Although social scientists have written much about the social forces implicated in domestic abuse or violence, I have found few texts other than Horsman’s (2000) Too Scared to Learn discussing directly how domestic violence and abuse affect learning. Because the learning difficulties seemed to be less related to motivation and more to stresses, I began to wonder whether domestic violence and abuse could affect the parameters of an individual’s physical/neurological capacity to learn. Again, I found no texts dealing directly with the aftereffects of domestic violence and abuse and the brain’s capacity to learn. However, literature on the psychobiology of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) strongly suggests that trauma does affect brain activity, differentially so in those with PTSD. Thus, especially because of the claims that writing the personal narrative or memoir can be healing, compositionists need to be studying the implications of PTSD and brain research for the teaching of writing. Furthermore, just as Belenky et al.’s (1986) theoretical framework can help compositionists understand the variety of ways women know the world, compositionists need a framework for understanding how the scientific findings with regard to PTSD can inform efforts to minimize the possibilities of further victimizing the students educators seek to help. I found that framework in the linguistic theory of enactionism.