Flying Monkeys: How Narcissists Recruit Your People Against You—and How to Respond

Flying Monkeys: How Narcissists Recruit Your People Against You—and How to Respond

NARCISSISTIC ABUSE • April 24, 2026

Last reviewed: June 2026 by Annie Wright, LMFT

When the People You Trusted Start Carrying His Messages

Your sister calls on a Tuesday evening, which isn’t unusual. What’s unusual is the first thing she says: “He reached out to me. He’s really struggling. I think you should talk to him.” And then you spend the next thirty minutes not talking about how you’re doing—which is, honestly, incredibly hard right now—but defending your decision to your sister, who loves you, who you thought was entirely on your side, and who is now inexplicably carrying the perspective of the person you’ve just left.

Or it’s the colleague you lunch with every two weeks, who heard something from someone who heard something from him, and who “just wants to make sure you know there’s another side to things.” Or it’s your mother, calling with that particular worried tone that means she’s already been in contact with him and is now serving as an unwilling courier for his version of events. Or it’s someone from your professional world, reaching out with a concern that’s been so carefully framed that you can’t tell whether it’s genuine or sent.

What you’re experiencing has a name borrowed from a place you wouldn’t expect: The Wizard of Oz. These are flying monkeys. And understanding who they are, how they were recruited, and what to do with each one is some of the most practically important knowledge in narcissistic abuse recovery—because they represent the hardest part of the loss: the moment when it’s not just him you’re losing. It’s everyone.

What Are Flying Monkeys?

Susan Forward, PhD, therapist and author of Toxic Parents and Emotional Blackmail, spent decades mapping how toxic relational systems extend their reach through networks of recruited loyalty. Her framework is particularly useful here because it distinguishes between flying monkeys who are knowingly operating in the narcissist’s interests and those who have been genuinely deceived into the role. The vast majority fall into the latter category. They have heard a compelling, partially accurate account of a relationship in which someone they care about was hurt. They are acting on that account in good faith. The harm they cause is real. The intention is not.

This distinction matters for how you relate to them—because responding to a deceived person the same way you’d respond to a knowing agent produces more harm and more isolation than you can afford right now.

How Narcissists Build the Network: The Neuroscience of Recruited Loyalty

To understand how a narcissist recruits flying monkeys, you need to understand something about how they present in social contexts. The grandiosity and entitlement that characterize narcissistic personality disorder in intimate relationships are often invisible to outside observers. What people outside the relationship see is frequently someone who is charming, emotionally available-seeming, generous, and—most importantly in the context of flying monkey recruitment—apparently devastated.

The narcissist who is running a smear campaign or recruiting flying monkeys doesn’t look like a person doing those things. They look like a person who is suffering. And humans are wired—at the neurobiological level—to respond to suffering. Mirror neurons, the neurological basis of empathy, fire when we observe another person in pain. We are physiologically moved to respond. The narcissist’s performance of suffering is calibrated, consciously or not, to activate exactly this response in the people around them.

Susan Forward, PhD, notes that toxic individuals in family systems often have a decades-long head start on building their narrative within the family before any conflict emerges. The narcissistic parent who has been casting themselves as the devoted, misunderstood parent for twenty years has a pre-established credibility that a single conversation from you cannot displace. The romantic partner who has spent two years telling your mutual friends about how complicated you can be—not with malice, just with concerned helplessness—has established a context in which your eventual frustration or limit-setting reads as confirmation of the narrative.

Bessel van der Kolk, MD, psychiatrist and trauma researcher and author of The Body Keeps the Score, has documented how our social brain systems are wired for belonging—for reading social cues, for responding to group dynamics, for being influenced by what the people around us believe. Flying monkeys work because the people who become them are human: they have empathy, they trust the person they’ve known, they have their own needs and limitations, and they are responding to information they have no reason to disbelieve. Blaming them for being human rarely helps. Understanding the mechanism usually does.

How Flying Monkeys Show Up in Driven Women’s Lives

For driven, ambitious women, the flying monkey dynamic has a specific texture that makes it particularly difficult to navigate.

Your social network is often tightly integrated with your professional identity. The boundaries between personal relationships and professional community are frequently porous—especially for physicians, attorneys, and executives in smaller professional communities where everyone knows everyone. A flying monkey operating in your professional sphere doesn’t just create personal discomfort. They can affect your professional reputation, your referral network, your team’s perception of you.

There’s also the dimension of what your community means to you beyond social pleasure. In my work with driven women, I consistently see that the social ecosystem built around a long-term relationship—the couple friendships, the shared professional contacts, the in-law relationships that have become genuinely meaningful—functions as a form of extended nervous-system regulation. These relationships anchor your sense of continuity, community, and belonging. When flying monkeys destabilize that network, the effect isn’t just social inconvenience. It’s physiological disruption.

Dalia is a 44-year-old physician who exited a six-year relationship with a man who, over the following four months, contacted her hospital colleagues “with concern,” reached her closest friend through a mutual contact to share his account of the relationship’s ending, and called her mother twice. None of these contacts were aggressive. They were concerned. They were measured. They sounded like someone processing a difficult loss. And each one landed in Dalia’s life as a grenade that looked like a flower.

“I’d lost the relationship,” she tells me. “I thought that was the worst part. Then I started losing the people around it and I realized that’s actually worse.” What Dalia is naming is a layered grief that isn’t fully accounted for in most narcissistic abuse recovery frameworks: the loss of the community—not just the person.

Five Types of Flying Monkeys—and How to Handle Each One

Flying monkeys are not a monolith. They come from different relationships, operate with different levels of awareness, and require different responses. Here are the five most common types and how to handle each.

Type 1: The Golden Sibling. This is the narcissist’s sibling (or cousin, or close family friend) who has always occupied the favored position in the family system. They have a long-established loyalty to the narcissist, often reinforced by the narcissist’s own family-of-origin dynamics. They contact you not to threaten but to “explain”—to help you understand what you’re really dealing with, which in their account is a family member who loves you and is struggling. They are rarely open to your account.

How to handle: “I appreciate you reaching out. I’m not going to discuss the relationship. I wish [name] well.” Full stop. This person is not a neutral third party and cannot be converted into one. Limit the exchange and limit your emotional investment in being understood by them.

Type 2: The Enmeshed Parent. A parent (theirs or, in some cases, yours who has been worked on) who has accepted the narcissist’s account because it aligns with their existing image of their child or because the narcissist has been cultivating the relationship with them deliberately. They call from a place of genuine worry—they love the narcissist, they want the relationship repaired, and they believe you hold the key to that repair.

How to handle: With warmth and firmness: “I know you care about [name] and I understand this is painful for you. My decision isn’t something I’m going to re-examine right now, and I’m not able to have this conversation. I hope you’re doing okay.” If it’s your own parent who has been recruited, the conversation requires more depth—specifically, naming that you need their loyalty directed toward you, not divided. That conversation may require therapeutic support.

Type 3: The Mutual Best Friend. This one hurts most. This is someone you genuinely love, who loves both of you, and who has been placed in an impossible position by the narcissist’s disclosure. They may be genuinely trying to stay neutral. They may not realize they’re serving as a conduit. They may be reporting back to the narcissist—not with malice, but because they’re still in contact with both of you and the narcissist asks questions.

How to handle: A direct conversation is warranted here: “I want to be honest with you: I can’t share information with you that I think might get back to [name]. I value our friendship and I don’t want what’s happening between us to compromise it. Can we talk about what this looks like for us going forward?” This conversation tests the friendship. The result tells you something important about whether this relationship is safe for your healing process.

Type 4: The Co-Worker Go-Between. A professional contact who either works with both of you, is connected to both of you through professional networks, or who has been specifically targeted because the narcissist knows they have your professional ear. They arrive with “I just thought you should know what’s being said,” which sounds supportive but often functions as a delivery system for the smear narrative.

How to handle: Thank them briefly for the information, do not expand on your response, do not share anything you wouldn’t want passed on: “Thank you for letting me know. I’m not going to engage with this publicly, but I appreciate the heads up.” Then document the conversation. In professional contexts, documentation is your most important protective tool.

Type 5: The Professional Flying Monkey. This is the most insidious type—a therapist, mediator, attorney, financial advisor, or HR professional who has contact with the narcissist in a professional capacity and whose professional positioning lends authority to the narrative they’ve been given. A shared couples therapist who has only one person’s account. A mediator who has been told one story. A lawyer who has been briefed in a way that shapes their professional behavior toward you. Their authority makes the smear more credible. Their professional role makes them harder to challenge.

How to handle: In legal or formal proceedings, disclose the conflict and request a neutral party. In therapeutic contexts, do not share a couples therapist with a narcissistic partner—ever. Your own therapist, who has only your account, is your safe space. Any shared professional has been potentially compromised. This isn’t paranoia. It’s calibrated assessment of how these systems work.

Both/And: You Can Grieve Them and Know Exactly What’s Happening

Here is the both/and that I hold most carefully for clients in this specific situation: you can see clearly what’s happening with the flying monkeys—their role, their recruitment, their function—and simultaneously feel a grief about them that is entirely legitimate and doesn’t require your clarity to resolve.

The intellectual understanding of flying monkey dynamics doesn’t close the wound of being contacted by your closest friend carrying the words of the person who hurt you. It doesn’t close the wound of your mother, who loves you, asking you to consider his feelings. Understanding the mechanism doesn’t make the loss not a loss. The grief is real even when the mechanism is fully visible.

Jamie is a 40-year-old entrepreneur who, three months after leaving a narcissistic marriage, is navigating the loss of six years of couple friendships that have quietly, without anyone announcing it, aligned with her ex. She hasn’t been formally excluded. She’s just—less included. The invitations come less frequently. The group chat has slowed. Nobody has said anything. It’s the quieter form of flying monkey dynamics: not active pressure, but passive realignment of the social field.

“I understand why it’s happening,” Jamie tells me. “I can explain it to you clinically. It still devastates me.”

Both things are true. The devastation doesn’t mean she doesn’t understand. The understanding doesn’t prevent the devastation. The work isn’t to get to a place where you feel nothing about losing these relationships. The work is to feel it fully—to grieve these specific people with the specificity they deserve—without letting the grief collapse into a belief that you are alone in the world, or that this is how it will always be, or that the narcissist has successfully taken everything from you. He hasn’t. But the grief is real.

The Systemic Lens: Why Losing a Community Is a Distinct Traumatic Loss

The loss of a community is not a secondary consequence of leaving a narcissistic relationship. For many driven, ambitious women, it is one of the primary traumatic losses—and it’s frequently undertreated in recovery because it exists in the gap between individual trauma work (focused on the relationship) and social work (focused on building new connections).

What’s lost when the community dissolves around the flying monkey dynamic isn’t just a collection of individual relationships. It’s a shared context: the particular shorthand that develops between people who have been in each other’s lives for years, the specific belonging of a group who knows your history, the continuity of being seen over time. These are not easily replaceable. New relationships don’t carry them. This is why “just make new friends” lands so hollow in the immediate aftermath of a narcissistic relationship—because what’s been lost isn’t just connection. It’s a history.

There’s a gendered dimension here too. Women’s social networks are often denser and more central to their wellbeing than those of their male counterparts—not as a weakness but as a feature of how women are socialized to build community and find support. When the narcissist recruits that network, they’re targeting something that is structurally central to driven women’s functioning. It’s not incidental. It’s precisely calibrated, whether or not it’s consciously intended as such.

Susan Forward, PhD, describes how toxic systems maintain themselves through the isolation of anyone who names the dysfunction. The person who refuses to collude with the system—who exits, who sets limits, who tells the truth—becomes the identified problem. The flying monkeys, in this framework, are the system’s immune response: the mechanism by which the system tries to restore the homeostasis that your exit disrupted. Understanding this systemic function doesn’t make it less painful. It does remove the interpretation that this is happening because you deserve it or because the community’s assessment of you is accurate. It’s happening because systems self-preserve. And you’ve disrupted the system by choosing yourself.

The Gray-Rock Protocol, Grief Work, and Rebuilding Your Circle

Recovery from the flying monkey dimension of narcissistic abuse happens across three interlocking tracks: managing current flying monkey contact, grieving what’s been lost, and building new community that is genuinely safe.

The Gray-Rock Protocol for Flying Monkeys

Gray-rocking—originally developed as a strategy for low-conflict disengagement from narcissists—applies equally well to flying monkey contact. The principle: become as uninteresting as a gray rock. Provide no emotional content, no drama, no information, no conflict. Responses are brief, neutral, and non-committal. This isn’t coldness. It’s information management.

Gray-rock responses to flying monkey contact:

• To any pressure to reconnect: “I’m doing okay. Thanks for checking in.”
• To any account of what he’s said: “I appreciate you telling me. I’m not going to weigh in on that.”
• To any request to reconsider: “That’s not something I’m reconsidering. I appreciate your concern.”
• To any update about his wellbeing: “I’m glad to hear he has support.” (Or silence.)

The goal of gray-rocking flying monkeys is to deprive the narcissist of information and to gradually reduce the flying monkey’s motivation to serve as a conduit—because there’s nothing coming back through the channel. Most flying monkeys, deprived of emotional content, eventually stop transmitting.

Grief Work for Community Loss

This deserves its own section in therapeutic work, and it rarely gets one. In individual therapy, I hold space specifically for the grief of each lost relationship—not the narcissist, but the community. The couple friends you won’t see together again. The family relationships that have been compromised. The specific friend who believed his account. Each one of these is a loss that deserves to be grieved with specificity, not collapsed into the larger category of “the relationship ended.”

Grieving the community concretely means: naming who you’ve lost, what specifically you valued in each relationship, and what that loss means to you. Not processing it into acceptance prematurely—but letting the full weight of it be felt, contained, and witnessed. This is not wallowing. This is metabolizing. Grief that isn’t metabolized doesn’t disappear—it relocates to your nervous system and becomes something else: chronic vigilance, difficulty trusting, the sense that building new community is pointless.

Rebuilding: Slowly, Selectively, on Your Terms

New community doesn’t replace the lost one. It grows alongside the grief for it. The timeline for genuinely trusting new community after narcissistic relationship loss is longer than most people want it to be—typically twelve to twenty-four months before new relationships carry the kind of weight the old ones did. This isn’t a problem. It’s calibrated caution. The selective, slow building of new community based on evidence of genuine reciprocity—rather than the speed of connection—is one of the most protective things you can do post-recovery.

The work of Fixing the Foundations^™ addresses both the attachment patterns that made the narcissistic relationship possible and the relational skills for building genuine, reciprocal community after. Both of those threads—the healing of what was, and the building of what’s next—matter equally. Because the end goal isn’t just not being hurt again. It’s being connected again, genuinely, on the solid ground of relationships you can actually trust.

The flying monkeys will likely resolve over time. Deprived of emotional drama and information, most of them return to their own lives. The narcissist eventually finds a new supply source and the campaign loses its motivation. The community, partially, eventually reconstitutes. And you will have built something new alongside the grief for what was lost—a circle that is smaller, perhaps, but genuinely yours. Community that you chose, that chose you back, that hasn’t been compromised before you got there. That’s not a consolation prize. For many women on the other side of this work, it’s the better thing.

Related Reading

Forward, Susan. Toxic Parents: Overcoming Their Hurtful Legacy and Reclaiming Your Life. Bantam Books, 1989.

Forward, Susan, and Donna Frazier. Emotional Blackmail: When the People in Your Life Use Fear, Obligation, and Guilt to Manipulate You. HarperCollins, 1997.

van der Kolk, Bessel. The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma. Viking, 2014.

Herman, Judith. Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence—from Domestic Abuse to Political Terror. BasicBooks, 1992.

Simon, George. In Sheep’s Clothing: Understanding and Dealing with Manipulative People. Parkhurst Brothers, 2010.

References

Peer-Reviewed Research (Vancouver)

1. van der Kolk BA, Wang JB, Yehuda R, Bedrosian L, Coker AR, Harrison C, et al. Effects of MDMA-assisted therapy for PTSD on self-experience. PLoS One. 2024;19(1):e0295926. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0295926. PMID: 38198456.

Medical Disclaimer

Medical Disclaimer