About
This guide is primarily intended for people around someone living with PTSD. It may also be useful to people living with PTSD and to others who are seeking to understand the condition better. It is not a diagnostic tool. Some parts of the site address difficult topics, including self-harm and suicide.
Dedication
This resource is dedicated to people living with PTSD.
To those who carry pain that is not always visible.
To those who make great efforts, every day, to keep going.
To those who are trying to work, study, care for others, maintain relationships, or simply get through the day while coping with symptoms that others may not see or understand.
To those who are struggling right now.
And to those who could not continue.
PTSD can profoundly disrupt every dimension of a person’s life, affecting the body, mind, relationships, work, studies, and fundamental sense of safety in the world.
This resource was created in response to the widespread misunderstanding of PTSD and the repeated need for people living with it to explain their pain in order to be understood and taken seriously.
About this resource
This resource does not claim to speak for everyone. Each person’s experience of PTSD is different.
Its aim is to offer language, knowledge, and practical guidance that may help people better understand PTSD and the person living with it, encourage compassion rather than judgment, and reduce misunderstanding, isolation, and harm.
Purpose and limitations of this guide
This resource is for educational and awareness purposes only.
It is not a diagnostic tool, clinical guideline, or substitute for professional mental health care, medical advice, legal advice, workplace policy, or formal accessibility procedures.
It does not provide treatment and cannot assess individual situations or risk.
If you or someone else may be in immediate danger, or if there is a risk of self-harm or suicide, please contact local emergency services or a crisis support service in your country.
The information here is based on research-informed understanding of PTSD and trauma-informed practice, but it is intended as general guidance. It should be adapted with care to each person, context, and professional environment.
About the author
My name is Micky Fenakel Fiedelman. I specialize in learning, professional development, and organizational development. My work focuses on making complex knowledge accessible, designing learning processes, and turning professional knowledge into practical tools.
I founded a professional development center and led it for ten years. In this role, I designed and led learning programs addressing communication in conflict situations, challenging human interactions, and the creation of more sensitive and psychologically safe professional environments. A significant part of my work involves actor-based simulations, which allow people to practice responding to complex situations that have no simple or ready-made solution.
PTSD has been close to my heart for many years, and I have encountered it repeatedly throughout my life. The idea for this guide took shape through conversations with people living with PTSD, particularly a conversation with a friend who wished he had a clear source of information he could share with his wife. He wanted to help her understand what he was going through because he did not always know how to explain it, and even when he did, he did not always have the emotional resources to do so.
That conversation brought into focus the additional burden carried by people living with PTSD: alongside the condition itself, they are repeatedly required to explain their pain so that the people around them will understand and take it seriously. This guide was created in the hope of easing some of that burden.
I am not a mental health professional, and I do not claim to speak on behalf of people living with PTSD. The expertise I bring to this project lies in connecting professional and research-based knowledge with lived experience, and turning both into content that is clear, accessible, and practical.
Acknowledgements
I am deeply grateful to Dr. Daniel Weishut for his personal and professional support throughout the process of developing and writing this guide. Daniel gave me the confidence to begin writing, helped me define the scope of the guide, gave me a gentle push when he felt I was not moving forward enough, and knew how to support me through moments of difficulty and discouragement. Without his support, this guide would not have come into being.
I would also like to thank all those who generously gave their time to review different versions of the website and shared comments, questions, and reflections that helped me refine the content.
Finally, thank you to all the people living with PTSD who were willing to speak with me, share their experiences, and at times entrust me with very personal parts of their lives. These conversations helped me better understand some of the experiences, challenges, and complexities of living with PTSD, and brought a human perspective to the guide that research and professional knowledge alone could not provide.