Flying Monkeys: How Narcissists Weaponize Your Support System

RELATIONAL TRAUMA • April 07, 2026

The Second Wave of Betrayal

It’s 9:40 on a Tuesday night, and Noelle is sitting at her kitchen table with her phone face down beside her. She’s 41, director of clinical operations at a healthcare startup, the person three departments call when a rollout is falling apart. Two weeks ago, she told her ex-husband she was done being contacted outside of custody logistics, a decision that had taken her most of a year to reach, partly because she’d spent a long time confusing his early intensity for genuine devotion and hadn’t wanted to admit how much that confusion had cost her. She expected him to be angry. She didn’t expect the group text from his sister, her own college roommate, and a neighbor she’s waved to for six years, all asking, gently, whether she’s “doing okay,” whether she’s “sure this is the right decision,” whether she’s “thought about what this is doing to him.”

She reads the messages three times. Then she starts drafting a reply with dates, screenshots, a timeline. She deletes it. She starts again.

In my work with clients who are setting boundaries with someone who has a pattern of controlling or manipulative behavior, this moment shows up constantly, and it’s rarely the boundary itself that does the most damage. It’s what happens next: the sense that the people you thought were neutral, or even on your side, have suddenly become a chorus repeating someone else’s version of events. Therapists and writers in this space have started using a shorthand for it, borrowed from a movie most of us watched as kids. The term is “flying monkeys,” and it’s worth being precise about what it is and isn’t before we go any further.

What People Mean By “Flying Monkeys”

Here’s the important caveat first: “flying monkeys” is not a clinical term. You won’t find it in a diagnostic manual, and no licensed clinician is using it in a treatment plan. It’s informal shorthand, popularized in narcissistic-abuse recovery communities, and it describes a pattern of behavior rather than a diagnosable condition in either the person doing the recruiting or the people being recruited.

That last part matters more than most recovery content acknowledges. The people relaying pressure back to you are not automatically co-conspirators. Most of the time, they’re something closer to confused bystanders who’ve been given one version of a complicated story. It’s worth separating out what’s actually happening, because these situations get lumped together constantly and they are not the same thing:

• Triangulation. One person deliberately routes communication through a third party to control how information flows, often to avoid direct accountability.
• Rumor and misinformation. Details get distorted as they pass from person to person, with no one necessarily intending harm.
• Loyalty conflicts. Someone who cares about both of you and doesn’t know who to believe, or feels caught in the middle.
• Organizational politics or family expectations. Pressure that comes from a system’s rules and roles (a family’s unspoken hierarchy, a workplace’s unwritten norms) rather than from one person’s individual agenda.
• Ordinary disagreement or legitimate concern. Someone who actually thinks you’re making a mistake and says so, without malice.
• Harassment, stalking, or coordinated abuse. A pattern of repeated, unwanted contact or surveillance, sometimes involving multiple people, that is designed to intimidate or control. This can be a crime, and it’s a different category from the examples above.

Most of the messages Noelle received that Tuesday night fell into the first four categories: people who love someone in the situation, who’ve heard one side, and who are uncomfortable with conflict. None of that makes the messages less exhausting to receive. It does mean that calling every one of them a “flying monkey,” as though they were all acting in bad faith, isn’t accurate, and it isn’t useful. The goal of this piece is not to teach you to see manipulation everywhere. It’s to help you tell the difference between a confused relative and an actual coordinated pressure campaign, because you’ll need different responses for each.

DARVO and the Smear Campaign, Named Correctly

I recently went back through Jennifer J. Freyd, PhD’s original writing on this, and I haven’t been able to stop returning to how precisely she named something I see constantly in session. Freyd is a psychology researcher, Professor Emerit at the University of Oregon, and the founder of the Center for Institutional Courage. In a 1997 paper, she introduced the term DARVO: Deny, Attack, and Reverse Victim and Offender. Most recovery content uses this acronym without ever naming who developed it, which has always struck me as a strange erasure of a woman who built an entire evidence base around it.

What Freyd’s research documents is exactly the pattern that shows up in a smear campaign: the person on the receiving end of a boundary often doesn’t just get angry, they get busy. They tell a story in which they’re the wounded party, and the person who left, or blocked them, or asked for space, becomes the unstable one, the cruel one, the one who “abandoned” them without cause. The people who hear that story first, and who don’t have access to the fuller picture, are the ones who end up relaying pressure back.

None of this requires that the person telling the story has a diagnosed personality disorder. Narcissistic Personality Disorder is a specific clinical diagnosis, made by a licensed clinician after a structured evaluation, and it is not something you or I can determine about an ex-partner, a parent, a colleague, or anyone else from the outside. What we can talk about, responsibly, is a pattern of behavior: DARVO, triangulation, and intermittent pressure campaigns are observable, describable actions. Whether the person doing them meets criteria for a personality disorder is a separate question, one that isn’t answerable from a blog post, and one that doesn’t actually change what you need to do to protect yourself.

How This Pattern Hooks the Driven Woman

Noelle’s instinct, the night the group text arrived, was the same instinct that had made her excellent at her job for fifteen years: gather the facts, present them clearly, resolve the confusion. “I have the calendar,” she told me two weeks later, still holding her coffee cup with both hands like it was cold outside instead of just cold in the room we were in. “I have the emails. I have the therapist’s note about why we changed the pickup schedule. I kept thinking, if I just show them the timeline, they’ll understand. And every time I sent something, it got worse. They said I was ‘building a case.’ They said I sounded ‘cold.’ I have never in my life been called cold.”

Sitting with Noelle that afternoon, I felt the particular ache I’ve come to associate with clients who are excellent at their jobs and terrible, through no fault of their own, at this specific problem. Not because she’d done anything wrong. Because the skill that made her successful everywhere else, the instinct to resolve ambiguity with evidence, was the exact skill this situation was designed to punish.

What I’ve come to think of as the credibility trap is something I see in driven, capable women again and again. She believes, reasonably, that the truth is simply a matter of presenting the facts well enough. But a person who is running a DARVO narrative isn’t actually interested in facts. The facts were never the point. The point was managing perception, and every additional email, every timeline, every screenshot Noelle sent got read by her audience not as clarity but as evidence of her being “too invested,” “too intense,” exactly the story her ex was already telling about her. She wasn’t losing the argument. She’d never actually been in one. She was performing for a jury that had already reached a verdict before she opened her mouth.

This is the part that’s hardest to sit with, and I don’t think it gets said honestly enough: sometimes the most strategic thing you can do is stop trying to be understood by people who’ve already decided not to understand you. That’s not defeat. It’s triage. For a lot of driven women, the instinct to over-explain traces back further than this one relationship, to an earlier pattern of childhood emotional neglect that taught her she had to prove her feelings were valid before anyone would take them seriously.

The Nervous System Under Social Threat

Here’s what the research on social pain has been showing for years, and what I watch play out in real time with clients like Noelle. Losing your support network doesn’t register in the body as a minor social inconvenience. It registers as danger.

Think of it like this: for most of human history, being cut off from your group wasn’t an inconvenience, it was a survival threat. Your nervous system still runs on that old software, even though the stakes today are a group text instead of a hunting party. When people who are supposed to be safe start relaying suspicion or pressure, your body doesn’t parse the nuance. It reads: the group is turning. And it responds the way it would to any threat, with your heart rate climbing, your sleep fragmenting, your thoughts looping the same three sentences at 2 a.m.

Stephen Porges, PhD, a neuroscientist at Indiana University and the developer of Polyvagal Theory, has spent decades studying how the nervous system constantly, unconsciously evaluates who is safe and who isn’t, a process he calls neuroception. What I keep coming back to in his work is how automatic this process is. You don’t decide to feel unsafe when three people you love start questioning your judgment on the same night. Your body decides for you, milliseconds before your thinking brain catches up. Which is why Noelle wasn’t overreacting when her hands shook reading those texts. Her nervous system was doing exactly what nervous systems are built to do: treating social abandonment as an emergency.

Which is also why the urge to over-explain, to send one more email, one more piece of evidence, is so hard to resist. It isn’t a character flaw. It’s a nervous system trying to re-secure a place in the group before the group finishes deciding you don’t belong in it anymore. Understanding that doesn’t make the urge disappear. It does make it easier to recognize the urge for what it is: panic, not proof that you’re doing something wrong.

There’s a specific texture to this kind of panic that’s worth naming, because it doesn’t always look like panic from the outside. Sometimes it looks like productivity. Noelle described it to me as feeling almost focused, almost calm, while she drafted those timelines at midnight. Her hands were steady. Her sentences were clear. It was only afterward, reading back what she’d written, that she noticed the paragraph had grown to eleven hundred words defending a version of events that, six weeks earlier, she wouldn’t have thought needed defending at all. That’s what a nervous system doing damage control under threat can look like in someone who is used to being competent under pressure: composed on the surface, and quietly bracing underneath.

This is also where sleep tends to go first. Not dramatically, usually. A person doesn’t announce that she’s stopped sleeping. She just notices, a few weeks in, that she’s been waking at 3 a.m. with her jaw tight, replaying a sentence someone sent her, rehearsing a reply she’ll never send. That’s the amygdala doing exactly what it evolved to do: keeping watch for the next signal that the group might be turning further. It doesn’t know the difference between an actual physical threat and a cousin’s passive-aggressive text. It responds to both the same way, because for most of human history, there wasn’t a meaningful difference. Being cast out of the group and being left to face a physical threat alone were, functionally, the same risk.

Both/And: Holding the Complexity of the Betrayal

Recovery from this specific kind of secondary betrayal asks you to hold two things that don’t cancel each other out, no matter how much you want one of them to win.

You can hold that the people relaying pressure to you might be genuinely caring, decent people who’ve been given a distorted picture. AND you can hold that their behavior, right now, in this moment, is harmful to you, and that you’re allowed to protect yourself from it regardless of their intentions.

You can hold that it’s deeply unfair to be recast as the villain in a story where you were the one who got hurt. AND you can hold that spending your energy trying to correct that story, person by person, may not be a fight you can win, or one that’s worth the cost of fighting.

You can hold that losing a social circle, even one built partly on misinformation, is a real and disorienting grief. AND you can hold that a circle organized around believing whoever tells the more comfortable story was never fully steady ground to begin with.

Tanya learned this the hard way, over about four months, in a way that looked nothing like Noelle’s situation but rhymed with it underneath. Tanya is 37, a senior product manager at a mid-size tech company, the kind of person who color-codes her calendar and has never once, in the two years I’ve worked with her, shown up late. She came to therapy not because of a romantic breakup but because of her father, whose pattern of control over the family had calcified over decades into something everyone had quietly agreed to call “just how Dad is.”

When Tanya stopped attending the extended family’s Sunday dinners, no one confronted her directly. Instead, her aunt started texting her mother, who started calling Tanya’s brother, who eventually showed up at her apartment holding a container of soup her mother had made, “just to check in.” Tanya let him in. She always let him in. He sat at her counter and said, carefully, like he’d rehearsed it in the elevator, “Dad’s really hurt. He doesn’t understand what he did.”

“I know you’re just the messenger,” Tanya told him, and she remembers her voice sounding strange to her, flatter than she felt. “I’m not mad at you. But I need you to tell him I’m not discussing this through you. If he wants to talk to me, he can call me himself. And I need you to stop being the person who carries his messages, because it’s putting you in the middle of something that isn’t yours to carry.”

Her brother didn’t say much. He ate a piece of the bread she’d offered him, standing at the counter, and left about twenty minutes later, the soup container still on the table, neither of them having mentioned it again. Tanya told me afterward that she didn’t know if it had worked, if he’d actually stop, or if her father would simply find someone else to send. She’d been working through a stack of books on attachment theory for months by then, trying to understand why she’d always been the one who let her brother in, no matter what he was carrying when he arrived.

What I want to name about Tanya’s situation, because it’s different from Noelle’s in a way that matters: this wasn’t a smear campaign engineered by someone consciously running a manipulation playbook. It was a family system, decades old, where everyone had learned a role, and Tanya’s brother wasn’t a co-conspirator so much as the person who’d always been handed the job of keeping the peace. Both things were true in that kitchen. Her brother was, in that moment, functioning as a flying monkey, carrying pressure on behalf of someone else. And he was also, plausibly, someone who loved his sister and had no real understanding of the position he’d been put in. Tanya didn’t have to resolve which of those was “more true” in order to set the boundary. She just had to hold both, and act anyway.

The Systemic Lens: Why Ambiguous Abuse Gets Disbelieved

We can’t fully understand why flying-monkey dynamics work without looking at the systems around them, not just the individuals inside them. Psychological abuse rarely leaves a mark anyone else can see. There’s no bruise, no photograph, nothing to hold up as proof. Our culture has a well-documented habit of defaulting to “there are two sides to every story” specifically in cases where one side left no physical evidence, which quietly stacks the deck against the person who was harmed.

Evan Stark, PhD, MSW, the late Rutgers professor who developed the framework of coercive control, spent much of his career arguing that our legal and cultural systems were built to recognize discrete, visible acts of violence and were poorly equipped to recognize an ongoing pattern of control that leaves no single incident to point to. What stayed with me in his work is how squarely this maps onto what happens with flying monkeys. A single dismissive text from a sister-in-law doesn’t look like abuse to anyone watching from outside. It’s the pattern, the volume, the coordination, sometimes explicit and sometimes not, that constitutes the harm. And patterns are much harder to prove than incidents, which is exactly why they’re so effective.

There’s also a gendered layer worth naming. When a woman sets a firm boundary, she’s often read as having violated an unspoken expectation that women stay accommodating, forgiving, and available for repair work, even in relationships that hurt them. A person running a DARVO narrative can exploit that expectation efficiently: society is generally more comfortable comforting the person who’s visibly upset than validating the person who’s calmly holding a line. None of this excuses harmful behavior. It does explain why the people around a survivor so often side, by default, with whoever is crying loudest, rather than whoever is telling the truth.

Recognizing this systemic pattern doesn’t make the isolation easier in the moment. But it can lift some of the shame. You are not failing some test of likability that everyone else is passing. You’re up against a set of cultural defaults that were never built with your safety in mind.

This shows up differently depending on where you sit in a family or a workplace. A woman who is the primary earner, or the one who holds the family together logistically, often gets read as having more to lose by “causing conflict,” which paradoxically hands everyone around her more power to pressure her into staying quiet. A woman in a large extended family, a tight-knit religious community, or a small industry where everyone knows everyone else’s business faces a version of this that’s structurally harder to walk away from than the situation of someone with a smaller, more replaceable social circle. None of these structural realities are your fault, and none of them mean you’re stuck. They do mean that the advice to simply “cut everyone off” ignores how unevenly distributed that option actually is.

Safety Planning and Practical Boundaries

Everything in this section depends heavily on context, and I want to be honest about that instead of offering one-size-fits-all rules, because the rules genuinely change depending on your situation.

If there is any harassment, stalking, threats, or physical danger involved, this is not a “manage your family group text” situation. What you may be dealing with is coercive control, and it calls for domestic violence advocates trained in safety planning, not general relationship advice. If you are in immediate danger, call 911. The National Domestic Violence Hotline (1-800-799-7233, or text START to 88788) and the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline are both available around the clock if you need someone to talk to about safety, fear, or crisis-level distress. A therapist or domestic violence advocate can help you build a safety plan specific to your situation, including guidance on documentation and evidence that accounts for your actual risk level, which is different from generic internet advice about “getting proof.”

Digital safety matters here more than most recovery content acknowledges. If someone has access to your devices, shared accounts, location sharing, or family phone plans, a domestic violence advocate or a tech-safety organization can help you audit that access safely, in a way that doesn’t tip off someone who might escalate in response to being locked out. This is not a project to take on alone if there’s any risk involved.

If custody is involved, a family law attorney, not a blog post, should guide decisions about contact, documentation, and communication style. Courts often expect a paper trail of respectful, businesslike communication; a therapist can help you regulate enough to write those messages, but the legal strategy belongs with a lawyer.

If your situation involves immigration status, financial dependency, or a disability that affects your independence, no-contact may not be simple or even safe to implement quickly. These are real structural constraints, not signs that you’re “not ready” to leave or set boundaries. An advocate who specializes in your specific situation, whether that’s an immigration attorney, a benefits counselor, or a disability rights organization, can help you sequence safety realistically.

If this is happening at work, keep communication professional and documented, and involve HR if a colleague’s behavior is affecting your ability to do your job. HR’s role is to protect the organization and assess policy violations, which sometimes overlaps with your interests and sometimes doesn’t; it isn’t a substitute for legal or clinical support.

For the more ordinary version of this problem, the one most readers are dealing with, a few things tend to help. The Grey Rock method gives you a way to respond to pressure without escalating or over-explaining: something brief, neutral, and repeatable, like “I’m not discussing this, and I’m not going to keep having this conversation,” said calmly and then followed through on. You don’t owe anyone your evidence file. And you get to decide, person by person, whether limited contact, full no-contact, or something in between makes sense, based on your actual relationship with each person, not a rule you read online that assumes everyone’s situation looks the same.

How to Heal: The Path Forward

Recovering from this kind of secondary betrayal asks for something specific: the willingness to be misunderstood by people whose understanding you can’t actually control, while still staying accountable to the people whose understanding matters and who are willing to actually listen. For most of the women I work with, this is where narcissistic abuse recovery work and this particular grief overlap most.

That’s a strange kind of grief to carry, because it doesn’t resolve the way other grief sometimes does. There’s rarely a moment where everyone suddenly sees clearly what happened. Some people never will. Sitting with that, rather than continuing to fight for a verdict that may never come, is often the actual work.

Judith Herman, MD, the Harvard psychiatrist and author of Trauma and Recovery, described recovery from complex trauma as moving through three overlapping stages: establishing safety, telling the fuller story of what happened, and reconnecting with ordinary life. For someone recovering from a flying-monkey dynamic, that reconnection often means rebuilding a support system more slowly and more deliberately than before, one where trust has to be earned again through consistency rather than assumed because someone shares your last name or your group chat.

The nervous system regulation work matters here as much as any conversation about who said what. A body that has spent months bracing for the next message from the group chat needs active practice remembering what safety feels like, not just an intellectual argument that it’s now allowed to relax.

Noelle, the last time I saw her, had stopped drafting the long explanatory texts. She still gets the occasional message from someone in the old group chat, some version of “just checking in,” and she’s stopped answering most of them the way she used to. “I used to think if I explained it well enough, they’d finally get it,” she told me. “Now I think some of them will get it eventually, and some of them never will, and either way I’m not available to keep making the case.” She didn’t sound triumphant saying it. She sounded tired, and steady, in a way that felt more true than triumph would have.

What both Noelle’s situation and Tanya’s situation point toward, underneath their real differences, is that this kind of betrayal asks you to give up something that feels, at first, like giving up on justice: the need for everyone to eventually agree with your version of events. What replaces it isn’t indifference. It’s a narrower, sturdier commitment to the people who actually show up, and a willingness to let the rest remain unresolved. For many of the clients I work with, that shift happens alongside deeper work on complex trauma more broadly, since a pattern like this one rarely arrives without a longer history underneath it.

If you recognize your own situation somewhere in this piece, that recognition is worth paying attention to. It doesn’t mean every person in your life fits a category from this guide, and it doesn’t mean the person you’re in conflict with meets criteria for a clinical diagnosis. It means something in the pattern is familiar, and patterns are usually worth naming, carefully, with someone who can help you sort out what’s actually happening in your specific circumstances.

This article is educational and does not replace individualized clinical, legal, or safety-planning guidance. If you are in immediate danger, call 911. For confidential support related to domestic violence, contact the National Domestic Violence Hotline at 1-800-799-7233 or text START to 88788. If you are in emotional crisis, the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline is available by call or text, 24 hours a day.

Related Reading

• Freyd, Jennifer J. Betrayal Trauma: The Logic of Forgetting Childhood Abuse. Harvard University Press, 1996.
• Stark, Evan. Coercive Control: The Entrapment of Women in Personal Life. Oxford University Press, 2007.
• Herman, Judith Lewis. Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence, from Domestic Abuse to Political Terror. Basic Books, 1992.
• Van der Kolk, Bessel. The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma. Viking, 2014.

Medical Disclaimer