What Are Flying Monkeys in Narcissistic Abuse and How Do I Deal with Them?

Flying Monkeys in Narcissistic Abuse: What They Are and How to Deal With Them

NARCISSISTIC & TOXIC RELATIONSHIP DYNAMICS • April 12, 2026

LAST UPDATED: APRIL 2026

When Your Own People Become the Weapon

You’re sitting across from your mother at a family dinner — the one you almost didn’t attend — and within the first ten minutes, she’s relaying a message. Your ex, she says, is really struggling. He told her you took the kids’ routines away. He cried on the phone to her, apparently. She just thinks you should know.

Your stomach drops. Not because you believe it — you know better by now — but because you recognize this moment. You’ve lived it before. Your own mother, a woman who loves you, is sitting across from you carrying water for someone who spent years making your life smaller. She doesn’t know that. She’d be horrified if she did. But it’s happening anyway.

This is what flying monkeys do. They extend the narcissist’s reach into spaces the narcissist can no longer access directly. And for driven, ambitious women who’ve worked hard to create distance — whether through therapy, physical separation, or sheer survival instinct — the flying monkey dynamic can feel like a particularly cruel betrayal. You did everything right. You got out. And somehow, they’re still everywhere.

In my work with clients, I see this consistently: leaving the narcissist is one chapter. Navigating the network they’ve assembled around you is an entirely different one. And it requires its own strategies, its own grieving, and its own kind of clarity.

This post is for the woman who’s already figured out that the person at the center of her pain is a narcissist — and is now reckoning with everyone orbiting them. We’ll look at what flying monkeys are, how they get recruited, the different types you’ll encounter, and concrete scripts for dealing with each one. We’ll also make space for the grief of it, because losing friendships and family members to a narcissist’s smear campaign is a real loss — and it deserves to be named as one.

What Are Flying Monkeys?

The term “flying monkeys” comes from The Wizard of Oz — those winged creatures who carried out the Wicked Witch’s orders without question, doing her bidding across the land. In the context of narcissistic abuse, the term describes the people in a narcissist’s social network who act as their proxies: delivering messages, gathering information, defending the narcissist’s behavior, pressuring you to reconcile, or actively spreading a smear campaign on the narcissist’s behalf.

What makes flying monkeys particularly disorienting is that they’re not strangers. They’re often people you love. Your mother. Your best friend since college. A sibling. A mutual friend who’s known both of you for years. The narcissist doesn’t build their army from outsiders — they build it from your shared social world. That’s what makes it so effective, and so painful.

It’s also worth naming: most flying monkeys don’t know that’s what they are. They believe they’re being helpful. They believe the story they’ve been told. They believe they’re acting out of genuine concern for everyone involved. This doesn’t make their behavior okay, and it doesn’t mean you have to tolerate it — but it does matter for how you navigate it. We’ll get to that.

If you’re still in the early stages of understanding what’s happened in your relationship, the post on narcissistic abuse syndrome is a useful starting point before diving deeper into the flying monkey dynamic.

How Narcissists Build Their Army

Narcissists don’t recruit flying monkeys the way a general recruits soldiers — with explicit orders and clear objectives. It’s subtler than that, and it starts long before any conflict begins.

Long before a relationship ends — or before you begin pushing back — a narcissist has been quietly building a curated narrative about who you are and who they are. This is called impression management. They present themselves as generous, misunderstood, devoted. They drop small seeds of doubt about you: that you’re sensitive, that you overreact, that you’re difficult to love. Nothing dramatic. Just a slow, consistent tilt in the story.

Lundy Bancroft, author of Why Does He Do That?, describes how abusive individuals invest significant effort in building a public reputation that contradicts their private behavior. That gap between public charm and private control is exactly what makes the smear campaign so effective later — no one believes a person so well-liked could be capable of what you’re describing. (PMID: 15249297)

When the relationship fractures — or when you begin to assert yourself — the narcissist activates that groundwork. They become the wounded party. They share (carefully curated) details of your behavior. They cry. They express genuine-seeming devastation. People who care about them want to help. And suddenly, people who also care about you are showing up in your life carrying the narcissist’s water.

The recruiting process typically involves several tactics:

• The pity play: The narcissist presents themselves as the victim — abandoned, betrayed, heartbroken. People who are genuinely empathic respond to this naturally.
• Strategic disclosure: The narcissist shares just enough “evidence” (texts taken out of context, events described with their spin, exaggerated or fabricated incidents) to justify the narrative they’re constructing.
• Loyalty testing: The narcissist makes clear — subtly or not — that you’re either with them or against them. This pressures mutual connections to choose a side.
• Triangulation: The narcissist keeps flying monkeys in competition with each other for their approval, which motivates each one to prove their loyalty through increased action on the narcissist’s behalf.

Christine Louis de Canonville, psychotherapist and narcissistic abuse specialist and author of The Three Faces of Evil, writes that the narcissist’s smear campaign serves a dual purpose: it discredits the target before they can tell their own story, and it provides narcissistic supply through the drama of being defended and rallied around. The flying monkeys aren’t just tools — they’re an audience.

Understanding this recruitment process matters because it helps you stop blaming yourself for losing people to it. It’s not that your friends and family chose the narcissist over you. It’s that they were handed a carefully constructed story at a time when they were most vulnerable to believing it — and the person delivering it was someone they trusted. If you’re navigating this while also trying to understand how to communicate when full no-contact isn’t possible, the post on how to communicate with a narcissist when you can’t go no-contact may help.

How Flying Monkeys Show Up in Driven Women’s Lives

The flying monkey dynamic doesn’t look the same for everyone. For driven, ambitious women — especially those who’ve built significant careers, public reputations, or complex family systems — the impact tends to take specific shapes that deserve naming directly.

What I see consistently in my work: the smear campaign doesn’t just target your character. It targets your credibility. And for a woman whose professional identity is built on competence and trustworthiness, that’s a specific kind of wound.

Meet Marisol. She’s a senior partner at a law firm — the kind of woman who has navigated every hard thing in her career with precision and composure. When her marriage to a covert narcissist ended, she did everything carefully: she was measured in what she shared, she protected her children from the conflict, she tried to be fair. What she didn’t anticipate was the campaign her ex would run through their social circle. Mutual friends — people she’d known for fifteen years — started checking in less. A couple of them started asking her pointed questions that she recognized as coming from conversations with her ex. One friend told her directly that her ex “seemed really broken up” and that she hoped Marisol would “consider his side.” Marisol had already lost her marriage. Now she was losing her friendships, one carefully worded coffee conversation at a time. She came to therapy not knowing whether to feel angry or guilty — and that confusion is exactly what the flying monkey dynamic is designed to produce.

Not all flying monkeys look the same. Here’s a breakdown of the types you’re most likely to encounter:

The Unwitting Flying Monkey is someone who genuinely cares about both of you, has been given a skewed version of events, and is acting out of authentic concern. They may not even realize they’re being used. They’re the most common type, and they tend to be the most painful to navigate because you can see their good intentions even as their behavior causes harm.

The Willing Flying Monkey has chosen a side and is actively participating in the smear campaign. They may enjoy the drama, may have their own complicated history with you, or may have a genuine investment in the narcissist’s worldview. They’re rarer but more overtly harmful.

The Spy is someone who maintains a relationship with you under the pretense of neutrality, but who is actively feeding information back to the narcissist. They may ask seemingly innocent questions about your dating life, your finances, your living situation, your parenting. Everything gets reported back.

The Guilt Messenger arrives bearing the narcissist’s emotional state as a weapon: “They’re so devastated.” “They just want to talk.” “Don’t you think you’re being a little harsh?” They may not intend harm, but they’re delivering it.

The Enabler has a long-standing pattern of protecting the narcissist — often a parent, sibling, or lifelong friend who has always minimized and excused the narcissist’s behavior. They were a flying monkey before you even arrived, and they’ll continue to be one long after you’re gone.

Ramani Durvasula, PhD, notes that many survivors of narcissistic abuse describe the flying monkey experience as the most socially isolating part of the recovery process — more so, sometimes, than the original relationship. You can grieve the narcissist. Grieving the entire scaffolding of your social world is something else entirely.

Triangulation: The Narcissist’s Favorite Tool

Triangulation is the engine underneath the flying monkey dynamic. It’s what the narcissist is doing when they tell your mother one version of events while telling your mutual friends another — and when neither story matches what actually happened. The goal isn’t accuracy. The goal is control: of the narrative, of the social environment, and ultimately, of you.

For driven, ambitious women, triangulation at work is particularly insidious. A narcissistic boss or colleague can triangulate entire teams — playing people against each other, creating alliances and rivalries, making sure no one compares notes. Flying monkeys in a workplace context may not even identify as such. They just know that agreeing with the narcissist’s take on you feels safer than questioning it.

Meet Rina. She’s the director of operations at a mid-size tech company, precise and unflappable in a boardroom. When she started pushing back on a narcissistic CEO’s erratic decision-making, she noticed something shift. Colleagues who’d been allies started to seem uncertain around her. Meeting invitations dried up. She discovered — through a trusted friend who told her directly — that the CEO had been characterizing her as “not a team player” and “resistant to growth.” He’d had those conversations with nearly everyone above her on the org chart. Rina hadn’t lost a job yet. But she’d lost her standing, her reputation, and the professional community she’d spent five years building — all without the CEO ever confronting her directly. That’s triangulation at scale. That’s a flying monkey network deployed in a professional context.

The grey rock method is one of the most effective strategies for interrupting the triangulation loop — and it works equally well with flying monkeys as it does with the narcissist directly. We’ll cover specific scripts in a moment.

Both/And: They Were Manipulated and It Still Hurt You

One of the most common things I hear from clients navigating flying monkeys is the wish for permission to be angry. Because alongside the intellectual understanding that most of these people were genuinely deceived, there’s real hurt. Real betrayal. Real loss.

Here’s the Both/And that I want to offer you:

The flying monkeys in your life may have been manipulated by someone skilled at manipulation — and their behavior still caused you harm. These two things don’t cancel each other out.

Your mother may have genuinely believed she was helping when she relayed your ex’s messages — and you still had to sit through it, absorb it, and recover from it. Your college friend may have had no idea she was being used as a spy — and you still lost a friendship that mattered to you.

The Both/And framing isn’t about excusing behavior. It’s about accurately holding the full complexity of what happened. Because if you collapse into “they were just manipulated, I shouldn’t be angry,” you’re bypassing your own legitimate pain. And if you collapse into “they chose him over me and I’ll never forgive them,” you may be cutting off the possibility of repair with people who, if given accurate information, might choose differently.

What I see consistently in clients who’ve healed most fully from the flying monkey dynamic is this: they let themselves grieve the losses that were real — the friendships that didn’t survive, the family relationships that never recovered — while also holding appropriate compassion for the people who were themselves deceived. That’s not easy work. It’s the kind of thing that unfolds over time in individual therapy, not in a single conversation or a single moment of realization.

The grief of losing people to a smear campaign is one of the least-discussed aspects of narcissistic abuse recovery. The stages of healing from narcissistic abuse include this kind of secondary loss — the social fallout, the community fracture — and it deserves as much attention as the primary relationship.

You don’t have to choose between understanding and being hurt. You can do both at the same time.

The Systemic Lens: Why Flying Monkeys Get Away With It

We can’t talk about flying monkeys without naming the broader context that makes them possible. Flying monkeys aren’t just a product of one narcissist’s manipulation — they’re a product of systems and cultures that routinely privilege the version of events told by the more publicly credible, more socially adept, or more emotionally persuasive person.

In many communities — professional networks, religious institutions, tight-knit family systems, even therapy cultures — there’s enormous pressure to see both sides, to extend grace, to avoid conflict, and to distrust strong emotional responses. Women who express anger after abuse are often characterized as unhinged. Women who enforce boundaries are often called cold. Women who name patterns directly are often labeled as difficult.

This systemic bias is precisely what a narcissist exploits when building their flying monkey network. The narcissist’s tears, their narrative of victimhood, their performance of reasonableness — these work because of a culture that is already predisposed to believe the more composed, more publicly sympathetic story. Especially when the woman telling her own story is visibly angry, visibly in pain, or refusing to perform stoicism.

Ramani Durvasula, PhD, has written and spoken extensively about how narcissistic abuse is enabled by cultures that reward charisma and punish authenticity — where the person who performs the best, rather than the one telling the truth, tends to be believed.

For driven, ambitious women, there’s an added layer: the higher your public profile, the more the narcissist’s smear campaign serves them. A successful woman who’s publicly accused of being difficult, cold, or unreasonable stands to lose more — and the narcissist knows it. The flying monkey dynamic in these cases isn’t just personal. It’s strategic.

Naming this systemic dynamic doesn’t eliminate its impact, but it does something crucial: it takes the shame off you. The reason people believed the narcissist’s version isn’t because your version was less true — it’s because the deck was stacked in favor of a performance that the culture was already primed to reward. That’s not a personal failure. That’s a structural one.

The betrayal trauma framework is useful here too — because the flying monkey dynamic is itself a form of betrayal trauma. You trusted these people. You expected them to see you clearly. The fact that they didn’t, and the role that social and cultural systems played in why they didn’t, is worth understanding. And for women navigating this alongside professional demands, trauma-informed executive coaching can be a powerful space to disentangle the personal from the professional.

Scripts and Strategies for Dealing With Flying Monkeys

Knowing what flying monkeys are and how they operate is important. But what most clients want most urgently is: what do I actually say?

Here are concrete strategies for each of the main types, with specific language you can adapt.

For the Unwitting Flying Monkey (the well-meaning messenger):

Your goal here isn’t to educate them — that rarely works and often backfires. Your goal is to close the channel without burning the relationship unnecessarily. Try:

“I appreciate that you care about both of us. I’m not able to receive messages from [name] through other people — it’s not good for me. If there’s something that needs to be addressed, it’ll need to come to me directly. I’d love to talk about other things.”

Or, more briefly:

“I’m going to stop you there — I can’t take in messages about [name]. How are you doing?”

Redirect. Don’t explain. Don’t defend. Don’t JADE (Justify, Argue, Defend, Explain) — a framework from narcissistic abuse recovery communities that applies powerfully here.

For the Spy:

The grey rock method is your best tool. Become uninteresting. Give nothing that can be reported back. One-word answers where appropriate, vague non-answers where necessary:

“Things are fine, thanks. How are you?”

“Nothing new on my end. What’s going on with you?”

You don’t need to explain why you’ve become vague. You don’t need to accuse them. You just need to stop providing usable information. Over time, if a spy has nothing to report, the narcissist typically moves on to a more productive source.

For the Willing Flying Monkey (the active campaigner):

This is the person who is knowingly spreading the narcissist’s narrative, challenging your version of events, or actively working to undermine you. Here, more distance is often warranted. If confrontation is necessary:

“I’m not going to discuss [name] with you. If our friendship is going to continue, I need it to be independent of that relationship.”

If they press, repeat calmly: “I’m not going to discuss this.” And then disengage. This is the broken record technique — one firm statement, repeated without escalation.

For the Guilt Messenger:

“I can see you’re concerned, and I know that comes from a good place. I’m not in a position to take in information about [name]’s emotional state — it’s not something I can hold right now. I hope you understand.”

This validates their intention without accepting the delivery.

For family members who are long-standing enablers:

This is often the hardest category, because the investment runs deepest. You may not be able to change the dynamic. You can, however, be clear about what you need:

“I love you and I want a relationship with you. I need that relationship to be free of information about [name] or messages from [name]. If that’s not something you can do, I may need to limit our contact until things settle down.”

Some families respond to this. Some don’t. What matters is that you’ve been clear, and that your subsequent choices — including creating distance — are grounded in protecting yourself rather than punishing them.

What to do about the smear campaign itself:

The instinct, when you discover a smear campaign, is to defend yourself — to reach out to everyone who’s been told a version of your story and correct the record. I understand that instinct completely. And in most cases, I’d gently caution against it.

Here’s why: responding to a smear campaign publicly tends to elevate it. It makes the conflict look like a “both sides” situation. And it gives the narcissist exactly what they want — your energy, your attention, and proof to their audience that you’re unstable or obsessed.

What tends to work better: live your life visibly. Let the people who are open to knowing you see who you actually are. Be warm, be present, be consistent. Over time, many people revise their assessment when the evidence in front of them doesn’t match the story they were told. Some won’t — and that grief is real and valid. But chasing the smear campaign rarely accelerates healing.

The Fixing the Foundations course covers this in depth — including how to rebuild trust in relationships after the relational scaffolding has been damaged by a narcissist’s interference. And if you’re navigating the social isolation of flying monkeys while also managing a demanding professional life, working with someone one-on-one in executive coaching can help you think through the professional dimensions of this without it bleeding into every other area of your life.

The weekly newsletter, Strong & Stable, regularly covers the relational aftermath of narcissistic abuse — including the grief of lost friendships and practical guidance for rebuilding. It’s free, and it arrives on Sunday mornings, when many clients say they most need it.

The Grief You’re Allowed to Feel

I want to close by naming something that doesn’t get said enough in the flying monkey conversation: this is a grief process. A real one. Losing a friendship — even to circumstances you understand intellectually — is a loss. Losing a family’s trust, watching a community fracture, discovering that people you loved chose to believe a story about you without ever asking if it was true — these are wounds that deserve to be tended.

The healing isn’t in staying angry, and it isn’t in bypassing the anger either. It’s in letting yourself feel the full weight of what was taken from you — the relationships, the community, the ease of moving through a shared world — and then, slowly, building something truer in its place. That’s what I watch clients do over time. Not a triumphant return to who they were before, but a quieter, more grounded arrival into who they’re becoming. People who know how to read a room with precision, who maintain their own narrative rather than handing it over, who’ve learned — the hard way — that the most important person to convince of your story is yourself.

You don’t have to earn your way back into a social circle that was willing to believe the worst of you. You’re allowed to let some of those people go. And you’re allowed, in time, to build something better.

Related Reading

• Durvasula, Ramani. It’s Not You: Identifying and Healing from Narcissistic People. New York: Portfolio, 2024.
• Bancroft, Lundy. Why Does He Do That? Inside the Minds of Angry and Controlling Men. New York: Berkley Books, 2002.
• Louis de Canonville, Christine. The Three Faces of Evil: Unmasking the Full Spectrum of Narcissistic Abuse. Black Card Books, 2016.
• Walker, Pete. Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving. Azure Coyote, 2013.
• Herman, Judith. Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence — From Domestic Abuse to Political Terror. New York: Basic Books, 1992.

If any of this lands close to home and you’re ready for clinical support, you can explore whether working together is the right fit.

Medical Disclaimer

Medical Disclaimer