WICHITA FALLS, Texas (KAUZ) - Sometimes it can be tough to go through this life alone, but a community resource is working to ensure residents don’t have to.

Common Ground Recovery Ministries at First Christian Church make it their mission is to provide community outreach support for people who may not be able to access help anywhere else.

Counseling expert and director of Common Ground Recovery Ministries Elizabeth Ivey understands that people go through things that may make them feel alone, but they want the community to know people are here in Wichita Falls to help.

“When I joined the project in 2017, I was told that the program had already been kind of in existence for about 10 years before that. It’s always just been kind of this idea of community, teaching community and that we all are going through different struggles in life and that it’s just nice to know that there are other people out there who can help,” Ivey said.

Anger, trauma recovery and unhealthy parenting are topics Common Ground Recovery Ministries is working to address through their outreach sessions.

While these topics can be difficult to tackle, just generating understanding in the community about the need to help with these issues can be another problem that fuels that flame.

“Anger management comes from a perspective of kind of using empirically supported skills and a support group model. Our parenting skills class comes from a perspective of there are a lot of skills out there to teach you how to raise a kid, but not necessarily how to help grow emotional maturity and things like that and our trauma recovery class is actually new this year. We’re really excited, but it’s talking about trauma in all of its forms, whether it’s something small, big, lifelong, unexpected,” Ivey said.

Ivey started back in 2017 and said the biggest problem she sees is less about whether these kinds of services help or not; it’s the fact that very few people knew resources were available right here in the community.

Overcoming fear of judgement is an important step, and Ivey said the results have been changing lives.

“One was a participant who had come to our classes back in 2017 or 18, I don’t quite remember, and she actually enjoyed our parenting class so much that she did it twice. And then from there, we actually trained her to be one of our facilitators,” Ivey said.

While navigating these issues isn’t always easy, Ivey said one of the most rewarding moments in her job is watching the participants grow and use strategies learned during the outreach session.

“I really love it. Again, that growth. If I get to watch two or three people, you know, kind of comes with class and really just get something out of it. It keeps me coming back. And so as long as we have, you know, one person coming every week, we’re going to try to keep offering these classes,” Ivey said.

In addition to these services, they also offer free childcare ages 0-12.

The support group meets on Tuesday from 6:30 p.m. to 7:30 p.m.

For questions, feel free to contact [email protected] or call/text 940-337-1712.