It is Time to Talk About Fight Club

Politics, divisive opinions, ego and senseless aggression in the alienation movement - STRT June 2025

“Gentlemen, welcome to Fight Club. The first rule of Fight Club is: you do not talk about Fight Club. The second rule of Fight Club is: you DO NOT talk about Fight Club! Third rule of Fight Club: someone yells "stop!", goes limp, taps out, the fight is over. Fourth rule: only two guys to a fight. Fifth rule: one fight at a time, fellas. Sixth rule: No shirts, no shoes. Seventh rule: fights will go on as long as they have to. And the eighth and final rule: if this is your first time at Fight Club, you have to fight.”

~ Tyler Durden, Fight Club [Movie]

Source: 20th Century Fox

My father once said poignantly, “You know Andrew… I remember when baseball was America’s favorite pastime. Now, it’s politics.”

Regardless of your political affiliations, religious views (or lack thereof), and other closely held opinions, I think we can all agree that most communication on divisive topics leads to a “winning at all costs” approach often fueled with ad hominem attacks, cognitive dissonance, and highly aggressive and hyperbolic stances.

It seems that civil discussion and friendly intellectual debates are impossible. Instead of challenging ideas, most people flock to groups that share their ideals. But what is also fascinating is that many of these social groups seem to have a degree of tolerance regarding those shared views. Go too far beyond tolerated variance, and you are shunned, ostracized, and banished from returning.

Dissenting beliefs make you a heretic and thereby dangerous to the community.

This behavior is not locked to any political party, country, or time period. Mob mentality has tragically ended the lives of countless historical icons and squashed the progression of real progress in social change.

Here are a few examples from across history:

• Socrates (399 BCE)
  One of the earliest champions of ethical dialogue, Socrates taught young Athenians to question assumptions, examine their lives, and seek truth beyond tradition. For this, the city condemned him to death by drinking hemlock.

• Hypatia of Alexandria (415 CE)
  A philosopher, astronomer, and teacher in a time when women were rarely permitted to hold public authority, Hypatia represented reason and scholarship. As tensions rose between Christian and pagan factions, she became a scapegoat for deeper political unrest. A mob pulled her from her chariot, stripped her, and killed her.

• Giordano Bruno (1600)
  Bruno envisioned an infinite cosmos filled with stars and worlds, a universe where God’s creation extended far beyond human imagination. But his ideas clashed with the rigid doctrines of the Church. Rather than entertain his vision, they burned him alive.

• Dr. Ignaz Semmelweis (1865)
  Before germ theory, Semmelweis discovered a simple truth—doctors washing their hands before delivery operations could save mothers’ lives during childbirth. His colleagues ridiculed him because the implication was that doctors were inadvertently killing their patients by not washing their hands (which they were). He was labeled unstable, institutionalized, and beaten by guards. In a tragic twist of fate, he died of sepsis, which was the same infection he tried to prevent.

• Alan Turing (1954)
  Turing broke the Nazi Enigma codes, shortened WWII, and laid the groundwork for modern computing. His brilliance saved millions of lives, yet he was prosecuted for being gay, chemically castrated, and died in isolation via cyanide.

• Emmett Till (1955)
  At just 14 years old, Emmett Till became a symbol of everything wrong with racial injustice. Accused of offending a white woman, he was lynched by a mob in Mississippi.

This is by no means an extensive list.

And the point of sharing this is that cognitive dissonance, to the point of anger, aggression, and sometimes violence, has been a part of humanity for as long as we have existed. In all of these instances, civil discussion and intellectual debate was not possible.

Countless great thinkers have shared this observation:

Elliot Aronson wrote in his book The Social Animal,

“Sometimes our motivation to be right and our motivation to believe we are right work in the same direction: We seek information (say, about the risks of smoking) and pay attention. But the theory of cognitive dissonance predicts that more often we seek information and then ignore it if we don’t like what we learn (and keep smoking). Understanding dissonance explains why so much of human thinking is not rational, but rationalizing.”

Leo Tolstoy said in The Kingdom of God is Within You,

“The most difficult subjects can be explained to the most slow-witted man if he has not formed any idea of them already; but the simplest thing cannot be made clear to the most intelligent man if he is firmly persuaded that he knows already, without a shadow of doubt, what is laid before him.”

And Eric Hoffer wrote about cognitive dissonance as part of the rise of the Nazi movement in The True Believer,

“It is the true believer’s ability to ‘shut his eyes and stop his ears’ to facts that do not deserve to be either seen or heard, which is the source of his unequaled fortitude and consistency.”

If this is the default way opposing ideas communicate, then it should come as no surprise that this type of thinking is also present in the alienation movement.

It manifests in two big ways: projected anger at the gender of your ex-spouse, and hypersensitivity to alienation deniers. (Note: This is an observation of the alienation movement and not an accusation directed at you, dear reader.)

What ensues is a consequence of unmet needs and personal trauma. But before I dig into the nuances of both groups, I want to start by addressing the big picture.

And there is no better example to articulate the gravity of the problem than Fight Club.

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Hurt People Hurt People

Fight Club started as a novel by Chuck Palahniuk and later became a movie directed by David Fincher. At its core, it’s about a nameless man stuck in a life that feels fake. He works a meaningless job, buys things he doesn’t care about, and suffers from insomnia. Then he meets Tyler Durden, the charismatic, unhinged figure who offers a different way to live.

At first, Tyler’s mannerisms and philosophy seem deeply seductive. He speaks to the pain of those around him and acts as a voice for those who have been too shy to say what they truly feel. If you listen to the video above, you will get a taste of how Tyler (played by Brad Pitt) grabs the attention of the men who idolize him.

The Narrator and Tyler start an underground club called Fight Club, where men gather around and fight with no rules or consequences. The act of fighting provides some cathartic release of all the pent-up anger and tension carried inside.

When punching each other senselessly stops providing the same release that it once did, Fight Club morphs into Project Mayhem.

Now, it’s no longer about individual catharsis. It’s about collective action, blind loyalty, and destruction disguised as purpose. Members stop using names. They follow orders without question. Tyler’s ideas become doctrine. Graffiti turns to vandalism, which escalates to terrorism. Each violent act is framed as striking back at a corrupt, soul-crushing society.

Fight Club is obviously dramatized to the point of making a good story, but let’s explore how these same dynamics manifest in the alienation movement.

Red Pills, Castration, and the Madonna/Whore Complex

Photo by Pea on Unsplash

When parents discover they are being alienated from their kids, one of the first things they do is look for support online. Often, friends and family are too shy to get involved, and only your closest loved ones will actually let you cry on their shoulder. Even then, they don’t fully understand what is happening and chalk it up to a bad breakup.

These parents are drowning in the moment, trying to stay afloat as legal troubles, CPS, financial issues, and alienation come at them like 100-foot waves. Looking online, they find videos and articles from various experts and researchers. On social media, they find support groups. However, the online support groups are often not providing the insight they hoped to find.

Many support groups cycle through negative stories after negative stories. If you are frequently online doomscrolling through posts by distraught parents, your hope for your own reunification evaporates instantly.

It is at this moment that feelings of anger, powerlessness, grief, self-doubt, depression, anxiety, panic, stress, and disgust stew inside of you, poisoning your sense of self. Active emotions like anger and anxiety will step forward, helping you hide your feelings of fear and grief.

The fear of inadequacy and powerlessness makes the person look for someone to blame. However, blaming the ex-spouse is not enough. It feels like there is a deeper, almost conspiratorial reason why they are being alienated.

And that is where some parents get caught up in blaming the opposite gender.

Both sides' arguments are hyperbolic and prejudicial. I’ll share some examples below. Chances are, you have heard all of them somewhere.

Extreme women’s groups will say, Men are:

• Lazy and irresponsible

• Chauvinist pigs that should be castrated

• Rapists/Only interested in sex/Willing to sleep with anyone behind your back

• Inherently violent and predatory/Narcissistic/Sociopathic

• Controlling, manipulative, and emotionally cold

Extreme men’s groups will say, Women are:

• Sluts/Whores/Promiscuous (but will not sleep with you)

• Not traditional like the past (though the past is described as a vague historical point in time)

• Emotionally manipulative/Narcissistic

• Bringing nothing to the table/draining your resources/gold diggers

• Willing to leave you for a stronger and/or wealthier man, or willing to put you in a position to raise another man’s child

Drawing from the example of Fight Club, these groups create a quick path for hurt, alienated parents to join a “cause” that provides them a scapegoat. The first stage of Fight Club is to fight amongst each other as a way to reclaim your sense of power and identity.

Join an extreme feminist group or a Red Pill or MGTOW (Men Going Their Own Way) group, and you will see a constant cycle of defamatory content against the opposite gender. Personal stories are shared (and likely embellished) to validate their polarizing beliefs. Then everyone reads that story and comments furiously on how your pain is justified and that the state of the world is at fault. Everyone’s story is accepted as truth, and no one takes any measure of accountability.

Civil discussion is not possible with either group. They have commoditized the opposite gender, acting as though their lived experiences are enough to claim superiority over them.

These groups will campaign against each other, achieving little to no progress in the grand scheme of things. Fortunately, these groups are usually too busy fighting amongst themselves and occasionally getting caught in scandals to advance their own agendas.

With that said, the consequences of getting wrapped up in these groups are dramatic.

Firstly, it brings your healing journey to a halt. Scapegoating an entire gender allows them to absolve themselves of all responsibility for their own erroneous behavior. This is just another mental prison that keeps you from achieving the things that you want most.

Second, everything posted on the internet is visible and cannot be removed. Sure, you can delete messages and posts, but all it takes is one person to screenshot them, and there is permanent evidence against you. Making comments about how someone deserves to be brutally murdered or tortured is not a good joke, nor is it a funny one. There is no reasonable justification for that language. It doesn’t reflect well on your character and makes you look untrustworthy to your alienated child. As the saying goes, “If you can’t say something nice, don’t say anything at all.”

And lastly, you trade reunification for short-term emotional gratification. If your alienated child sees you speaking vehemently about gender politics (especially if those comments are about their alienating parent), they will hold that against you. If your alienated child has been aggressive or hurtful to you, there will be fear that you will harbor these kinds of deep-rooted, hate-filled beliefs about them. If their gender matches the hateful comments you are making, they will internalize those beliefs about themselves.

These toxic gender echo chambers don’t just stay in their corners. You see their influence all over social media, especially how individuals generalize their pain.

A child who grew up with a controlling or abusive mother might frequently post memes or quips deriding women. And when you call it out, their defense is always the same.

“Well, my mom was like that.”

Here is another example.

A mother posts a photo about the importance of a child having a loving mother to share how she wants to be there to help raise her kids into kind, emotionally intelligent adults. This is typically done because the mother was feeling raw and in pain in the moment and wanted to communicate that to the broader community. But instead of support, she’s bombarded with men commenting, “What about fathers? We matter too!”—even though her post never dismissed or even mentioned fathers at all.

In both cases, what you’re seeing isn’t reasoned discourse. It’s emotional reactivity. One person’s pain reminds another person of their pain, and suddenly both sides are in an emotional state, looking for connection, but instead of connecting with each other, they are competing to see who has had it worse.

Posting this kind of content on social media is also a way for these people to find a tribe. They want their suffering to mean something, their wounds to be seen, and their experiences to be validated.

In the end, the people who post inflammatory content are quickly initiated into an early version of Fight Club that mirrors their beliefs.

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Social Dog Piling the Alienation Deniers

Photo by Alex McCarthy on Unsplash

It usually starts with a screenshot.

A parent in an alienation support group shares a post from a high-profile influencer with a massive following, claiming that parental alienation isn’t real. Maybe the influencer frames it as “junk science,” or suggests it’s just a tactic abusers use to discredit protective parents.

Outraged, the parent writes a caption like, “This is dangerous misinformation. Let’s flood the comments and tell them the truth.”

The group responds.

Dozens, sometimes hundreds, of alienated parents swarm the influencer’s page. A small percentage of the comments are factual, personal, and emotional, sharing their lived experiences and calling for awareness.

However, the overwhelming majority will step into that Fight Club mentality, posting rage-filled comments intended to provoke the influencer into feeling afraid and anxious so that they will stop espousing these views to their followers. Death threats, swatting, language inciting violence, and using derogatory catch phrases; these are different forms of cancel culture. But unlike celebrities caught in sex scandals, most of these alienation deniers dig in their heels and double down when they are attacked.

They don’t want to have a conversation because they are convinced they are right. Every threat and insult they receive for those views solidifies their stance. They are not interested in intellectual discussion. If they were, they would be actively researching and interviewing experts. Instead, alienation deniers are usually playing a game of power, where they aggressively push their ideas and philosophy, and you, the receiver, are expected to submit and accept it without question. For them, being wrong means they lose their status and power.

There is a famous saying that once you reach a certain level of success, you will start having haters. The problem with this conventional wisdom is that it doesn’t encourage reflection, as the haters are often dismissed as being jealous or emotionally unstable. Their pain is invalidated, and their message is reduced to noise. And when it comes to alienated parents, that dismissal is especially dangerous because it reinforces the very invisibility they’re trying to escape.

But here’s the trap. By choosing outrage over strategy, the alienation movement gives the deniers exactly what they expect—emotional volatility. The alienation denier doesn’t walk away thinking, “Maybe I misunderstood parental alienation.” They walk away thinking, “See? These people are unhinged. This just proves my point.”

This is the exact pattern Fight Club warned about. It is the cycle where hurt people, desperate to be seen, escalate into chaos. Not because they’re inherently destructive, but because no one gave them a roadmap for what to do with that pain.

And once you enter that mode, your message becomes a weapon. You stop reaching your kids, the courts, or the culture. All it does is push the very people you want to influence further away and attract other angry people.

Now I want to make something clear.

Denial of alienation hurts.

It feels like your reality is being erased. And in many cases, it is.

But responding with a mob only amplifies the existing criticism that alienated parents are emotionally unstable or vindictive. No matter how justified they feel, the threats and insults don’t correct the narrative. They confirm the worst assumptions.

Most alienation deniers believe the concept is a smokescreen used to make a protective parent look abusive and that the child is estranged because of the rejected parent’s own harmful behavior.

That belief isn’t without context; there are legitimate cases of estrangement where a parent was so toxic that they refuse to accept any responsibility, leaving the child with no other option but to cut contact.

There have also been instances where abusive parents falsely claimed alienation to manipulate the system. And here’s the irony. If someone successfully weaponizes the idea of alienation to turn judges, lawyers, and social workers against a protective parent, that act itself is alienation. If you can convince a bunch of adults to turn their backs on a person, you absolutely can do the same to a child who does not have the cognitive ability to discern protection from psychological abuse. The manipulation they claim disproves alienation proves exactly how it works.

The bottom line is, don’t get baited into proving their point. You cannot convince them that they are wrong because they refuse to believe there is room for discussion. When it comes to power games, most of the time, you win by not playing.

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Healed People Heal People

Source: Everything Everywhere All At Once (Movie)

One of my favorite movies is Everything Everywhere All at Once.

If you haven’t seen it, I highly recommend it.

Beneath the absurdist humor, multiverse chaos, and sci-fi spectacle, it’s really a story about something deeply human—a mother trying to save her daughter from suicide.

Evelyn (played by Michelle Yeoh) is a fighter. She doesn’t let people walk over her. She hustles, argues, micromanages, and always tries to prove she’s good enough. To the IRS. To her father. Even to herself.

She sees her husband, Waymond, as too soft, sensitive, silly, and weak to handle the pressure of life.

But time and time again, it’s Waymond who de-escalates tension, disarms conflict, and keeps their fractured family from falling apart—not through domination, but through empathy. While Evelyn tries to fight her way through every problem, Waymond solves them by being kind. And in the end, it’s not martial arts or a mastery of all skills that saves their daughter Joy—it’s recognition, forgiveness, and love.

Waymond isn’t weak by being optimistic and kind despite all the uncertainty thrown at him. He’s strong in a way Evelyn had to learn to see. Here is one of his best quotes towards the end of the movie:

“You think I’m weak don’t you? When we first fell in love all of those years ago, your father would say I was too sweet for my own good. Maybe he was right. You tell me that it's a cruel world and we're all just running around in circles. I know that. I've been on this earth just as many days as you.

When I choose to see the good side of things, I'm not being naive. It is strategic and necessary. It's how I've learned to survive through everything. I know you go through life with your fists held tight. You see yourself as a fighter. Well, I see myself as one too. This is how I fight.”

Not all alienation support groups devolve into Fight Club. However, many people treat alienation as an unending battle where they join these groups to “rally the troops.”

It is no surprise, because anger is highly profitable. You can move a lot of people toward destructive acts that serve an ulterior motive and cash in on a lot of sales. I work in marketing, so I see these tactics on a daily basis.

Most of these online debates will have no consequence on the grand scheme of things. Winning a Facebook argument doesn’t get you closer to reuniting with your child. It just wastes your time and mental energy. It is a distraction that poisons your mind and creates the illusion of enemies standing between you and your child. It might feel good to be a “part of the cause,” but you end up sacrificing your own efforts to reunite for the cause.

Most parents are not equipped to become influencers. They haven’t done the healing yet. And the rules of the social media game are different when you are actively managing a following with your own content. The average parent isn’t interested in tracking social media metrics, curating educational materials, and promoting products (yes, you have to monetize; otherwise, you will burn out). They are just trying to find a way to reconnect with their kid.

Now, there are circumstantial elements that may stand in the way of reunification (finances, your ex, CPS, family court, legalities, etc.) However, the only thing that matters in your journey to reuniting with your child is that you actively build a bridge for them to cross when they are ready to reconnect. You can’t do that effectively if you are swept up in online fights.

Time goes by regardless of how you spend your time during alienation. If you choose to spend that time online fighting, you will be too busy to notice the opportunities your child wants to connect because you will still be in a fighting mindset. But if you do the work to heal yourself, you will discover the greatest gifts you can give your alienated child.

Your peace and your love.

Where we are most deeply wounded is where we are most deeply gifted. There is something stunning in that — and true. That rings true for me. Wherever I have been wounded, wherever any of us have been wounded, if we dive into what those wounds are, if we go down into and do the hard work within those wounds, we’ll actually find ourselves, we’ll find our real giftedness, a sincere, true giftedness.

~ Andrew Garfield, Actor

The Antidote to Fight Club is Connection, Kindness, Empathy, and Love.

Now I have been accused of living life with rose-tinted glasses. And I get it.

When everything feels like a fight, it is hard to believe it is possible to win without fighting. After all, there is CPS, family court, alienation deniers, the alienator, and the weight of societal expectations weighing on you all at once.

How can you continuously be kind in a world that is deeply unkind?

When you’ve tried everything—reasoning with your ex, begging the court, explaining yourself to CPS, fighting false allegations, shouting into the void of social media—and nothing changes, a terrifying thought creeps in…maybe the only way to be heard is to burn everything down.

Violence starts to feel like a form of agency. Anger feels like the only emotion powerful enough to push back against the silence. And when the system ignores you, when the people who should care don’t listen, when your child slips further away… It’s easy to believe that rage is your only remaining weapon.

But that’s the lie pain tells you.

Being an existential optimist might seem foolish to some. But to me, it’s not about ignoring reality—it’s about refusing to let it harden me.

Kindness isn’t passivity. It’s resistance. It’s choosing not to replicate the pain that broke you. It’s showing up with presence, even when everything inside you wants to disappear. It’s staying open when every survival instinct tells you to shut down. Kindness despite pain is the ability to recognize that acting from a place of hurt continues the cycle of passing pain onto others. You have to actively choose not to let the pain turn you into the person who hurt you.

Alienation hurts because it severs the connection with those you love. So the only way through is to rebuild the connection—even if it takes years, even if it’s just in the way you carry yourself, even if the person you’re trying to reach isn’t ready yet.

You don’t fight fire with fire. That only turns everything around you into charcoal. Fight fire with water. Extinguish hatred completely with love and curiosity.

You can’t control the court system. You can’t control your ex. You can’t control your child’s current perception of you. But you can control the story you live. You can choose grace and growth, and to be someone your child will one day feel safe coming back to.

Most parents I speak to do not want to spend the rest of their lives in the alienation community. They don’t want to be influencers or content creators. Instead, they would rather explore all the beautiful things life offers with their kids. And that is normal.

Doing the emotional work of healing trauma and developing the skills to strengthen your resolve and mentalize (putting yourself in someone’s shoes) will help you feel a sense of inner stillness, even though the world is chaotic. In this state, people who try to attack or provoke you do not affect your sense of identity or emotional state.

Like water off a duck.

And when your child returns to you, they need you to be their anchor so they can follow your footsteps as they navigate their healing journey.

If I died tomorrow, I wouldn’t want to be seen as a fighter in the alienation movement. Instead, I would rather be remembered as an old friend—someone who came by for coffee or tea and sat down next to you when you needed it the most, lent my shoulder to cry on, gave you a hug if you felt alone, or said the right thing at the right time so you had the strength to keep going.

I am not a crusader and don’t want to be a martyr. (Don’t worry, I am in perfect health and have no intention of dying.)

I don’t see alienation as a battle like most people do. I see it as an open wound that needs healing. A person with unhealed trauma and weak social skills, unintentionally behaves in ways that harm others, and they justify it as an act of self-preservation so that they don’t get crushed by the emotional guilt of their actions.

There was a time when I was furious with my stepmother for what she did to me. As I worked through my own pain, I wondered what kinds of fears and trauma led her to become the person she is today. Now, I don’t even think about it anymore. She has a journey she must undergo, and it is not my place to decide what path she takes in life.

When I was younger, I was sucked into the Red Pill groups. I saw countless men puffing their chests, acting as though they somehow mapped out the entirety of women’s psychology. None of them were happy. None of them felt safe enough to give or receive love. And they treated women the same way that they treated everything in life—as a fight.

At first, it felt liberating, but after a while, I couldn’t stomach it. I wanted love, to get married, and to have a family. I have always wanted to be a father, and I don’t want a life where I am constantly fighting.

Once I pursued a path of love, peace, and kindness, I was able to make that dream come true.

Until next time,

Andrew Folkler

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Liked this Article? Here are a Few Past Articles You May Like…

• Seeing through the Eyes of the Alienated Child (Understanding the psychological states of an alienated child.)

• Escaping the Prison of the Mind (A great follow-up on the emotional state of an alienated child after alienation).

• How to Talk With Your Alienated Child When They Don't Want to Talk to You (Good for navigating the survival state with your alienated child).

• Finding Meaning in Alienation When All Hope is Lost (A great first step in finding your path to healing).

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