Training is forgotten with time. Life experiences seared into your lizard brain never go away.

On that note The Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg is a great book on the science of how this works.

I'll second Scott's question about whether you've considered keeping your gun outside the house.

Since you know that you react like that and are hopefully doing what you can to change that even if the VA is a mess, it seems to me that the responsible thing to do is also to preemptively mitigate the impact of those reactions, since you already know that your decision-making in the heat of the moment is going to be somewhat hard-wired in a bad direction by past experience.

Hell, even just keeping the guns in a gun safe well away from the bedroom would make a big difference. You with a gun become a target, do anything you can to avoid being that target because dead men can't use the video evidence in court.

I keep the guns really far out of reach so as to require enough time to come to my senses. I've also been through a lot of therapy since then and I'm not nearly as bad off.

Thank you for caring.