Why is my friend being so violently sick when he remembers?

I agree with ty…I was raped when I was 15 and it’s something that if you don’t have help you might never get past. For him to really be able to live now he has to deal with his past. Try to get him to talk to someone (a therapist), they will be able to work through it better with him. In the meantime just keep being there for him, listen when he wants to talk about it. Sometimes telling someone everything that happened is therapeutic and it will help him to get past it. Remember that he will never forget it but the pain of it can fade.

Best wishes

Simply forgetting about it doesnt make it go away, if he hasnt dealt with it it will come back up in different ways, and having such a violent reaction definitely shows he hasnt gotten past it…

Explaining why the body reacts physically to a psychological event is kinda hard and will take a lot more research and I dont have time right now, but I can explain why specifically the vomitting… vomitting usually happens in reaction to either something you’ve eaten which is not good for you, or in reaction to disgust (like when you smell something bad you might get nauseated, this is a protective factor because it tells you that you might have injested something bad or there’s something bad around and you want to get away from it). When you think of someone touching you (imagine some old dirty man touching you against your will, even just on the arm, dont you just want to get away from him and wash your arm?) it generally brings up a disgust reaction… so now if he’s actually remembering someone doing stuff, it brings up really strong disgust reactions and so the vomitting… at least that’s one theory…

some people throw up when they get really upset, I know I do if I get really upset (I guess if you think about what happens when you get upset, sometimes your muscles start to clench, and if that’s happening to your stomach, you could feel like throwing up…)

either way, it was obviously something really traumatic and simply forgetting about it is not going to make it go away… sounds a little like post traumatic stress, a lot of people who experience some form of sexual abuse/truama go through it. Try and get him to talk to someone (a professional) about it. He needs to know that it wasnt his fault and he has nothing to be ashamed about. Guilt and shame are the two most common reactions… The best way to get over this is really by talking it through with someone and processing it… avoiding it doesnt help… he will be ok, but he really should talk to someone…

If you want some further info, this is the national rape, abuse and incest hotline in the states, they have an online chat, I’m sure they’d be willing to talk to you about it a little more… http://www.rainn.org/

You don’t say how old he is but since you are 18 I’d assume that he is probably around the same age.

It is important to stress three things to him. First is that he must continue his professional counseling since the professional is the person most likely to help him properly place and overcome the past.

Second, remind him that the events of his youth are not his fault and do not make him any less a man.

Third, that you and others will not condemn him because of a past that he had no control over.

Many of us have things in our past that haunt us. It is by dealing with them that we overcome them and their pull on our current lives.

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