Yes, for me, years. My problem was bad because I was regressing, I was surrounded with people and was constantly in a situation (because of my sister's up and down mental health issues) that kept triggering me.

It was not until I was able to extract myself from that environment and my sister was luckily stabilized, that I was able to actually focus myself and get strong enough to try to expose myself to similar situations without overwhelming fear.

PTSD has a way of completely messing up your sense of time and place. It's almost existential. After PTSD you don't live life as if you could live forever, you live as if ever day could be the last one, as if there is no guarantees in life anymore, nothing to hold on to.

This break can go so deep, that now I remember, we also tried some narrative therapy (which to also help my depression) to give my life some meaning. Looking at the replies about existentialism, I'm also reminded that I personally tried to read philosophy and see if I could make sense of this experience. I also tried to see if I could regain my religious faith, which had helped me live through sometimes chaotic and frightening world of my youth. Why you trust there is an ultimate "why" in life, you stop searching for it in immediate life and are not frustrated when things happen that make no sense.

Sadly all of these efforts seemed not enough, or disappointing. I could not be religious like before (though I'm still spiritual in a general sense), also reading philosophy just depressed me more, and I was like someone whose soul had been extracted and fragmented, and I kept putting it back in, in new arrangements, with new adhesives, but it never felt right. I was still stuck in the past, with uncertain future, etc.

On a personal level - and you might think this is odd thing to say - what has helped me most has been to actually be around people and observe what they do. Share and let them share with me. When your body and mind and emotions are just full of wounds and traumas and fragmentation, there is a loneliness that goes so deep is defies description. PTSD does that you. Then you distance yourself to be safe, but it makes life worse. Can't be a long term strategy.

To counter that loneliness of PTSD that had changed the direction of my life and made me feel worlds apart from "normal" people- and this has been hard - I've tried to very slowly be more and more around people and listen to them. This recreates that sense of normalcy for me. Sense of being human, around humans, with shared fears and hopes and dreams, there is something unusually comforting in shared suffering and fragility of life. This sense that people are my extended family, even if we don't know each other. When I hear them, I'm reminded of similar things inside me, ones I had blocked since PTSD, and the more of them come alive, the more normal I feel.

I hope your PTSD is not as bad (that gets better way faster, and you need to try fewer different methods), but just to tell you there's hope, even with worst of them.