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Throughout The Movie Precious, There Are Several Times

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Throughout the movie Precious, there are several times when the audience witnesses trauma and its effect on Precious’ life. These traumatizing events include sexual abuse, verbal abuse, physical abuse, and emotional abuse. When people go through these events, their mind will find ways to cope with their situation. These coping mechanisms are depersonalization, derealization, detachment, and dissociation.
Depersonalization is defined in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders 5 (DSM-5) as “experiences of unreality, detachment, or being an outside observer with respect to one’s thoughts, feelings, sensations, body, or actions” (DSM-5, 2013, p. 302). According to Mayo Clinic, a symptom could be that a person feels like …show more content…

Towards the end of the movie, Precious looks out the window and sees her dream guy. As her mom walks by, she chooses to walk away from the window. At this point, I believe that she is disengaging from the fantasy world that she had been trying to live in for so many years. Detachment is another experience that is seen in Precious. Detachment is defined by Science Daily (n.d) as “an inability to connect with others on an emotional level, as well as a means of coping with anxiety by avoiding certain situations that trigger it”. Another way of thinking of this is a lack of physical emotion during a situation (R. Stensrud, lecture, February 21, 2017). An example of this would be when her father rapes her. Precious shows no physical emotion during this time. She lies there and slips into her fantasy world. The same thing occurs when the boys in the alley way shove her down onto the sidewalk. Instead of fighting back, she lays on the ground and goes into this numbing state, letting her mind slip into this fantasy world where she is dancing on a stage in front of everyone. By refusing to feel anything and blocking out the traumatizing event, she is better able to cope with her negative experiences in life. Last but not least, dissociation is clearly present in Precious. Dissociation is defined by betterhealth.vic.gov.au as “a mental process of disconnecting from one’s thoughts, feelings, memories, or sense of identity.” We see this each time that

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