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

A psychoeducational essay on flying monkeys: how narcissists recruit your people against you, and how to respond, drawn from more than a decade of practice with driven women in relational-trauma recovery.

Nandini put her phone face-down on the arm of the couch before she’d finished sitting, and told me her aunt had texted four times on the drive over. She hadn’t read them. She didn’t need to. For three months, ever since she’d stopped answering her mother’s calls, her aunt’s messages had all said some version of the same thing: your mother is heartbroken, she doesn’t understand what she did, please just call her. Nandini is 44, runs a team of thirty people, and hadn’t cried about her mother once. That afternoon she cried about her aunt.

I’ve noticed this shape so many times in my practice that I can almost predict when it’ll arrive. A woman finally does the hard thing: she names the narcissistic pattern in a parent, a partner, a sibling, and she steps back. And then, within weeks, the pressure stops coming from the person she stepped away from and starts coming from everyone around them. Her sister. Her closest friend from college. Her mother’s oldest friend, who has known her since she was six. The messages sound reasonable. The people sending them love her, or say they do. And she’s suddenly defending a decision she made to protect herself to the very people she thought would help her hold it.

What I’ve come to think of as the second loss of narcissistic abuse isn’t the relationship itself. It’s the web around it. The narcissist rarely works alone once you pull away; they recruit, often without the recruits fully understanding what they’ve signed up for. These people have a name, borrowed from The Wizard of Oz, and I’ve found that giving my clients that name is one of the most steadying things I can offer, because it turns a dozen bewildering conversations into a single recognizable pattern. So let me show you what that pattern looks like when it walks into your kitchen, your inbox, and your family group chat.

This article is educational and developmental in nature. It isn’t a substitute for individualized care from a licensed clinician, and reading it doesn’t establish a therapist-client relationship. If you’re in crisis or having thoughts of suicide, in the United States call or text 988 for the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline. Outside the US, visit findahelpline.com for local crisis resources.

Flying Monkeys: The Name for the Moment It Stops Being Just Him.

Let me give you the word first, because the word is the thing that turns eight separate painful phone calls into one pattern you can see. In the clinical literature on narcissistic abuse, flying monkeys are the people a narcissistic person recruits, knowingly or not, to pressure you, surveil you, gather information about you, or carry his messages to you once you’ve started to pull away. The term comes from The Wizard of Oz, where the winged monkeys do the Wicked Witch’s errands and never once ask why. It isn’t a diagnosis. It describes a function a person is serving, not who that person is.

Here’s the analogy I use in my office. Imagine a relay race you never signed up for. You’ve stepped off the track. You’ve said, clearly, that you’re done running. And the baton keeps arriving in your hand anyway, passed by people who love you, who don’t think of themselves as runners at all, who genuinely believe they’re just handing you something you dropped. That’s the disorienting part. The baton is his. The hand is your sister’s.

On a Tuesday afternoon it feels like this. Your phone lights up with your mother’s name and your stomach drops before you’ve read a single word, because some part of you already knows what the call is about. You pick up and spend twenty-five minutes defending a decision you’ve already made to a person who was, until recently, entirely on your side. You hang up feeling like you’ve just been in the room with him, and technically you haven’t spoken to him in six weeks.

I want to be precise about who these people are, because precision is what keeps you from either forgiving too fast or writing everyone off. In my experience there are roughly three groups. The largest is people who were genuinely manipulated: he got to them first, with a good story and a wounded face, and they believed him because they had no reason not to. The second is conflict-averse people who experience your separation as unbearable tension and who mistake brokering peace for love. The third, and the smallest, is people who know exactly what they’re doing and have chosen him. You’ll need to figure out which one you’re talking to, and the section on the five types will help you do that.

The name matters because without it you’ll keep treating each conversation as a separate failure to explain yourself. You’ll think the problem is that you didn’t say it right to your sister, or that your colleague needs more context, or that your mother would understand if you just forwarded her the texts. With the name, you can see what’s actually happening: the same message, arriving through eight different mouths, written by one hand.

Your Nervous System Hears His Voice in Her Mouth.

Something happens in your body when a safe person carries an unsafe message, and I want to name it, because most of the women I work with think the intensity of their reaction means they’re overreacting. They aren’t. The clinical term is neuroception, which describes how your nervous system scans, beneath conscious awareness, for cues of safety, danger, or life threat, and shifts your physiology before your thinking mind has weighed in. Think of it as a smoke detector wired directly to your heart rate. It doesn’t check who’s holding the match. It just registers smoke.

I came to this idea through Stephen W. Porges, PhD, whose polyvagal perspective reframed how I understood what my clients were describing after these calls. What Porges laid out is that the same system that reads a familiar voice as safe, the one tuned to warm prosody and a soft face, is the system that gets flooded when that voice suddenly carries a threat. Your sister’s tone is the tone you’ve heard your whole life. Her words are his. The mismatch isn’t a metaphor. It’s a physiological collision.

Here’s what it looks like on a weekday. She says, “He reached out to me,” and your hands go cold around the mug. Your heart rate climbs. Words start coming out of you fast, too many of them, an over-explanation you didn’t plan and can’t stop, because your body has decided that if you can just make her understand, the threat will end. That’s fight, wearing the costume of a reasonable conversation. Or the opposite happens. You go blank. You say, “Okay,” and “I hear you,” and “I’ll think about it,” and then you hang up and sit on the edge of the bed staring at the wall for forty minutes. That’s shutdown, and it isn’t weakness. It’s a very old system doing what it was built to do when escape isn’t available.

What I want you to understand is why these calls cost you more than a direct message from him would. When he texts, your body knows the threat and knows the source. When your mother calls, the threat arrives inside a safety cue, and your nervous system has to hold both at once. That’s the exhaustion you can’t explain to people. You weren’t yelled at. You weren’t threatened. You had a twenty-minute conversation with someone you love, and you feel like you’ve been through something.

There’s also a cumulative piece. One of the things that lets a nervous system recover after a frightening relationship ends is distance, a stretch of ordinary days in which nothing dangerous happens. Flying monkeys close that window. Every call, every forwarded concern, every “I just think you should know,” tells your body the danger is still in the building. Recovery keeps getting postponed, not because you’re doing it wrong, but because the alarm keeps getting pulled by hands that don’t know they’re pulling it.

That wall you stared at after the call. Hold onto that image. We’ll come back to what your body was asking for in that moment.

How the Recruitment Works: He Gets to Them First, and He Arrives Wounded.

People ask me how he got to them, and the honest answer is that he didn’t have to work very hard, because he was using a mechanism families run on anyway. The clinical term is triangulation: pulling a third person into a two-person conflict so that the tension routes through them instead of being faced directly. Picture the difference between a straight wire, where the current has to pass between two points, and a triangle, where a third corner absorbs the charge. On a Tuesday, triangulation is your mother asking you to “at least hear him out,” and not noticing that she’s now standing where the conflict used to be.

I first met this idea properly through Salvador Minuchin, MD, and his work on family structure. What struck me, reading his conceptual model of how families organize around distress, was how clearly he saw the third person being recruited not by argument but by position. A child gets drawn into the space between two parents. One parent allies with the child against the other. Or the child becomes the mediator, the one who carries information back and forth and keeps the peace by absorbing everyone’s discomfort. Minuchin was describing families with a sick child, but the structure he mapped is the structure a narcissistic person exploits with perfect intuition, because it’s already there in most families and most friend groups, waiting.

Here’s the arc as I’ve watched it unfold across hundreds of cases. It starts long before you leave, with seeding. Small concerns dropped into conversation months or years earlier: a worried comment to your sister about your stress, a joke to a mutual friend about how you’ve “been a lot lately.” Nothing you’d notice. Then, when you begin to pull away, he arrives first, and he arrives wounded. Not angry. Wounded. He’s confused, he’s hurting, he doesn’t understand what happened, and could she help him understand? He asks for nothing except her sympathy, which is the easiest thing in the world to give.

Then comes the ask, disguised as concern. Would she check on you? Would she let him know you’re okay? Would she just pass along that he misses you? Each request is small and kind-shaped. And then the reward, which is the part people underestimate: she gets to be the trusted one, the reasonable one, the peacemaker who sees both sides. That role feels good. It’s a promotion inside the family system. Nobody gives it up easily.

By the time you’ve actually left, the network already has a story about why, and the story got there before you did. Your account isn’t the account anymore. It’s the rebuttal. And rebuttals, no matter how accurate, always sound a little defensive to people who heard the other version first. That’s not a failure of your explanation. It’s the geometry of the triangle doing exactly what it was built to do.

Your Family Trained You Not to Correct the Record.

Five Types of Flying Monkeys: What Each One Is Actually Asking You For.

Every flying monkey is asking you for something, and the fastest way to decide how to respond is to figure out what. Over years of doing this work I’ve come to see five recurring types. They aren’t a personality quiz. The same person can move between them, and your sister in March may be a different type by August. What stays constant is that each type has a want underneath the words, and your response lands better when it speaks to the want rather than the words.

The Courier carries messages. “He asked me to tell you he’s not doing well.” The Courier usually doesn’t experience herself as taking sides; she thinks of herself as a phone line. What she wants is to discharge the message so she can stop holding it. The response that works is to close the line without punishing the person: “I’m not going to be a channel between us. If he has something to say, he knows how to reach my attorney, and I’d rather hear about your week.”

The Peacekeeper can’t tolerate the rupture itself. She isn’t carrying his message so much as her own discomfort, and what she wants is for the tension to resolve so she can breathe. She’ll say things like “can’t you two just talk it through?” Try: “I know this is hard to watch, and I’m sorry you’re in the middle of it. I’m not going to discuss him with you, and there’s nothing you need to fix here.”

The Investigator asks questions. How are you sleeping, where are you living, have you started seeing anyone, is work okay. Some of it is love. Some of it flows straight back to him, and you often can’t tell which. What the Investigator wants is information, so the response is to make information scarce, which is where gray rock comes in. “Fine. Busy. How’s the garden?” The tone stays warm. The content goes flat.

The Believer has taken his account fully and thinks you’re the problem. She’ll argue with you, quote him, suggest you get help. What she wants is for you to concede, and nothing you say will be enough, because she’s already decided. This is the one type where distance is usually the only script: “We see this very differently, and I’m not going to argue it with you.” Then you stop responding to the argument, even when it’s clever.

The Neutral Party wants, above all, not to choose. “I don’t want to take sides.” She thinks neutrality is fairness, and doesn’t see that neutrality after abuse is a side. What she wants is permission to stay comfortable. The response is to reframe the ask: “I’m not asking you to take a side. I’m asking you not to carry his.”

You’ll notice that sentence, some version of it, is the one you end up saying most. Keep it short. Say it kindly. Say it again next week.

Both/And: You Can Grieve Her and Know Exactly What She’s Doing.

The question I hear most, usually around the third or fourth session after a client has named the pattern, is some version of: “So do I hate her now?” And the answer I give is the one that frustrates people at first and then, eventually, holds them. You don’t have to pick. You can grieve your sister and know exactly what she’s doing. Both things are true, on the same afternoon, in the same body.

The clinical word for this is ambivalence, and it gets a bad reputation because people hear it as indecision. It isn’t. Ambivalence is the capacity to hold two real and contradictory feelings about the same person without collapsing either one. The analogy I use is two hands, each holding something that weighs something. In one hand: I miss her, we’ve talked every Sunday since I was nineteen, she knows what I sound like when I’m lying. In the other: she’s carrying his messages, and every call leaves me shaking. On a Tuesday it feels like screening her call and then crying because you screened her call.

Here’s why collapsing into one hand is so tempting. If she’s a traitor, you don’t have to grieve, because you never really had her. Anger is cleaner than loss. And if she’s just confused, just manipulated, just doing her best, you don’t have to protect yourself, because protecting yourself from someone who’s doing her best feels cruel. Both collapses spare you something. Both cost you the truth.

The truth is that the relationship was real and the function she’s serving is also real. The grief is legitimate because you didn’t imagine the closeness. The boundary is legitimate because you aren’t imagining the pattern either. When my clients can hold both, something changes in how they talk about it. They stop saying “I can’t believe she’d do this to me,” which is a sentence about betrayal, and start saying “I miss her and I’m not going to tell her anything,” which is a sentence about a decision.

What this looks like practically is more layered than either no contact or full contact. You can love her and give her nothing he can use. You can miss the group text and not rejoin it. You can go to your niece’s birthday and leave after the cake. You can hold the door open a crack for the version of your sister who eventually gets it, without standing in the doorway waiting for her. None of that requires you to decide, today, who she finally is.

Two hands. Neither one empty. That’s not indecision. That’s the weight of a real loss, held honestly, while you keep yourself safe.

The Systemic Lens: The World Processes What It Can See and Bills the Woman Who Points at the Rest.

Grief You Aren’t Allowed to Speak Comes Back as Symptoms.

The loss you’re carrying has a name in the grief literature, and almost nobody around you will use it. It’s called disenfranchised grief: mourning a loss the people around you don’t recognize as a loss, so there’s no ritual for it, no casserole, no card. The analogy is a funeral nobody attends because nobody agrees anyone died. On a Tuesday it feels like this: you can’t tell your colleague you’re grieving your book club, because your book club is still meeting. It’s just meeting without you, and half of them still follow him online.

I want to make one claim in this section and stay with it, because I think it’s the most important thing I know about the aftermath of flying monkeys. Grief that isn’t allowed to be spoken doesn’t dissolve. It goes underground and comes back up wearing a different face. For the driven women I work with, that face is usually not sadness. It’s pace.

Francis Weller, MFT, gave me the language for this in The Wild Edge of Sorrow, and reading him felt less like learning something new than like finally hearing described what I’d watched in my office for years. His argument is that grief needs a witness and a container, that it was never meant to be carried alone, and that a culture with no room for sorrow doesn’t get rid of sorrow. It relocates it. The mourning that can’t happen in the open happens in the body and in behavior, and we call it something else.

Picture the specific grief of losing your sister’s Sunday calls, the friend group’s text thread, and the colleague you had lunch with every other week, all in one season, none of it acknowledged as loss by anyone but you. It has to go somewhere. Weller says where.

What I see, again and again, is that it goes into the calendar. The woman who’s lost eleven people in a year, none of whom died, starts working until nine. She answers the text that lands at 9:14 p.m. within four minutes. She sleeps badly and calls it stress. She feels lonely in rooms full of people and calls it introversion. She notices she’s pouring a second glass on Thursdays and calls it a phase. None of that is a character flaw. All of it is grief that was refused a voice, arriving as symptom, exactly the way he describes.

The repair starts smaller than you’d think. Not a ritual, not yet. One sentence, said to one witness who won’t argue with you about whether it counts: “I lost eleven people this year and none of them died.” The moment the grief is spoken, it starts coming back up out of the shadow into a place where you can actually do something with it. The pace is the symptom. The speaking is where the mending begins.

Letting Go of Them Will Feel, at First, Like Giving Up on Being Understood.

Everything I’m about to describe, the gray-rock protocol, the grief work, the slow rebuilding of a circle, is a form of letting go. And I need to tell you the truth about letting go before you start, because otherwise you’ll think you’re doing it wrong. At first, it won’t feel like relief. It’ll feel like giving up on the hope that they’ll finally understand.

Let me translate the tool. The gray-rock protocol is a way of becoming uninteresting to people who feed information or pressure back into his system: brief, flat, factual, pleasant, and without detail. Picture a gray rock on a path. Nobody stops for it. Nobody picks it up. On a Tuesday it sounds like your mother asking how you’re really doing and you saying, “Fine, busy, how’s the garden,” meaning it kindly, and offering nothing else. It works. It also hurts, and here’s why.

Every detail you withhold from her is a piece of the hope that this time, if she just had the full picture, she’d see. Gray rock asks you to stop supplying the picture. That’s why my clients describe week three not as relief but as grief. They’ve stopped trying to be understood by someone positioned not to understand them, and stopping feels like closing the door on the version of the story where the family comes around, apologizes, and the record gets corrected in front of everyone. In my proverbial House of Life™ framework that door sits on the foundation floor, and letting it close is foundational work, even when it feels like loss.

Arielle Schwartz, PhD, names this with a precision I’ve never been able to improve on in The Complex PTSD Workbook. She’s writing about releasing traumatic memory, but the mechanism is identical to what happens when you release the people who carried his messages. Here’s what I want you to hold alongside her words: the feeling that you’re abandoning something precious isn’t a sign you’re doing this wrong. It’s the sign that you’re doing it at all.

That’s what the door sounds like closing from the inside. It sounds like the end of redemption. And what I can tell you, from sitting across from women on the far side of it, is that redemption was never the thing being held. Hope for someone else’s change was. Letting go of that hope doesn’t erase the relationship or the years. It stops handing you back into the relay race every time the baton comes around.

What comes after is slower and quieter than people expect. You rebuild the circle one person at a time, starting with someone who heard your account first, or who never knew him at all. You let a friendship take a year to become weight-bearing. And at some dinner months from now, you notice that nobody has mentioned him, that nobody at the table has his number, and that the ache of missing your sister is still there, and has somehow become something you can carry to the table, set down beside your plate, and eat dinner anyway.

Here’s something I want you to understand about grief before we go any further: it’s not just sadness. At its core, grieving is an act of release. And in her work on complex trauma, Arielle Schwartz, PhD, names the part of this process that almost no one prepares you for. When you finally start to let go of what hurt you, it can feel, at least at first, less like healing and more like surrender. Like you’re throwing away the last thread of hope that things might still be set right, that the story might still get its fair ending.

“To the extent that the patient is unable to grieve, she is cut off from a part of herself and robbed of an important part of her healing. Reclaiming the ability to feel the full range of emotions, including grief, must be understood as an act of resistance…”

Source: Judith Herman, MD, Psychiatrist, Trauma and Recovery (1992)

That’s exactly what letting go of the flying monkeys will feel like. Not relief, not at first. It’ll feel like you’re giving up on ever being understood by people who once knew you well. Like you’re conceding the narrative to someone who lied about you. I want you to know that this feeling is part of the grief, not evidence you’re making a mistake. You’re not abandoning the truth. You’re just no longer waiting for people who’ve stopped listening to hand it back to you.

Seven criteria to consider before you begin.

These criteria are orientation points, not a gatekeeping checklist. You don’t have to meet every one perfectly, and any missing piece can become part of the plan.

Frequently asked questions.