Hello,

I registered on this website just to ask about my friend, who I will call Rachel for the sake of anonymity.

I have known her since we were 13-14 and now we are both adults. When I met her, she had not yet gone through puberty and had, understandably, a very childlike personality.

She reached puberty within that year and her body finally started maturing. She got her period, and her breasts started to develop as well as all of the other classic signs. However, something that I noticed was that she seemed to not want to accept the fact that she was becoming post-pubescent. She would always talk about how the people she found ideal were thin, flat-chested, small and innocent-eyed.
She would describe how her ideal person was almost indiscernibly male or female due to their lack of secondary sex traits.

Whenever we are watching tv shows or movies, she avoids looking or talking about any scenes that might be sexual in nature, and gets really uncomfortable whenever I talk about people I find attractive. She also gets super embarrassed and turns really red if she sees people with very little clothes on.

I think she feels severely discomfortable with her own sexual maturity and refuses to acknowledge that she is no longer a child.
I want to figure out what I can do to help her start to acknowledge the fact that she is a sexual being and that it is okay to feel urges or attraction to people in a way that is less than innocent. It is getting to the point where she cannot relate to other people because she avoids conversation about relationships and interacts between people at all costs.
If someone starts talking about their friendship, family or relationships, she ignores them and tries to steer the conversation back to cartoons, or video games, or television.

I'm just really concerned that she is not able to handle interpersonal relationships, especially sexual in nature (because she cannot even accept her own sexuality) and is completely absorbed with trying to re-insert herself into her pre-pubescent self.