How to help my puppy blues get better?

I got my boy 3 weeks ago at 11 weeks. He’s now 14 week. He’s a golden retriever. He’s honestly a really good puppy. He’s pretty quiet, has slept through the night since night one, and is picking up commands pretty quickly. Potty training is still a work in progress, he has like 1-2 accidents each day usually when he’s tired or if we miss his cues. He goes in his crate without complaints now and will settle in for about 3 hours if we don’t wake him up.

Despite all this I have severe and borderline crippling anxiety since I got him. I am an anxious person at baseline but never to this extent before. The main issue is I work night shift as a nurse and I get severely anxious when trying to sleep during the day because it starts as worrying about it him and then transitions to just anxiety about not being able to sleep during the day. My husband works part time nights so fortunately we have mostly worked opposite nights. On the couple of nights we had to work together my dad came over and played with our puppy and let him out to potty. Then during the day a friend that lives close by would come over and let him out and play with him for a bit while we are sleeping. I hired a trainer to help in the beginning because he was biting me like crazy and I needed help, it did help, however she wanted to me to touch him and mess with his food when I feed him to prevent resource guarding and I feel like it actually triggered it. He’s starting to show more resource guarding over high value items such as bully sticks, his food bowl, and if he gets a hold of something he knows he shouldn’t eat like paper. I think when the resource guarding appeared it re-triggered my anxiety since he snapped at me twice.

I even went to urgent care and got prescribed some anxiety meds to help for breakthrough anxiety and they aren’t working anymore. I feel like I’m at my limit and I hate it because I love my little guy but I can’t keep not sleeping for work and I can only miss so much work related to anxiety and not sleeping.

My husband brought up that maybe we should return him since I’m struggling so bad. I really don’t want to do that but at the same time everyone says that adolescents is gonna get even harder and I’m barely managing now. Idk what to do.

submitted by /u/latenightabyss
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