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By Diane Cerven, LPCC In previous posts, we talked about calming our emotions using different coping skills such as: deep breathing, distraction skills, and grounding skills. In the last post, we talked about how taking care of ourselves and how addressing our basic...

By Diane Cerven, LPCC There are many ways that we can take basic care of ourselves, each method can have a big impact on our mental health.  In the last post, I wrote about taking care of our physical health, now let’s talk about sleep. Sleep According to...

  A big thank you to the members of the Lakes Area Vinyard Church in Park Rapids for their donation of 22 boxes filled with Thanksgiving meals for families in need.  The Vinyard Church has been partnering with Lake Country Associates to distribute the boxes of...

I find that many people do not take care of themselves. They worry about others, making sure that they: children, husband, community, church, friends, work, etc., have their needs met. Not leaving time during the day to get their own needs met and not taking time for...

We have been talking about the use of coping skills to better regulate our emotions. When we are not overwhelmed emotionally, we are better able to handle problem solving in the moment or move forward from the difficult situations we find ourselves in. Grounding...

There are times when our thoughts run away with us, taking us to the past or to a possible imagined future. Typically there is a trigger, sometimes something we don’t even recognize. Maybe something that reminds us of what happened back in 2nd grade and then our minds...

We continue learning about coping skills by learning how, when and why to using mental grounding skills. We talked last time about how mental grounding skills are helpful for people with PTSD (read here), but I recommend grounding skills to anyone who feels that their...

This month we continue discussing how to use coping skills to manage our emotions when they become over whelming. Last month we focused on the use of deep breathing and distraction skills like using games, household chores, and other distraction options. I recommend...

The Piano Lake Country Cottage Members would like to thank Dave and Sandy Munson of Walker for their generous donation of a beautiful piano.  Now housed in it's new home in the Cottage living room, the piano will not only bring enjoyment to those practicing, learning...

In the previous three posts, we talked about how our emotions can become too “big”, even overwhelming, especially when we focus on the negative ones.  To help ourselves we can use distraction as a coping skill.  Distraction is something we are all familiar with in...