Precious Movie Psychology

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The film Precious focuses on Clarice “Precious” Jones, a girl whose life is far from ordinary. At sixteen years old, Precious finds herself pregnant with her second child, both of which belong to her father. Although he’s no longer in the picture, Precious experiences daily abuse from her mother, who thinks nothing of her. Regardless of her past, Precious is eager to give her children a better life than she had. After meeting Ms. Rein, her alternative school teacher, Precious finally gets the love and support that she’s been hoping for her whole life. Precious’ life may have had a different path had she received proper treatment earlier in life. Even though Precious is in the adolescent stage of her life, she can still benefit from treatment; …show more content…

As she grew older, she continued to experience sexual, physical and verbal abuse from her mother and father. According to the DSM-5, Precious meets criteria for exposure due to the fact that she was directly experiencing the traumatic events. In my opinion, the most severe trauma Precious experienced was being raped by her father. In the film, we see moments of Precious remembering that traumatic experience but then transforming her thoughts elsewhere. The image becomes a positive moment, one in which she is famous and adored. My interpretation of these flashbacks is dissociative reactions and are not involuntarily reoccurring; it seems more as though she is in control of thinking back to her exposure. Precious struggles when she is asked about her what her home life is like. She tends to avoid the thought and proceeds to redirect the conversation; this demonstrates her efforts to avoid thoughts of her situation. Due to the nature of Precious’ abuse, her cognitions and mood were negatively effected. The fact that Precious was sexually abused by her father at a young age, in addition to her mother constantly putting her down and making her believe that she was at fault, Precious had it set in her mind that it was the truth. Her mother’s verbal abuse also diminished her participation in school resulting in her inability to read and write at age sixteen. The trauma she was exposed to …show more content…

Precious’ mother and father were extremely abusive towards her and now at the age of sixteen, it’s Precious’ best interest not to interact with either parent. Precious’ mother blamed Precious for the sexual abuse she experienced and one may assume that during a session she would express her thoughts. This exchange can cause a regression in treatment success and can produce negative outcomes of the treatment (Yasinski et al., 2016). TF-CBT explains that treatment can be just as successful with or without parent involvement. Due to the severity of Precious’ trauma, it has become difficult for her to open up to new people. It can extremely difficult for an individual to be put in a situation that forces them to actively think about their traumatic experience, causing them to retract from going to session and completing the therapy (Pukay-Martin, Torbit, Landy, Macdonald, & Monson, 2017). I think that the fact that TF-CBT includes many sessions, Precious will have time to build rapport with her clinician instead of just jumping right into discussing and reliving everything she went through. This treatment will not only benefit Precious but it will also help her children. A component of this treatment is teaching parent skills. Precious was never taught how to be a good mother; she did not have a good example of what parents

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