Making sense of domestic abuse is in part a problem of naming, and therefore, constitutes a problem that can be addressed within the realm of language and linguistics. Multiple theoretical frameworks have been constructed to explain how human beings comprehend with and without language their worlds of interaction—public and private, aesthetic and functional, cultural and natural. The inadequacies of theories that privilege either the environment of culture (such as the social constructivist perspective privileged by postmodernists in the humanities and social sciences) over the individual organism or the individual organism (such as medical or artificial intelligence perspectives privileged by cognitive scientists, neuropsychologists, and physicians) over the environment of culture are resolved for me by enactionism, a theory of culture explicated by anthropological linguist William Foley (1997). Enactionism argues that cognition is the result of the complete and indivisible enactment of both the individual organism and its environment. Human beings know only through the senses AND only within the epistemology privileged by one’s community, however small or large that community is. Therefore, enactionism makes an important contribution to understanding the apparent contradiction of a person living with domestic abuse without comprehending it explicitly as abuse. That contribution will make more sense after an overview of the main concepts with which enactionism deals, but first, enactionism can best be understood in contrast to the theory of mental representations. In the introduction to Anthropological Linguistics, Foley (1997) argues that humans do not create meaning through mental representations.