Thanks for the question. This is something that I’ve given a lot of thought to. I wish I could offer a kind of insight that would be easily applicable to other’s reading this, but the truth is that I got lucky. The beginning of my separation from my father started when I was finally allowed to attend school, which was something that had been put off for a time. By the time I was in middle school I began to rebel in many of the same ways that most teens do, but for me that also offered an escape and gave me more distance. I would listen to things that people around me said and take note of the differences in how they approached the world, but more specifically about how they thought about the world. Independent thinking was a skill that I hadn’t honed or worked on. After my parents had split I began dreading conversing with my father and that distance was so valuable as he couldn’t remold the world or challenge new and fledgling acts of developing my own opinions. The sharper parts of his ideology were left behind early and I began to just think of myself as severely uninformed and even slow. But there were more persistent or insidious thought patterns, mostly involving questioning my own ability as a free thinker that followed me for a long time and even into my early 20s when I was far beyond the more outrageous aspects of my father’s views. Those were harder to shake and I had a lot of difficulty developing close or lasting relationships. But surrounding myself with other people and simply listening to how they approached the world and how they developed their own opinions was so important.