I agree with Whitney and Mercy Junebug.
I think you explained how you feel pretty well actually. I am assuming some of it is just what it is and some is the loss of the pups. ?
Do I just view it as ptsd
This is the way I see it. Please feel free to disregard if it doesn't work for you. I like to break things down as I find it feels much more doable to approach things that way. PTSD usually comes along with a lot of stuff and a lot of that stuff can come along without PTSD too. So for me I like to think of PTSD as the essential symptoms. The flashbacks and intrusions, the hypervigilence, the avoidance.
Other stuff such as lack of boundaries, lack of being able to give importance to our feelings, interpersonal/relationship problems, depression, depressive thinking, toxic shame, low self esteem, passive or aggressive qualities can all happen separate to PTSD and from such things as neglect, dysfunctional families, abuse and more. Growing up in environments like that can cause personality tendencies that can cause us a lot of distress and stop us from being able to protect ourselves emotionally or even physically. All of these things we can change.
The PTSD specific symptoms can improve by processing the trauma itself in a safe place with the right person to help us. Preferably when we are stable enough to deal with processing them safely.
When it comes to what to do with your big emotions about the puppies then I think it can be helpful to just let yourself grieve the loss. Be careful though as if you instead go into using it as a way to torment and beat yourself and tell yourself that the whole world is bad then that isn't ever going to be helpful. It tends to just layer distress on top of distress and shame.
Its extremely hard to break but like the others said you can catch yourself and tell yourself positive messages instead. That is what Affirmations are about. There is a lot of information that you can get that helps teach us how to deal with big emotions healthily. You could buy a book and work through excercise and even get help from others on here.
With your depression symptoms: have you tried SSRI's? It might help to be on meds to start so that you feel less helpless and have more energy to work on change. There are lots of workbooks and exercises you can do to help depression too. And yes, exercise and food and water are all important for depression.
When it comes to protecting oneself and being able to take ones own feelings into consideration there is an enormous amount of help one can access. The easiest way is to get books for co-dependency because that is what it essentially boils down to for those of us who are this way inclined. You can look at Stockholm syndrome too.
You could start a thread and discuss things as you go along and get input from others who have done therapy and done these things. These things take a lot of hard work to improve and they don't go away by themselves sadly. Treating the trauma alone doesnt tend to solve them either.
The important part is to start actively looking at these things and working on them. Most of the people over here are doing that in therapy or have done it in therapy and continue to attempt to work on it in their heads but you can do a lot with books and on here.
:inlove:
