do not have it to give is a small vote that someone else's comfort outranks your health. Cast enough of those votes and the tally comes due.
"The opposite of mental wellness is mental illness," she says. "The line is thin. Chronic stress, chronic people pleasing, overextending yourself, pouring from an empty cup, burnout. All of that can put us in position to experience depression, anxiety, substance use disorder."
That is the clinical truth under the kitchen-table wisdom. Burnout is not a personality trait. It is a doorway, and what is on the other side of it has names.
THE OXYGEN MASK, EXPLAINED PROPERLY
You have heard the airplane speech. TaKenya wants you to hear it the way she means it.
"That takes us to that old saying that you gotta put the oxygen mask on you first. This does not mean that you neglect other people, or mistreat other people. But you have to ask yourself: do you have the capacity to do the things that they are asking you? Does saying yes to them mean that I am saying no to me? Am I sacrificing what makes me happy to make you happy?"
Then the line that turns the whole thing around: "Taking care of yourself is taking care of everybody else that we care about."
So before the next yes, three questions, in her words and in this order.
1Do I have the capacity for this right now?
2Does saying yes to them mean saying no to me?
3Am I trading what makes me happy for what makes them happy?
If the honest answer to the second or third is yes, that is not a reason to feel guilty. That is information. That is the moment the mask goes on.
FALL BACK IN LOVE WITH SOMETHING
The prescription is not complicated, which is why so many of us skip it.
"I think it is important to revisit the things that make us happy," she says. "Things that maybe we stopped doing when life gets busy, when life gets overwhelming. Maybe something we used to love to do that we stopped doing. Fall back in love with it."
There was a thing. There is always a thing. The choir you left when the second child came. The morning walk that turned into a morning commute. The sketchbook, the garden, the Saturday you used to keep for yourself. You did not lose the love. You lost the slot on the calendar. Put it back.
A woman finally sitting down. Illustration for Knect, generated with Higgsfield AI.
WHY TAKENYA IS THE ONE TO SIT WITH
Credentials first, because they matter and because she has earned them. TaKenya Clark-Jefferies is a Licensed Clinical Social Worker, license number 62241, with a Master of Social Work and a Doctor of Behavioral Health. She has been in practice for more than sixteen years. She works from a toolkit that is well studied and well proven: cognitive behavioral therapy, motivational interviewing, solution-focused therapy and a strength-based approach that starts from what is already working in you.
But the credentials are not why people stay. This is: "No two people are ever the same. Every session is shaped around you, your history, your goals, and what brought you here." And this: "You don't have to carry it all alone. Here, your story is met with warmth, dignity, and zero judgment."
That combination, a clinician's training and a pastor's patience, is rarer than it should be. It is also exactly what a woman who has been strong for everyone else needs when she finally sits down: someone who will not flinch, will not rush, and will not let her talk herself out of her own pain.
Terra Vista sees preteens, teens, adults and elders, as individuals, couples, families and groups. Sessions are in person at 12139 Mount Vernon Avenue, Suite 104, in Grand Terrace, or by secure video anywhere in California. Individual therapy is 150 dollars for fifty minutes, couples and family work is 175, the grief support group is 30, and a sliding scale is available on request. Aetna, Cigna and Evernorth, UnitedHealthcare, Optum, Magellan, Inland Empire Health Plan, Lyra and Spring Health EAPs are accepted, with out-of-network options and Kaiser out-of-network as well. Most messages get an answer within one business day.
The Next Chapter: Journey to Healing Through Grief, Loss and Disappointment, by TaKenya Clark-Jefferies, LCSW. Rated 4.9 stars by readers on Amazon. Image: Terra Vista Counseling.
THE BOOK, AND THE ONE AFTER IT
Some seasons do not need a plan. They need a map. That is what TaKenya wrote for the people she could not fit into her calendar: The Next Chapter: Journey to Healing Through Grief, Loss and Disappointment, a faith-based, clinically grounded guide to looking within and drawing a new life map.
It is written for anyone facing a loss that changed the shape of their life, a death, a divorce, a diagnosis, a door that closed, and it does the thing good therapy does: it does not tell you how to feel, it walks with you while you feel it and then asks what you want the next page to say. Readers have given it 4.9 stars, and the reviews read like thank-you notes.
And she is not finished. A second book is in the works. If The Next Chapter is the map out of grief, the next one is shaping up to be the practice of staying well once you are out. Watch this space.
“Taking care of yourself is taking care of everybody else that we care about.”
YOUR INTERNAL YES
You do not need a crisis to call a therapist, the same way you do not need a heart attack to see a cardiologist. You need a reason, and if you have read this far, you already have one. Maybe it is a grief you have been carrying quietly since spring. Maybe it is the yes you keep giving that you know you should stop. Maybe it is simply that nobody has asked you how you are in a very long time, and you would like to find out.
Here is the internal CTA, the one only you can click. Ask yourself the question TaKenya asks her clients: what did I used to love that I stopped doing? Then ask the harder one: what would it take for me to say no to one person this week so I can say yes to that?
If the answer is a conversation with someone trained to hear it, Terra Vista is at https://www.terravistacounseling.com/, at (909) 452-5857, and at Info@terravistacounseling.com. The book is at https://a.co/d/03zSGhB2. The road to healing begins here. It begins, specifically, with you deciding you belong on your own list.
Terra Vista Counseling. The road to healing begins here. Mark: Terra Vista Counseling.
