Not all cognitive shifts begin at the level of the individual. Cultural or institutional cognitions can exert significant pressure on an individual to make life enhancing individual changes. For example, when Amelia, who later became a member of the Center for Nonviolence creative writing class, again allowed a violent man to live with her, Child Protective Services threatened to take away custody of her child—a potential loss which cracked through her numbness so that she could take action on her and her daughter’s behalf. Because social pressures were exerted to change her family-destructive behavior, Amelia sought help with a strength she did not know she possessed, and at first even that was a tentative strength at best. In the Center for Nonviolence support groups Amelia attended, she struggled with cycling symptoms of numbness, hypervigilance, and hyperarousal, struggles that may have paralyzed her had the social consequences of continued failure to act been less. Many women seeking help at the Center for Nonviolence struggled openly with numbness, minimizing the effects of violence and abuse they live with and perhaps perpetrate, and questioning their hypervigilance and hyperarousal as being signs of paranoia or being too sensitive. They may never have revealed to anyone the shame of being abused, let alone have sought medical help for their symptoms. They did not realize their constellation of symptoms had a name: posttraumatic stress disorder.