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Flying Monkeys: How Narcissists Use Other People to Control and Hurt You

Narcissistic Abuse Recovery • March 19, 2026

SUMMARY

You’ve already managed to create some distance from the narcissist — and then you get the text from a mutual friend, the call from a family member, the message from someone who “just wanted to reach out and share their concern.” It feels like the narcissist has a whole army working on their behalf. That’s not paranoia. It’s a real dynamic, it has a name, and understanding how it works is the only way to stop it from working on you.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

1. When Other People Become Part of the Problem
2. The Psychology Behind the Proxy Campaign: Triangulation, Proxy Abuse, and Social Isolation
3. The Different Roles They Play (and What Each One Costs You)
4. The Both/And Reality: Flying Monkeys Aren’t Always Villains
5. How to Protect Yourself From the Proxy Campaign
6. Practical Tools: Journaling Prompts and Recovery Exercises
7. When to Seek Help — and What Recovery Actually Looks Like
8. Frequently Asked Questions

When Other People Become Part of the Problem

Dr. Serena Okafor had spent twelve years building one of the most respected oncology practices in her city. She was the person other doctors called when they didn’t know what to do. She was used to being the one with answers, the one who stayed calm in the room where other people couldn’t, the one who held the whole picture. None of that prepared her for what happened after she finally ended her seven-year marriage to Marcus.

She had been no-contact for six weeks when the messages started. The first came from her own mother — a woman who had watched the marriage quietly for years and said nothing. The message was three paragraphs long and described, in careful detail, how devastated Marcus seemed, how much weight he had lost, how he had told her mother that Serena had “just changed” and that he “didn’t know who she was anymore.” Her mother ended with: “I raised you to fight for your marriage. I hope you’ll reconsider.”

The second message came four days later, from her closest friend of fifteen years — a woman who had been in the room when Marcus had once cornered Serena at a dinner party and spoken to her in a voice so low no one else could hear, his hand on her arm in a way that looked affectionate from across the room. That friend now wrote to say that she had run into Marcus at a neighborhood event and “just felt like Serena should know” how much he was hurting. “He still loves you,” the message said. “He doesn’t understand what went wrong.”

Over the following three weeks, Serena heard from a college roommate she hadn’t spoken to in two years, two couples who had been mutual friends of the marriage, and a colleague of Marcus’s she had met exactly once at a holiday party. Each message was individually reasonable. Each person seemed genuinely concerned. Each one carried, in different packaging, the same content: Marcus is suffering. You are the cause. You should reconsider.

“What undid me,” Serena told me later, “was not any one message. It was the pattern. And then feeling insane for noticing the pattern. Because if I said ‘he organized this,’ I sounded paranoid. But if it wasn’t organized — if all these people independently decided, in the same three weeks, to reach out on his behalf — that somehow seemed even more frightening.”

She was not paranoid. She was observing, with her physician’s trained eye, a recognizable clinical dynamic that has a name: the flying monkey campaign. The term comes from The Wizard of Oz — the Wicked Witch’s airborne enforcers, sent to do her bidding — and it describes the use of third parties by a narcissistic individual to maintain contact, exert pressure, gather intelligence, and manage their public narrative after a relationship ends or a conflict erupts. Understanding how it works — the psychology underneath it, the roles each messenger plays, and the specific ways it targets your recovery — is what this piece is about.

If you are in the middle of it right now, I want you to know: the confusion you feel is entirely appropriate. This dynamic is designed to create confusion. It works by weaponizing your love for people you genuinely care about, your instinct to defend yourself, and your very human need to be accurately known. None of those are weaknesses. They are the features of your character that this pattern exploits.

The Psychology Behind the Proxy Campaign: Triangulation, Proxy Abuse, and Social Isolation

To understand why the flying monkey dynamic works so effectively, you need to understand three interlocking clinical concepts: triangulation, proxy abuse, and deliberate social isolation. These are not just buzzwords. They are the structural architecture of what happens when a narcissistic individual deploys third parties against someone they can no longer directly control.

DEFINITION TRIANGULATION

A relational dynamic, first described in family systems theory by Murray Bowen, in which a third party is introduced into a two-person relationship to manage tension, deflect intimacy, or gain leverage. In narcissistic abuse contexts, triangulation involves introducing a third person — real or implied — as a tool for control: to provoke jealousy, manufacture competition, deliver messages, gather intelligence, or shift the target’s focus away from the narcissist’s behavior.

In plain terms: Instead of dealing with you directly, the narcissist routes their influence through other people. A third party is brought into what should be a two-person dynamic — and suddenly you’re managing not just the relationship with the narcissist, but also the relationship with whoever they’ve recruited. That triangulation keeps you off-balance, reactive, and focused anywhere but on your own healing.

Triangulation, as Murray Bowen originally described it in family systems theory, is the predictable way anxious relationships manage tension: when the emotional pressure between two people becomes too intense, a third is pulled in to dilute it. In healthy systems, this is often temporary — the triangle stabilizes, the tension dissipates, and the third party exits. In narcissistic triangulation, the process is ongoing and weaponized. The third party is not brought in to stabilize — they are brought in to destabilize you.

During the relationship itself, this often shows up as the introduction of an admirer “who really gets me,” the constant comparison to an ex who “never made things this hard,” or the deployment of family members to back up the narcissist’s account of an argument. These in-relationship uses of triangulation are corrosive enough. But the post-separation deployment — the flying monkey campaign — is arguably more sophisticated, because it operates at scale, across your entire social network, often without the narcissist’s fingerprints anywhere visible.

DEFINITION PROXY ABUSE

A form of coercive control, documented in Evan Stark’s clinical research, in which an abusive individual uses third parties as instruments of harassment, surveillance, pressure, or harm directed at the target. The proxy — often unaware of their role — acts as a conduit for contact, a vehicle for narrative dissemination, or a source of intelligence about the target’s emotional state and movements. Because the harm is delivered through someone else, it is harder to identify, name, or document.

In plain terms: The abusive person doesn’t do the dirty work directly. They get someone else to do it — often someone who genuinely believes they’re helping. The result is the same as direct contact, with the added layer that you can’t simply block the source, because the source is people you love.

Evan Stark’s research on coercive control is foundational here. Stark’s framework, developed over decades of clinical and forensic work, shifted the field’s understanding of intimate partner abuse away from discrete incidents and toward the recognition that abuse is fundamentally a pattern of control — a systematic effort to limit the target’s autonomy, agency, and capacity for independent action. Proxy abuse sits squarely within this framework: it is coercive control extended beyond the relationship’s formal end, delivered through the social network rather than the direct relationship. The “invisible” quality of proxy abuse — the fact that it is hard to document, hard to explain to someone who hasn’t experienced it, and easy for others to dismiss as coincidence or concern — is precisely what makes it so effective and so damaging.

The third element of the architecture is deliberate social isolation — or more precisely, in the post-separation context, social contamination. During the relationship itself, many targets of narcissistic abuse describe a gradual narrowing of their world: friendships that somehow fell away, family relationships that became complicated, a social circle that contracted around the narcissist’s preferences. This isolation is a feature, not a bug. It reduces the target’s access to outside perspectives, external validation of their own reality, and the practical support that might help them leave. The research literature on narcissistic abuse syndrome consistently documents this pattern.

After separation, the dynamic shifts: instead of isolating you from people, the narcissist contaminates your access to those people. They can’t cut you off from your own mother — but they can make your mother a vehicle for their narrative. They can’t remove your best friend from your life — but they can recruit that friend, however unwittingly, as a messenger. The result is a social environment in which you cannot fully trust any conduit that also has access to the narcissist. Your social world, which you were counting on for recovery support, becomes riddled with doubt.

The neuroscience is worth pausing on here. Research on social rejection and ostracism — including the foundational work of Naomi Eisenberger and her colleagues at UCLA — has established that the brain processes social exclusion through the same neural pathways as physical pain. When the flying monkey campaign results in former allies withdrawing, going cold, or actively treating you differently, the brain experiences this as injury. It is not weakness to be profoundly destabilized by the experience of your social world reorganizing against you. It is neurology. The physical symptoms of narcissistic abuse — the disrupted sleep, the hypervigilance, the inability to concentrate — are the body’s response to a threat that is real, even when its mechanisms are invisible.

“Coercive control refers to a strategic pattern of behavior designed to secure and expand masculine dominance through the deployment of intimidation, isolation, and control. The pattern is cumulative and context-specific, with each incident deriving its significance from the larger constellation of behaviors in which it is embedded.”— Evan Stark, PhD, Coercive Control

Evan Stark, Coercive Control: How Men Entrap Women in Personal Life (2007)

Understanding the clinical architecture of what’s happening — that it has a name, that it has been documented, that it follows recognizable patterns — does not make it stop. But it does something equally important: it interrupts the self-pathologizing. The problem is not that you are paranoid. The problem is not that you are too sensitive or too attached. The problem is that you are accurately perceiving a real pattern of coercive influence, delivered through people you love, by someone who understands exactly how to exploit your relational loyalties. That clarity is the beginning of protection.

The Different Roles They Play (and What Each One Costs You)

Flying monkeys don’t all operate the same way, and understanding the different roles helps you respond differently to each one. What follows is a clinical taxonomy — not a judgment of the people in these roles, most of whom are acting in good faith on incomplete information, but a map of the functions they serve in the proxy campaign.

The messenger delivers information the narcissist wants you to have — how they’re doing, what they’re saying, how they’re suffering — without the narcissist having to break the no-contact boundary themselves. This allows the narcissist to maintain plausible deniability (“I haven’t contacted her at all”) while still breaking through your boundary by proxy. The cost to you: re-engagement with the narrative, intrusion on the space you’ve created, and often a reactivation of grief or guilt. The messenger’s outreach may feel like love — and in the messenger’s experience, it is. They have no idea they’re functioning as a delivery mechanism.

The peacemaker is usually someone who genuinely loves both parties and is genuinely distressed by the conflict. They’re not malicious — they’re trying to restore a dynamic that felt comfortable to them. But they’re operating from incomplete information, and their pressure on you to reconcile, forgive, “work things out,” or “not let things get this far” asks you to sacrifice your own needs for everyone else’s comfort. Sound familiar? It should. It’s the same demand the relationship itself was making. The peacemaker, however loving, is functioning as an arm of the system that required you to suppress yourself. The fawn response that the relationship trained into you is exactly what the peacemaker’s pressure activates.

The spy provides the narcissist with information about you — your life, your relationships, your emotional state — which the narcissist can use to calibrate their next move, maintain a sense of connection, or weaponize in a future conflict. This role is sometimes played knowingly, but far more often by well-meaning people who don’t realize their casual updates are being used as intelligence. The “how are you doing?” that turns into a detailed conversation about your healing, your new plans, your current emotional state — that information travels. Assume it will. Not as a counsel of paranoia, but as a practical matter of protecting your recovery.

The character witness spreads the narcissist’s version of events more broadly — to your family, your community, your colleagues — building a social narrative that positions you as the aggressor, the unstable one, the one who “did this to a good person.” This is the most insidious form, because the smear campaign often reaches you secondhand, through other people’s changed behavior toward you, before you even know the story has been told. You arrive at a gathering and something is different. Someone who used to greet you warmly is now polite but distant. A friendship that felt solid seems to have quietly cooled. You don’t know why — and that not knowing is itself a form of psychological harm. It mimics the gaslighting of the relationship itself, leaving you questioning your own perceptions rather than accurately identifying what’s happening.

Keisha, a trauma nurse in Miami who’d separated from her husband after eight years, described the experience of watching her social circle slowly reorganize around her husband’s narrative over a period of months. “I’d show up to things and feel the temperature change,” she said. “People were polite, but something was different. It took me a while to realize that what I was feeling was people who’d already decided what had happened.” That erosion of your social reality — of the people who know and see you — is one of the most painful dimensions of the flying monkey dynamic, and one that rarely gets named for what it is.

There is also a fifth category worth naming: the well-meaning enabler who is not recruited by the narcissist but operates on their own instinct to “fix” what feels broken. These are people who care about you deeply and are uncomfortable with rupture — who may have their own unresolved discomfort with conflict, boundaries, or estrangement, and who act from that discomfort rather than from the narcissist’s direction. Their impact on your recovery can be just as disrupting, even if their motivation is entirely loving. Recognizing this distinction matters, because it informs how you respond: with a firmly boundaried “I’m not discussing this” rather than with the wariness you might extend to someone you suspect is actively serving the campaign.

What all of these roles have in common is this: they introduce the narcissist’s agenda into your psychological space without the narcissist being present. They keep you entangled — in justifying yourself, in defending your reality, in managing other people’s feelings about your choices — at precisely the moment when your energy needs to be directed toward your own healing. CPTSD recovery from narcissistic abuse requires a kind of deliberate narrowing of focus that the flying monkey dynamic systematically disrupts. That is its function. Understanding that is protection.

The Both/And Reality: Flying Monkeys Aren’t Always Villains

Here is something I want to name directly, because it is easy to lose in the heat of the experience: the majority of people who function as flying monkeys are not bad people. They are not villains. They are people who love someone who has hurt you, who have been given one side of a story, and who are responding to that story with the care and concern they would want someone to extend to them.

The both/and truth of the flying monkey dynamic is this: their outreach can be genuinely harmful to your recovery AND the people behind it can be acting from real love. Both are true simultaneously. Collapsing them — either by excusing the impact because of good intentions, or by demonizing the messengers because of their impact — costs you something important. The first costs you your right to protect yourself. The second costs you the nuance that will eventually allow you to re-engage with some of these people, on your terms, when you’re more grounded.

The narcissist is skillful precisely because they present a version of events that is internally coherent and emotionally compelling. They are not typically lying in ways that are easy to disprove — they are framing true details within a false context, selecting the evidence that supports their narrative and omitting everything that would complicate it. The people who receive this version and respond to it are doing exactly what they should be doing with the information they have. The problem is not their character. The problem is their information.

This framing matters practically. If you approach every flying monkey as a conscious agent of harm, you will tend to either over-disclose — defending yourself at length, providing more information than is safe to share — or to permanently estrange people who, with time and distance, might come to see the fuller picture. Neither outcome serves you. The more useful frame is: this person has incomplete information and is acting from it in good faith. I can acknowledge their concern without engaging with its content. I can protect my recovery without burning the relationship.

It is also worth acknowledging — with compassion rather than self-blame — that you are probably not the only person in this person’s life who has been shaped into a role they didn’t fully choose. The narcissistic family system assigns roles to everyone in it: the golden child, the scapegoat, the peacekeeper, the witness. The flying monkeys in your situation may have been playing their assigned roles — managing the narcissist’s anxiety, mediating their conflicts, protecting their image — for years before your relationship with the narcissist even began. Understanding this does not require you to excuse their impact on you. It does require that you resist the simplifying narrative that makes everyone associated with the narcissist a knowing participant in your harm.

The both/and framing also applies to your own experience of the flying monkey campaign. It is possible to feel grief for the friendships that have been contaminated AND to feel rage at the manipulation that caused that contamination. It is possible to miss the version of your mother who was simply your mother — before she became a vehicle for your ex-partner’s narrative — AND to hold a clear boundary against engaging with the content of her outreach. The grief of narcissistic abuse has many layers, and the layer that involves watching your social world become complicated is one of the least-discussed and most painful.

What the both/and framing protects you from is the rigidity that can calcify in abuse recovery — the all-or-nothing thinking that is itself a trauma response, a way the nervous system tries to create safety through categorical judgment. The emotional flashbacks of complex trauma tend to push us toward absolute positions: this person is safe, that person is dangerous; this memory is real, that one is not. The reality of the flying monkey dynamic, as of most relational realities, resists those absolutes. Holding the complexity — imperfectly, over time — is part of how healing moves forward.

How to Protect Yourself From the Proxy Campaign

The most important thing I can tell you about navigating flying monkeys is this: your goal is not to win the narrative battle. It’s to protect your recovery. Those two goals are often in direct conflict, and conflating them is one of the main ways the flying monkey dynamic succeeds in pulling you back in.

Extend no-contact to the flying monkeys — at least temporarily. This doesn’t mean forever, and it doesn’t mean you’ve decided these people are bad. It means that right now, anyone who is actively transmitting the narcissist’s narrative into your life is a conduit for contact, regardless of their intentions. You can decide later — once you’re more settled in your own reality — how you want to re-engage with specific people. Right now, the door needs to be closed enough to allow your own version of events to stabilize. The principle here is the same as the one that makes responding to the silent treatment so counterproductive: any engagement, however small, signals that the channel is still open.

You don’t owe anyone your side of the story. This is one of the hardest things for most people to accept, especially driven women who have been trained to manage other people’s perceptions of them. But defending yourself to flying monkeys usually backfires: it provides the narcissist with more information about your emotional state, it keeps you in a reactive posture rather than a grounded one, and it rarely actually changes anyone’s mind. People who want the full story and are genuinely open to it will find a way to get it when you are ready. People who have already decided don’t benefit from your explanations — and your explanations, delivered from a place of distress, are likely to confirm whatever narrative they’ve been given about your “instability.”

Be selective about what you share and with whom. Assume that anything you say to someone who has access to the narcissist will eventually reach them. This isn’t cynicism — it’s just accurate. Adjust your disclosures accordingly, not by lying, but by keeping details of your healing, your plans, your new relationships, and your emotional state out of the channels that lead back to the person you’re trying to create distance from. Rebuilding your self-worth after narcissistic abuse requires a protected internal space — and that space is undermined every time information about your inner life travels through contaminated channels.

Have a short, non-escalating script ready. When someone reaches out with the narcissist’s version of events, you don’t need to improvise in the moment — which is when you are most likely to over-disclose, defend yourself, or say something that gets transmitted back. A prepared response might sound like: “I appreciate you reaching out. I’m doing okay and focusing on moving forward. I’m not in a place to discuss [their name] right now.” Then stop there. You’ve acknowledged them without entering the narrative, without providing ammunition for further transmission, and without burning the relationship. The key is brevity: every additional sentence is another opportunity for the conversation to go somewhere you don’t want it to go.

Work on tolerating the false narrative. This is the hardest piece — the piece that requires the most clinical support. The fact that people who know you believe a version of events that isn’t true is deeply painful. Your instinct is to correct it. But some versions of your story will circulate without your intervention, believed by people who may never update their view. Learning to tolerate that — to locate your sense of self somewhere that doesn’t depend on other people’s accurate knowledge of you — is some of the deepest healing work there is. The obsessive thought loops that narcissistic abuse tends to create are often fed by exactly this: the need to correct a record that is currently wrong. Interrupting that loop is not about accepting injustice. It is about recognizing that the energy you spend on the external narrative is energy stolen from your internal rebuilding.

Priya, after several months of work, arrived at something she described simply: “I stopped needing the people who got the wrong story to know the right one. That’s not because I gave up. It’s because I finally knew it myself clearly enough that I didn’t need them to confirm it.” That internal consolidation — being the final authority on your own experience — is exactly where this work leads.

Practical Tools: Journaling Prompts and Recovery Exercises

The flying monkey dynamic activates very specific psychological vulnerabilities — the need to be accurately known, the fear that the false narrative will become permanent, the grief of watching relationships become complicated, the rage at the injustice of being targeted in this way. The exercises below are designed to address each of these directly. They are not a substitute for clinical support — if the flying monkey campaign is significantly disrupting your functioning, working with a trauma-informed therapist is the most important thing you can do. But they are tools you can use between sessions, in the moments when the dynamic is most activated.

Exercise 1: The Narrative Anchor. The flying monkey dynamic works partly by creating doubt about your own version of events — when enough people are telling you a different story, it becomes difficult to stay grounded in your own experience. A narrative anchor is a written account, for your eyes only, of what you actually experienced in the relationship. Not a legal document, not a polished account for someone else’s consumption — a raw, unfiltered record of specific incidents, specific moments, specific things that were said and done. Write it in as much detail as you can. Return to it when the incoming messages make your own reality start to feel unstable. This is your record. It belongs to no one else and is answerable to no one else.

Exercise 2: The Grief Inventory. Because the flying monkey dynamic involves relationship losses — friendships that have become complicated, family dynamics that have shifted — it generates grief alongside the other responses. That grief often gets suppressed because it doesn’t fit the cultural narrative about leaving a bad relationship (which is supposed to be a relief, not a loss). Give yourself permission to inventory the specific losses: this friendship, this version of this family member, this part of your social world. Write them down. Acknowledge them. The grief of what was never real and the grief of collateral damage are both worth tending.

Journaling Prompts for the Flying Monkey Experience:

What do I actually know about this person’s motivations, versus what I’m assuming? What is the most charitable interpretation of their outreach — and is it consistent with how they’ve behaved toward me over the full course of our relationship?

What would I say to a close friend in exactly this situation — dealing with these same messages, this same erosion of their social world, this same pressure to re-engage? What would I tell her about what she deserves?

What is the story I am most afraid the narcissist is telling about me? And what do I know — concretely, specifically — about who I actually am, that contradicts that story? Write both. Notice the gap between the fear and the evidence.

These prompts are designed to slow down the reactive cycle — the one in which incoming messages immediately trigger either the urge to defend yourself or the collapse into doubt — and to introduce just enough space for a different response to become possible. The emotional flashbacks that trauma creates can make that space feel impossible to access. Writing creates a sliver of it even when the nervous system is flooded.

When to Seek Help — and What Recovery Actually Looks Like

The flying monkey dynamic is one of the most destabilizing elements of narcissistic abuse recovery — not because it is the most overtly harmful, but because it contaminates the social environment that recovery depends on. You need people around you who see you clearly, who know your story, who can hold a stable and accurate perception of who you are. The flying monkey campaign specifically targets that — it makes the people you most need less able to be what you need them to be.

There are particular signs that this dynamic has reached a level that requires clinical support. If the incoming messages are significantly disrupting your sleep, your concentration, or your ability to function — that is a signal. If you are spending more mental energy managing the external narrative than attending to your own healing — that is a signal. If the grief of watching relationships become complicated has started to feel like confirmation that leaving was wrong — that is a signal worth bringing to a therapist who understands how long narcissistic abuse recovery actually takes.

What clinical support offers in this context is not, primarily, advice about how to handle each message. It offers something more foundational: a reliable external relationship in which your version of reality is consistently held and validated. For survivors of chronic gaslighting, whose inner compass has been systematically undermined, having a therapeutic relationship in which your perceptions are taken seriously is itself a form of healing. Over time, that internal compass becomes less dependent on external confirmation — which is precisely what makes the flying monkey campaign lose its power.

The complex PTSD that can develop from narcissistic abuse involves nervous system dysregulation, not just cognitive distress — and that dysregulation responds better to body-based and relational interventions than to psychoeducation alone. EMDR and somatic approaches are particularly effective. Understanding this dynamic intellectually is valuable. But the healing happens in the body, in the therapeutic relationship, in the slow and imperfect process of learning to trust your own experience again.

Recovery from the flying monkey campaign tends to move through recognizable stages. First, acute disruption — each incoming message landing as a shock, the pattern not yet fully visible. Second, anger — often a relief after the confusion, because anger is grounding and contains information about what you value and what you won’t accept. Third, a longer, quieter stage that involves making peace with the false narrative: accepting that some people will believe a version of your story that is wrong, and locating your sense of self somewhere that doesn’t require their correction.

That third stage is the destination. It is not resignation. It is not indifference. It is the hard-won recognition that your reality does not require other people’s validation to be real. The people who matter — who are curious, who are genuinely open to your experience, who are not enmeshed with the narcissist’s survival needs — will eventually come to understand what happened. Some will not. Learning to hold that without it destroying your sense of self is the final and most liberating move in the process of rebuilding your worth after narcissistic abuse.

Serena said something in our final session together that I’ve shared, with her permission, many times since: “I used to think the goal was to get my name cleared. Now I realize the goal was to be someone whose name doesn’t need clearing — at least not in my own head.” That shift — from managing the external narrative to inhabiting your own truth — is the work. It takes time. It takes support. And it is entirely possible, even from inside what currently feels like the most complicated mess. You did not earn this. But you can absolutely recover from it, and the clarity you will have on the other side about your own character, your own needs, and your own relational discernment will be something no smear campaign can touch.

If you recognize yourself in this article and are ready to explore working together, I invite you to reach out about working with Annie. The recovery work for narcissistic abuse — including the specific challenge of navigating the flying monkey campaign — is work I do with clients every day. You don’t have to navigate it alone.