Life can be stressful and there are resources to help you deal with those stressful situations. Bonnie Partin, Mental Health Therapist with Family Pride Counseling, recently moved to a new location in Middlesboro to better serve Bell County.

“I was with a local agency, and I got a lot of good experience working there. I learned a lot of things I needed to know about mental health and working with people with substance abuse disorders and things like that,” Partin explained. “I got an opportunity to join a private practice, and I just took a chance and made the jump.”

Partin explained that they are growing and continuing to do well.

“We are located at 311 North 12th Street at the Beacon of Light Chiropractic Office and rent space from Jason and Kimberly Taylor. Our main office is in Barbourville on Cumberland Avenue.”

Getting involved in Celebrate Recovery years ago is what opened the door for her to work in mental health.

“I got involved in helping with Celebrate Recovery and going through the process of doing something to work on myself and developed a heart for working with broken people, and I really felt that God was leading me to go back to school and become a therapist,” she said. “I went back to school to Liberty University and got a bachelor’s degree in Christian Counseling and a master’s degree in Professional Counseling and have been doing this for about five years.”

The types of services offered in her office include mental health therapy, substance abuse therapy and working with any kind of brokenness. Recently, the office added Accelerated Resolution Therapy Services for people who are struggling with trauma. Kristina Davies offers that type of therapy to the community.

“We may see parents who have had children taken out of their home that has a case plan with DCBS (Department of Community Based Service), and they have certain things that they have to work on in order to be reunited with their children,” explained Partin of services offered through her office. “That is one of my favorite things to do is to work with those parents.”

She explained that they have therapist who work with the children and help on that side of the case as well.

“My passion is geared toward working with the parents,” she explained. “Whether that means they have anxiety that translates into poor parenting skills or maybe they’ve had a substance abuse disorder and that’s affected how they’ve parented.”

She said that what is found a lot of the time is people forget about the parents because they just get pushed away when they’ve done a poor job and made mistakes.

“People just push them away and don’t want to give them second chances,” she said. “What you really see when you start peeling the layers back is you see people who don’t know how to parent because they didn’t have parents or they don’t know how to deal with anxiety because they were raised in an anxious household. They use drugs because that’s the kind of family they grew up with. That’s been their environment and sometimes all it takes is one person to say you don’t have to do this. You don’t have to be this same way and do things the same way your parents did. You can break that cycle.”

She reiterated the importance of having that encouragement and support in someone’s life.

“Sometimes all it takes is one person to encourage them and it can change everything when you see that,” Partin said. “That’s the rewarding side of what we do is to see people get that concept.”

She encouraged breaking the stigma that surrounds therapy and seeing a therapist.

“Obviously people think there is something terribly wrong with you if you are seeing a therapist,” she explained. “The stigma is that we can’t have anything wrong with us. Nobody can have anything wrong with us but at the same time, we all have something wrong with us.”

She explained that everybody has something and everybody has some nervousness, anxiety or some depression.

“There are days when they don’t want to get out of bed and that’s very normal, but the fact society doesn’t talk about it makes people think they’re abnormal when they experience that,” she continued to say about the stigma around therapy. “It’s not true. What you find most of the time is we have all these techniques that we can use with people to help with their problems, but at the end of the day, most people just need someone that they know is in their corner.”

She said that a lot of therapy is advocacy for their issues and having someone in their corner, on their side, and that at the end of the day if we had more people doing that, there wouldn’t be any stigma around therapy.

“You see all kinds of research on the importance of dealing with stress properly,” she said. “It can make you sick and cause you to have health issues and if you have health issues it can make them worse. It’s so important to learn how to cope with everyday life.

She explained that she doesn’t know one person who doesn’t have a stressful life.

“If we don’t deal with that the right way stress will kill people,” she explained. “Having a place that you can come or even having someone that you can talk to, it just helps.”

She explained that when we hear ourselves say something it becomes real to us.

“We have these voices in our head that tell us things over and over and over,” she said. “We have those thoughts and we tend to listen to those thoughts but sometimes you can say something and when you say it, you automatically recognize that it’s wrong because you actually heard it. Sometimes that’s all you have to do is just say it and have somebody willing to listen to you say that.”

She explained that you can see people who carry stress and how it affects their relationships.

“Relationships tend to be stressful,” she said. “People who tend to talk about their mental health have healthier relationships with other people. When they’ve learned to deal with their own problems they have more compassion for people that have problems.”

She explained that recognizing our own problems helps relationships a lot.

“It’s almost like a chain effect because once I work on myself and I get myself where I need to be I have better insight and judgment on my issues and then I can recognize when someone is struggling and I can be patient with them and that may change their life and it’s almost like a ripple effect,” she said.

If you or someone you know is struggling with life’s stressful moments, you can find out more about Family Pride Counseling on their Facebook page. Just search Family Pride Counseling and you can find out everything you need about the services they offer. You can also call or text 606-219-4676.

“If you’re someone who has anxiety about making phone calls because believe it or not people don’t want to make phone calls now,” she explained. “You can actually text that number and someone will respond and set you up an appointment. We have our main office in Barbourville and we have our office here in Bell County.”

Family Pride Counseling is operated by Kristina Davies, LPCC-S in Barbourville.