The Trauma that Change Your Memory

Dissociative amnesia is characterized by forgetting an event with a high negative charge. There are traumatic experiences that can mark us for life. These can change many aspects of our lives and relationships. Intense suffering produces a strong impact, and in order to protect our mind, the traumatic event or certain characteristics associated with it are removed from the recovery process. Although the prevalence is not very high, there are specific populations or specific situations in which dissociative amnesia is common. For example, in soldiers who have witnessed war, people who have experienced childhood sexual abuse and domestic violence.

Nowadays, most people have gone through some kind of trauma in their life, and it’s about overcoming that part of your life and learning how to live with whatever one has gone through. The screenplay, “Dissociation”, is a very small of the experience of life of a 16-year-old girl named Beverly, who finds herself in a hospital room one morning with parts of her memory lost.

My work stems from an interest in an individual’s search for identity and reconciliation with the self. I think of identity in regard to its various containers, and think deeply about how a character articulates itself, strives to become whole, behaves in private versus the public, and searches for mirrors of itself in the world. What I hope to accomplish in my screenplay, is a very honest depiction of how people approach trauma or difficulty in their lives. Trauma changes the body and shapes an individual. The person at the end has the strength and the spirit to step out of it, lean against it, smile at it, push it down a hill.

The irony of it all being, how anyone who has gone through any sort of trauma wishes nothing more than to forget whatever it is that they’ve gone through and start anew. But, our main character without knowing how lucky she is to have this privilege digs and digs until she gets to bottom of things, everything eventually coming back to her in floods. Facing and coming to terms with the very thing she wished to forget. This juxtaposition of trauma and irony insists that the relationship between the person and an event is fluid, dynamic, and always reveals the tenacity of the human spirit.

Amnesia, or memory loss, is a popular plot device in films, typically, a character will incur some sort of head injury causes them to lose their memories of earlier events. Amnesic characters often undergo personality changes too, as well as a loss of identity, but go on to lead an otherwise normal life. Usually, the character's memory is restored towards the end of the film, as a result of another bang to the head.

Real amnesic patients rarely experience a loss of identity; this confuses amnesia with a poorly understood condition called dissociative fugue. And there is not a single documented case of an amnesic patient forming new memories during the day only to have them wiped clean overnight. I wish to write a film that depicts amnesia accurately, having first hand lost my memories due to an accident. I’ve learned that it’s our own minds who chooses to dispense with parts of our memories, as they are traumatic or painful as a way of protecting ourselves. Even if we don’t wish to do so, we sometimes do it unconsciously.