you don’t catch SSA like a disease but not only is the body including its hormonal system growing and changing rapidly, but the individual’s identity, psyche, emotions and other aspects of personality are also growing and changing wildly.
there are aspects of normal adolescent development that have been misunderstood or misrepresented as SSA or as full-blown homosexual identity:
in young adolescence same-sex friendships are the norm, and since we are learning at that time the difference between the childlike love for someone who provides for our needs, and the more mature love that considers the wellbeing of the other, and indeed, just learning to recognize the “other” as distinct from the “self”, sometimes confusion arises when very intense attachments and friendships develop. What is normal is interpreted as abnormal. The normal development from selfish to altruistic love is warped because teens are often taught that love=sex, therefore to feel love is the same as feeling sexual attraction. This mistaken notion is a debasement of understanding of real love. For the Christian view, read 1 Corinthians chapter 13.
the other aspect of modern pop culture that sows confusion is the assumption that teenagers can be and should be sexually active, or intensely preoccupied with sexual things, ideas and activities. This is of course not true, but everything in our consumerist culture promotes the lie that teenagers should be evaluating everything and everyone in terms of sex, sexual attractiveness, sexual stimulation. Naturally friendships, relationships get passed through this filter of sexuality and are warped in the process.
The business of adolescence is forming and discovering one’s identity, learning the meaning of friendship, loyalty and all the qualities pertaining to friendship, and learning the difference between selfish love, and altruistic disinterested love. To embark to early on sexual experimentation and expression distorts and derails this pattern of personality growth, with dire consequences, especially it the teen seeks advice or counselling from someone with an agenda for promoting homosexuality as normal.
