Thirteen Movie Substance Abuse

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Thirteen is a movie based on adolescent substance use and peer pressure. The main character is Tracy, who is the daughter of Melaine (Mel). Tracy is in the seventh grade and at school she experiences being teased by other students for the way she looks, such as her socks. In the opening of the movie it shows a blonde girl (Tracy) and a girl with brown hair (Evie) slapping each other while they do whippets inside a bedroom. Tracy says she “can’t feel anything” after doing the whippets, I took note of this because I felt like this was going to be a relevant piece of information regarding substance abuse. Throughout the movie, Traci is influenced by other kids at her school by the way they behave and mostly dress. Traci makes friends with a girl …show more content…

According to cognitive behavioral therapy, people are more likely to feel triggered into using drugs when they experience certain things such as stress, physical symptoms like withdrawals, or even boredom. There is one point in this movie where Evie and Tracy are in her room and Evie leaves Tracy at home while she goes to the park with her boyfriend K.K. Tracy was upset by this, my interpretation would be that she felt abandoned by Evie and this is what triggers Tracy to go to the bathroom to retrieve a pair of scissors and begins to cut herself with the blade to relieve her intense feelings. For a theorist of cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT), the way they would treat this would be to firstly find out what the trigger is. In this case, the trigger was Evie leaving Tracy at home to go to the park alone with K.K. In response, Tracy cuts herself. Using functional analysis questioning can be helpful in identifying the thoughts she had before cutting herself such as ‘what thoughts came to your mind when Evie left that night?’ Tracy may have felt abandonment when Evie left (video). Tracy’s feelings of abandonment may stem from the issues she has with her father, who works a

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