I would help her by finding the best clinical psychologist in the local area, one with the best recommendations and the experience to deal with your friend.

And I would listen and be there for them but I wouldn't judge or question what they say, that's not going to help.....

it's up to the doctor to determine if she suffers from FMS.

First, I would try to determine where those memories came from. Did they arise spontaneously? If so, they may actually be memories of something that she saw when she was young rather than something that happened to her. If she has been seeing a therapist, it would be important to know if the therapist was qualified in such matters. Cases have occured where a therapist dropped hints and guided the person to memories that weren't real, but induced by the therapist.

Last, I don't think the average person is qualified to offer much in the way of help except for offering their sympathy and friendship.

If those memories are still hurting her, I will help her to find a therapist. Abusiveness can hurt deeper. If the memories are hurtful, you need the professional help to handle them before they push you down to depression.

I would offer her a shoulder to cry on, an ear which will listen and not judge. And if she wanted to go to counceling I would go with her, support her in coping with her recovered memories. I had some pretty nasty repressed memories from when I was a little girl 3-5 and I remembered them when I was 16 and my mom wasn't sure if it were true but the psychiatrist was able to verify they were...they know how to get around 99% of those who are falsifying memories. Good luck :)

Someone very close to me has been sexually abused as a child. After I found out I have been thinking of various ways to help. The ugly truth, however, is that in this situation it is extremely hard to help if you haven't experienced the same thing personally, because you simply don't understand how it feels.

One thing that definitely should never be done is to go behind this person's back and book him/her an appointment with a counselor. If you were trusted with this information, it was for your ears only and in no way you should be breaking the trust.

Best option is to be patient and let your friend know that he/she has a shoulder to lean on. Prepare to become a listener, not a talker. When your friend talks to you again about what happened (do not start this conversation yourself) and asks you for advise (if he'she does not ask for advice, don't give one) on how to go through with you can gently offer some of the following options:

1) Talk to a counselor who understands the issue
2) Seek justice and get the abuser punished by the law
3) Join a support group of people who had the same experience

However, be careful with the advice you give, as it should stay as advice and not an order.

Bottom line is everyone deals with pain differently and it may take some time, so there is no quick fix and it never completely goes away. But simply being there for this person and listen can turn out to be the greatest help you can offer.

There is also a number of good articles on the topic:
http://www.aaets.org/article31.htm
http://www.counselling-directory.org.uk/sexual.html
http://www.reachuk.co.uk/Sex%20Abuse.htm
http://www.livingwell.org.au/Childsexualabuse/Dealingwithchildhoodsexualabuse.aspx

Past is Past. Though she recovered memories of that thing, nothing to worry about it. Just try to make her happy and forget about that thing.

No! Do no try to help her with this issue, you can make it worse if you are not qualified to deal with this. you have no obligation to play therapist...also it would be irresponsible on your part, if she has recovered memories this can be a good sign that her brain is ready to process these. Our brains encapsulate memories to protect us from the pain they cause, in the same way a tumor encapsulates toxins or disease to protect the rest of the body. our brains disconnect the pathways from traumatic memories making hard to access them in order to protect us from the pain, if she is remembering them now she may be in a position in her life to process them, no one can help a person with this. Your statement that "traumatic memories are hard to repress" tells me that you are not qualified to be helping your friend, traumatic memories are in fact the most easy to repress. It happens in a very physical way, there is nothing mysterious and magical about how we retrieve memories. The worst thing you can do is question whether or not her thoughts are real. This is not the point. you obviously are a good friend for wanting to try to help. You can help by doing some of the legwork of finding a therapist who is qualified to handle this. The last thing a victim of a sexual crime needs is for someone to deny their feelings. Do not try to be her therapist as hard as that is to do, this is not like helping a friend get over a break-up or something. You're delving into serious stuff here. You can also help by doing research on your own and educating ourself about this situation....it looks like you are already starting to do that by posting on here..so congrats for being such a good friend. I wish your friend a successful resolution to her inner turmoil.

I would not bother trying to get my friend to figure out if it was a false memory, because even if it's a false memory, from his point of view it feels just as real.

Fretting about false memory is like fretting about what whether or not what you see is real or if you're a brain in a vat with electrodes plugged in to produce a Matrix-type artificial reality. If you're feeling pain, does the cause make any difference how much it hurts?

What I would do - and this is just me - is... I'd sit down with my friend and walk him through about 12 doses of propranolol... until the memory doesn't hurt anymore.

What a lot of people don't know about memory is that every time you remember something, you rewrite it.

Computer techies who know their stuff will be familiar with this concept from the way core-memory works, wherein the simple process of reading a byte of data from ram erases it from ram, such that in order to keep that data alive in ram, the ram had to be immediately rewritten after having been read, otherwise there would be nothing to read the next time the CPU goes to look at it.

Similarly, when humans remember something, the process of remembering something throws the neural circuits holding the memory into a very temporary state of flux, wherein it gets rewritten upon recollection, and the more you remember it, the more it gets rewritten.

That's why when you watch a movie you've seen already, some of the scenes aren't quite the same as how you remembered... and yes, ironically, it means the less time you spend reviewing a memory, the more likely it is to be accurate when you do, which is why if someone does finally recall an incident of childhood abuse, then if it's not a false memory, they're remembering it far more accurately than anybody would ever want to.

(As an aside, I had an English prof from Oxford who was *convinced* that every time people remembered something they "redrafted it", as he put it. He knew nothing about neuroscience, but it turns out he was right...

Anyway...)

There are drugs that will block a memory from being rewritten upon recollection if those drugs are in your system, such that you permanently forget the memory, and no I am not going to tell you what those drugs are, because when people start permanently forgetting things, they go into a state like Alzheimers disease, wherein you degenerate into a state of befuddlement. Whether or not you like your memories, you still need them in order to maintain sentience. Without memory, your mind is about as functional as a CPU without ram, which means... not functional at all.

However, propranolol is interesting, because if you remember something while on it, then at high doses, if that memory includes pain, then the memory will be rewritten with everything except the painful part, such that you'll still be able to remember the event, but it won't hurt, and it won't matter so much.

It's useful for helping combat vets who never should have been soldiers in the first place, and who got post traumatic stress disorder from their experiences, and it's useful for victims of rape.

Each dose lasts about six hours, but it's during a key 40 minutes at the peak of effectiveness where things happen, and when at that point, the person is encouraged to remember the event. After about 12 rounds, people find that although they can remember the event, but they just don't care any more. It doesn't matter, and they want to get back to living.

If you find yourself encumbered with memories packing too much pain, to the extent that it's affecting your ability to function, such that you think this might be an option for you, then do it under supervision of a trained clinical psychologist (not psychiatrist... psychologist) because you have to get the dose just right for your weight and metabolic rate.

What to watch out for: In low doses, propranolol is also used to treat childhood migraines, plus it's used by surgeons to stop hand tremors, and by stage performers to control state fright, so if you're the type to rummage though people's medicine cabinets, and you find they have a bottle, and you get the idea of nicking it to treat yourself for some bad memories... don't.

The dose required to affect the rewriting of a memory is way more than what's taken to stop childhood migraines or hand trembling or stage fright, and I'm not going to tell you what that dose is so you'll go to a trained psychologist who knows how to tweak it for your weight and metabolism in order to get it right.

Sometimes self medication works, but this isn't one of them. Do it under supervision.

That's what I would do if a friend came up to me and said he was having problems with memories of childhood sexual abuse.