Therefore, in the process of structuring and supporting the arguments in this essay, and following in the previously articulated tradition of CCC and College English scholars, I am positioning my arguments so that they can be seen as extensions of—not departures from—the sociopolitically grounded arguments embraced by these journals in the last ten years. Not only do I look at the socially situated nature of literacy struggles after trauma, but I also look to the natural sciences and their tentative but empirically based claims about the nature of the mind and its use of language after trauma. In examining these empirically based claims, I am following directly in the footsteps of Paulo Freire (1987), who in Education for Critical Consciousness argues,

We began with the conviction that the role of man was not only to be in the world, but to engage in relations with the world—that through acts of creation and re-creation, man makes cultural reality… We were certain that man’s relation to reality, expressed as a Subject to an object, results in knowledge, which man could express through language.

… As they apprehend a phenomenon or a problem, they also apprehend its causal links. The more accurately men grasp true causality, the more critical their understanding of reality will be… Further, critical consciousness always submits that causality to analysis; what is true today may not be so tomorrow… Critical consciousness represents “things and facts as they exist empirically, in their causal and circumstantial correlations”^{Endnote 2}… Critical consciousness is integrated with reality;… Critical understanding leads to critical action… (pp.43-44)