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Mental health

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Remembering awful memories

1 reply

heartbrokendogmum · 11/10/2021 00:11

I don’t really know where to post this.

A couple of years ago, my dog was killed by one of my other dogs while I was out. I was only gone a couple of hours, and I was the one who found her. It was awful and traumatic.

Even now two years later, I will sometimes get images of it come into my head, or replay the moment I found her, or other bits of it all. It’s like a video starts playing in my head, I can’t control it or switch it off and I didn’t press play, it just came on out of nowhere. Sometimes I can shake it off or distract myself, others times I struggle to clear it out of my head, it will sometimes make me cry, it will stop me from sleeping, sometimes it will send me down a rabbit hole of upsetting thoughts.

How can I get it to stop? I was prescribed fluoxetine which worked for a few months, until it didn’t. I can’t bear to keep seeing my lovely, beautiful dog like this in my mind anymore.

OP posts:
Sarahlou63 · 11/10/2021 09:52

I'm so sorry - that must have been awful. I also lost a dog in very tragic circumstances so I know exactly where you're coming from, I also had flashbacks to finding his body.

What worked for me (in time, and with effort) was to replace that image with one of him in happier times - not just the snapshot of him but a complete immersion; the sounds, the smells, the feel of his fur, his happiness, the warmth of that day, how happy I felt at the time. If you close your eyes and really concentrate on reliving that day you will find that the traumatic memory fades as the happy one become stronger.

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