This diagnostic category of posttraumatic stress disorder was not, however, without its detractors, especially as it was applied to those not traumatized by war. It was 1982 before researchers finally concluded that “psychologically healthy men can indeed be coerced in unmanly ways” (Herman, 1997, p. 116)—thus enabling the shift away from the paradigm of blaming the victim for veterans with PTSD. For women, the social cognitive shift would take another ten years and stronger recognition of the importance of the subjective evaluation of having been shamed. The DSM-III and the DSM-III-R emphasized an objective, external judgment of the causal event as traumatic, using language such as “recognizable stressor,” “event outside the usual human experience,” and “would evoke distress in almost anyone” (Appendixes A & B). Perhaps the psychiatrists who wrote the DSM-III and DSM-III-R were attempting to limit what counted as an event sufficient to evoke PTSD in order to side-step the possibility of over-diagnosing PTSD or mistakenly enabling a malingerer to profit from a PTSD diagnosis. Holding a mirror to these apparent concerns, Davidson and Foa (1991) questioned how stressor events could be characterized universally as “outside usual experience and … markedly distressing to almost anyone” (¶ 8)—when, as in their example of being mugged, what was unusual and distressing to a rural resident might be neither unusual nor particularly distressing for the New York City dweller [provided the victim is not injured]. The same dilemma—characterizing domestic abuse as “outside usual experience”—existed for women who were abused physically or emotionally as children and then later as wives or domestic partners. How were they (or their healthcare providers) to distinguish a clear boundary between tolerable “common marital conflict” excluded by both the DSM-III (p. 236) and the DSM-III-R (p. 247) and intolerable traumatic treatment, when for so much of their lives abuse was inside their usual experiences?