Can You Get PTSD From Losing a Pet? What the Research Says

Traumatic pet loss — from sudden deaths, accidents, or difficult euthanasias — can create symptoms that look and feel like trauma. Here’s why that trauma is real and worth addressing.

After a traumatic pet loss, be it a sudden accident, an unexpected death, a disappearance, or euthanasia that went nothing like you’d hoped, some people experience a feeling that goes beyond what might be called ordinary grief.

It’s when the images come back without warning. They replay on a loop, sometimes for months, haunting the person who went through the experience. In turn, that person might avoid certain places, avoid certain routes home, or turn the music off if a specific song comes on.

Sometimes they can’t sleep or don’t want to eat.

Some feel like they’re still bracing for something to happen, even though the worst has already happened.

What is this? And can losing a pet have this drastic an effect?

The answer is that it’s grief steeped in trauma, and yes, pet loss can set it off.

But the way you experience a grief/trauma blend is totally unique to you and what you went through, and it’s not wrong in any way.

What Trauma Actually Is

Popular culture and people in general tend to link trauma to a lot these days. It might be when when referring to major things, like childhood or a career or relationship:

I had a traumatic childhood.

My last job gave me PTSD.

I’ve got a lot of trauma from dealing with my ex.

Sometimes it’s something brief and minor, or a way to describe a less-than-stellar experience:

That math test was traumatic!

I still have trauma from that blind date.

My brother traumatized me with his bug collection.

But trauma isn’t defined by the what. Meaning it’s not about what specifically happened to you. It’s defined by the way you experienced what happened, and how it landed in your unique nervous system.

The American Psychological Association explains trauma as “an emotional response to a deeply distressing event that overwhelms a person’s ability to cope.”

• Witnessing somebody else suffering can qualify as trauma.

• Knowing there is suffering going on outside of your control, even if you can’t see it, can count.

• A sudden violent death qualifies, whether it was a human or an animal.

• A high-stakes medical crisis with impossible decisions meets the criteria. Euthanasia falls under this category.

In terms of pet loss, researchers have documented what some clinicians now call traumatic pet bereavement, which is grief complicated by traumatic elements that make the experience much more intense and much more difficult to integrate than a typical loss.

In a 2016 study in the journal Society and Animals, researchers found that pet loss following traumatic circumstances was associated with significantly higher rates of post-traumatic stress symptoms than non-traumatic pet loss.

(And sure, none of this is a news flash. You might be nodding your head, well aware that the harder an experience is, the more difficult it is to get over. Obviously.)

But something goes awry with this thinking when it comes to the world of pet loss. Unlike with human loss, people are less likely to ask about how the death happened, or how you might be coping. It becomes just another water cooler conversation, followed by the weather forecast, national news, or local gossip.

Yet if you’re the one who went through the traumatic loss of your pet, it’s not an experience you can easily wave aside — especially if you’re reminded of your pet constantly throughout your home and your daily schedule, where they used to be woven throughout.

So in order to validate that grief, it’s sometimes helpful to understand that it absolutely can be traumatic and can potentially leave you with signs of PTSD.

Symptoms Worth Recognizing

Consider whether you’ve experienced any of the following recognized trauma responses:

• Intrusive images or memories that arrive without warning, often at random moments

• Avoidance of places, sounds, or situations connected to what happened

• Being more easily startled than usual or feeling chronically on edge

• Sleep disruption or nightmares

• Emotional numbness, alternating with sudden intense waves of feeling

• A sense that the loss hasn’t fully registered, like you’re watching your life from a slight distance

None of these are signs that you’re overreacting.

None of these mean you’re broken.

All they mean is that you went through something that your nervous system can’t absorb all at once, and so it’s working through it little by little (which, for the record, is exactly what nervous systems are supposed to do after a major shock).

I experienced quite a bit of this when my little soul dog Koda passed, because it was sudden, completely unexpected, and quite horrific to see him in his suffering.

He’d been acting nervous a few days before the 4th of July, which was normal for him because the sound of fireworks always made him panicky and our neighborhood was filled with early celebrations.

On a particularly challenging night when my two toddlers did not want to go to bed, Koda was more agitated than usual. I stuck him downstairs in the laundry room (something I’d never before done), reasoning that he’d calm down because he couldn’t hear the fireworks there. I closed the door on him and went back upstairs to wrangle my babies into bed. When I returned to check on him, I found he had thrown up all his dinner, was heaving air in a deep, strange way, and just seemed off.

I called the emergency clinic and they asked me to look at his gums, which were white. I was told to bring him in immediately. They took him to the back with very few words. Forty torturous minutes later, I was told I could come see him. He looked terrified in his cage. As I moved toward him, fluid started coming out of his nostrils. The clinic staff swooped him up and ushered me out, telling me he was “basically drowning.”

That was the last I saw of him alive. He died of congestive heart failure shortly after.

It’s Universally Unique

Maybe a better way to think about trauma is that it’s not about what happened; it’s about your own reaction to it. Your reaction, whether it’s extreme or quite small, is normal. Meaning:

You can’t expect a specific reaction to a specific event simply because somebody else experienced it in the same way.

You are human, and when something genuinely hard happens, your ability to cope is based entirely on who you are, what you’ve been through, and how you were built to cope.

In other words, you’re not weak for struggling with this.

Also, as we’ve talked about so often, traumatic pet loss tends to go unrecognized, mostly because the cultural permission to grieve a pet is so nearly nonexistent.

People would never question your trauma symptoms if you witnessed a human death, particularly if something about the death went unexpectedly or if it was sudden or difficult.

But if it was a pet that died in a sudden or difficult way or if the euthanasia went wrong, you’re often expected to move right past it in a matter of weeks. Depending on your personal makeup, this could be difficult or feel almost impossible.

When there’s a big gap like this between what you experience and what those around you expect you to experience, it can add a painful layer of isolation to something that’s already difficult to go through.

So please take comfort in knowing that what you’re feeling, or what you may have felt when you went through this, was real, normal, and is worthy of being supported.

It’s also important to recognize that traumatic grief takes a lot longer to get over than ordinary grief. This isn’t because something was wrong with the experience or something is wrong with you.

It’s just a different type of grief that requires a different type of response.

What helps?

• Gentle movement like yoga or tai chi

• Short walks outside

• Sitting in the sunshine for a few minutes each day

• Hugging someone and holding on for more than 20 seconds

• Meditating

• Journaling

• Letting yourself cry and really allowing your feelings their day in the sun

All of these steps help coax grief out of your nervous system and into the open, where it can float away, almost like a balloon that you’re finally ready to let go of.

An additional thing trauma researchers note is that the urge to avoid all reminders of what happened, while completely understandable, can actually prolong your traumatic grief symptoms.

Better is to have gradual and gentle re-exposure to reminders of your pet, and of their passing, in a safe setting with support so that your nervous system learns the danger has passed, the shock is over, and you can move forward at your own pace.

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