Survivors of domestic violence, unlike their victim counterparts, have learned to shift attention from changing their partners to changing themselves to create lives without violence or abuse. That shift from being a victim to being a survivor can be a tentative, nonlinear, even recursive process. Thus, composition instructors of students with histories of domestic abuse and violence must recognize and actively seek understanding of the habits of mind associated with victimhood, which can lead students to withdraw from school, in order to more effectively assist them in achieving their literacy goals. As college students, survivors may share characteristics with Belenky et al.’s (1986) Received or Subjective Knowers, each an epistemological position representing challenges for educators corresponding with these knowers’ tendencies toward either/or and all-or-nothing thinking and associated with their chaotic relationships in which abuse continues and disrupts their learning. Furthermore, because a teacher’s work is not to heal but to educate and enable learning, compositionists should strive to understand the effects of stress on learning, in particular by understanding the psychobiology of posttraumatic stress disorder, which has been shown to affect learning centers of the brain. A theoretical framework that facilitates understanding PTSD and its effects on the brain is provided by the linguistic theory of enactionism.