Our 18 week old Golden Retriever puppy has handled some aspects of training really well. She is good with lots of commands, and is friendly and outgoing on walks, and in the last few weeks has had a really solid sleep routine. She is (mostly) crate trained, will nap in there voluntarily and has generally been going to bed in crate without protest. We had a lot of issues with biting/over-tiredness initially but this is also slowly improving (although can still randomly bite quite aggressively if she wants to play).
However, we are really struggling with separation anxiety and sleeping through the night. She wakes up no later than 5:30am everyday regardless of bedtime and will not settle again in the crate. She also cannot really tolerate us leaving the room for more than a minute at a time if she is awake, even if she is clearly very sleepy she will wake up and become quite agitated, and will sometimes pee on the floor. She also struggles when one of us (my partner or I) leaves the house, even if the other person is with her.
We have tried all the classic training techniques (short bursts, rewarding calm, giving her kongs/lick mats when we leave the room) but outside of training sessions she will non-stop bark when we are out of the room. We have tried pushing back the wake up time by keeping the environment completely dark/quiet until we want her to wake up.
To top it off, last night she barked pretty much for 2hrs straight (minus taking her outside to check if she needed the toilet 3x) at bed-time (worse than initial crate training) for no apparent reason.
We are becoming quite overwhelmed (and over-tired) as from what we see online, people generally have puppies that can sleep through the night (and later than 5:30am) and who can be left by themselves for more than 1min. We are really struggling with the lack of progress and have reached out to some professionals as well, but would love advice if anyone experienced anything similar?
submitted by /u/mtmegerest
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