Imagine this: You’re in highschool, sure it’s like middle school but a lot more drama and a lot more of gossip.  You go to sit with your friends, they’re nice people but lately they’ve been seeming to create a fair distance away from you, sooner or later to find out that they’ve heard you’ve kissed someone of the same sex, even if it was true, you still don’t appreciate whoever spread it around.  You still don’t know or understand about how this may go into effect sooner or later.  Has this ever happened to you? In order to overcome this, everything starts with acceptance.  The one reason that I think you should use acceptance as a way to overcome being what you think you are is to first understand what acceptance means and to understand the many ways as to how acceptance can help you.  Acceptance will hopefully help and most likely for the better. Acceptance is a trouble most teenagers have, but really acceptance is a trouble for the parents.  This travels from the parents who are heterosexual, or straight, and they wonder what they may have done wrong in order to have their child become homosexual.

One reason I think you should rely on using acceptance is it helps to relieve most things off your chest. Acceptance is hard for people to do, especially if you’re someone that goes through this stage, most parents have a hard time accepting their child’s sexuality. Most parents feel as if they’ve done something wrong to have their child become the way they are (Health-Care Professionals, 2012). Considering almost most parents are heterosexual or straight, they learn to accept their child’s sexuality soon enough. The research about the harmful ways accepting what you are states, “According to scientific observation, individuals who figure out they’re not straight have a fear of being called gay or lesbian out in public and think it affects or reflects the way society’s assumptions about what is or isn’t normal and who’s welcomed and excluded” (Education State University, 2016). I believe this means that most people are scared of figuring out what they are. Think about it-the names people use such as “f**”, “queer”, and “homo” on these individuals who already suffer enough by keeping their own sexual identity to themselves don’t need anymore suffering to go through. This is where the four stages of acceptance comes in.

Another set of research explains these four stages which states, “Stage 1 of acceptance would be sensitization: this is the general feeling of being different from your child’s same sex peers. Stage 2 of acceptance would be identity confusion: this means that they have experienced in adolescence and involves a conflict between prior self-image and look heterosexual arousal. Stage 3 of acceptance would be identity assumption: this means that figuring what you may think your identity is in your early twenty’s where they start to accept their sexuality, and associate regularly with homosexual groups. The final step of acceptance would be commitment: this is when a person starts to enter same sex relationships and accepts their sexuality as “a way of life” (Allyn and Bacon, 2009). One study shows that 2-10% of adults identify as gay, lesbian, or bisexual, and that most young men who identify as homosexual or bisexual are likely to remember at the age of 10.

Most people that disagree with me would say that sexual identity isn’t a big deal because they don’t go through it or have never experienced someone they know is struggling through this to get the gist of what they might go through. Usually, one study shows that most parents aren’t very supportive because they are straight. Another study shows that most teenagers commit suicide. Do you see it yet? Most on the opposing side would not see the harmful effects keeping your sexual identity in may causse on anyone for that matter, because once again, like said before, they have not gone through it.

In conclusion, you should rely on acceptance is that it’s a good way to relieve everything off your chest and you feel good to get it out no matter what. It’s tough to take in at first but think of every one that goes through this as well.  Everyone may go through this a lot differently than you may go through and everyone that suffers this may even know how you feel inside but then again, not everyone knows how you take the feeling but everyone does know the experience of the feeling itself. As someone that knows to question their identity and has siblings or friends that go through this type of suffer, they kind of give you a gist of what it’s like to go through this themselves and have coped with it in many ways. It gets better and it will be okay.