Flying Monkeys: When the People You Trusted Become Weapons

NARCISSISTIC ABUSE • July 17, 2026

The Text From Her Best Friend, Three Weeks After No Contact

Carlota is sitting on the floor of her closet at eleven at night, back against the wall of shoes, laptop still open on the bed where she left it mid-email. Three weeks ago she went no contact with her mother. The house has been quiet in a way that felt, for the first time in years, like relief. Then her phone buzzes on the carpet beside her.

It’s Renata. Her best friend since business school, the one who drove four hours to sit with her the week her father died, the one whose wedding she stood up in. Carlota’s chest loosens for a second, an old reflex of comfort, before she even reads the message. Then she reads it.

“Hey, I know things are hard right now. I just want you to know your mom called me crying today. She said she doesn’t understand what she did wrong. I’m not trying to tell you what to do, I just think you should know how much this is hurting her.”

Carlota reads it twice. Her thumb hovers over the reply button and then goes still. Something about the rhythm of the sentences feels wrong, too smooth, too rehearsed, like a phrase she has heard before in a different voice. She scrolls up through old texts with Renata, searching for the friend who once said, unprompted, “your mom is a lot, I don’t know how you do it.” That woman is nowhere in this message.

She sets the phone face down on the carpet. The cold recognition arrives slowly, then all at once: this isn’t concern. This is a script. Her mother has found a way to keep talking to her even after Carlota said no more, and she has done it by putting her words in someone else’s mouth. Renata isn’t calling as Renata anymore. She is calling as a courier.

What happens in that closet is a moment I have sat with more times than I can count in my therapy practice. A driven, capable woman finally draws a boundary, and within days the boundary gets tested, not by the person she drew it against, but by someone she loves who has been, wittingly or not, recruited to carry the message across the line she just built. This is the particular disorientation of flying monkeys, and it is one of the most underdiscussed parts of leaving or distancing from narcissistic abuse.

What Are Flying Monkeys?

In my work with clients untangling themselves from a narcissistic parent, partner, or former friend, one of the first things I tell them is that exiting the relationship rarely means exiting its reach. The person may be gone from daily life. Their influence, carried through other people, often is not.

I want to be careful with language here. When I use the word “abuser” or describe someone as engaging in narcissistic patterns, I am describing behavior, not handing out a diagnosis. I have never met your mother, your ex, or your former friend, and neither has the internet. What I can describe, from years of sitting across from women living through it, is a pattern: control that used to travel through one person now travels through many.

The term flying monkeys resonates precisely because it names something that otherwise feels impossible to name. You are not just grieving one relationship. You are watching a network activate. Someone calls your sister. Someone messages your college roommate. Someone leaves a voicemail for your boss. Each contact feels random until you notice they are all using the same three phrases, the same rehearsed cadence I also hear described in gaslighting dynamics, where a version of reality gets repeated until it starts to sound true.

Flying monkeys are not inherently malicious people. What they share is a functional role: they extend an abusive person’s reach past the point where direct access has been cut off. A parent you have gone no contact with cannot call you. Their sister can. Their oldest friend can. Their pastor, sometimes, can.

The Social Psychology of How Abusers Build Proxy Networks

To understand why flying monkeys form so reliably around people with narcissistic traits, it helps to look outside the trauma literature and into basic social psychology, because the mechanics are not exotic. They are the same mechanics that make advertising work, that make crowds move together, that make a rumor spread through an office by lunch.

Robert Cialdini, a psychologist known for his research on influence and social proof, has spent decades documenting how people look to others, especially others they trust, to decide what is true and what is an appropriate response to a situation. When an abusive person gets to someone in your circle first and delivers a coherent, emotionally compelling account of events, that person now carries a version of the story that feels true to them. They are not lying when they repeat it. They are doing what humans do: trusting a narrative that arrived first, wrapped in enough emotional detail to feel credible.

This is compounded by a second, related phenomenon. Solomon Asch, a psychologist known for his experiments on social conformity, demonstrated that people will override their own direct perception to align with a group consensus, even when that consensus is visibly wrong. Translate that into a friend group after a separation: if three people have already accepted one version of events, a fourth person hearing your side for the first time is working against social gravity, not just against your ex’s persuasive account.

This pattern often shows up alongside trauma bonding, the sticky attachment that can keep a person feeling loyal to someone who has also hurt them, and it complicates how flying monkeys read the situation too. What I see in my practice is that abusive partners and parents rarely need to convince an entire network individually. They need to convince a few well-placed people early, and social proof does the rest of the work for them. The aunt who “just wants everyone to get along.” The mutual friend who “doesn’t want to take sides” and therefore, functionally, takes one. The proxy network isn’t built through one grand persuasive act. It’s built through dozens of small, low-stakes conversations that happen before you even know a story is being told about you.

Proxy networks are not just emotionally exhausting, they are strategically effective, because they make boundary-setting almost impossible to enforce cleanly. You can block one number. You cannot block your own family. This is why so many clients describe the flying monkey phase as harder, in some ways, than the original relationship. The original relationship had one source of harm. The proxy network has many, and each one arrives wearing the face of someone you love.

How Flying Monkeys Target Driven Women’s Specific Vulnerabilities

The women I work with tend to be extraordinarily good at reading rooms and holding multiple people’s needs in mind at once. That is often exactly why they built the careers and social circles they have. It is also, unfortunately, part of what makes them vulnerable to flying monkey dynamics in a specific, patterned way.

Carlota is a partner at a mid-size architecture firm. She built her professional reputation, in part, on being the person who keeps everyone’s projects moving. That same fine-tuned attentiveness to other people’s emotional temperature is what made Renata’s message land so hard. Carlota’s first instinct wasn’t anger. It was guilt, a flicker of “maybe I am the problem here” before she’d even finished reading the text.

This is not a flaw in Carlota. Driven women are frequently socialized to manage other people’s comfort as part of managing their own success. A woman who has spent years being the reliable one, the one who smooths things over, has a social architecture that can be turned into a pressure point. The flying monkey doesn’t need to convince her she’s wrong. They just need to activate the part of her that has always taken responsibility for keeping the peace.

Carlota grew up in what I’d describe, in plain terms, as a narcissistic family system, where loyalty to the parent was treated as a precondition for belonging. Two weeks after the message from Renata, an aunt she hasn’t spoken to in months calls, saying she’s “just checking in,” then pivots within ninety seconds to how much her mother has aged this year, how worried everyone is, how it might be worth Carlota “hearing her out, just once.” Carlota recognizes the shape of the conversation before it fully unfolds this time. She still feels the tug. She just names it faster.

What makes this especially disorienting is the collision between professional identity and private reality. Carlota runs client meetings where she is decisive and unflinching. In these conversations with people who claim to love her, she finds herself apologizing for things she didn’t do, over-explaining a decision she is allowed to make without anyone’s permission. Competence becomes, in these exchanges, a kind of vulnerability, because competent people are expected to be reasonable, and “reasonable” is exactly the frame flying monkeys use to extract concessions.

This pattern connects directly to the smear campaign dynamics many of my clients describe, where reputation itself becomes the battlefield. Many occupy roles, in medicine, law, executive leadership, where professional standing depends on how they’re perceived by a wide circle. A smear campaign that reaches even a fraction of that circle doesn’t just cost a friendship. It can cost referrals, board positions, the quiet social capital that took a decade to build.

Carlota tells me the hardest part isn’t even what her mother is saying about her. It’s realizing how easily the story spreads once it has an audience willing to receive it without asking questions. “I keep waiting for someone to just ask me,” she says. “Nobody asks. They just tell me what they’ve already decided.”

I think about this quote often when clients describe flying monkeys who insist they are “staying out of it.” Neutrality, in a dynamic with a clear power imbalance, is rarely neutral in its effect. The person with less power experiences even well-intentioned neutrality as another form of abandonment. This doesn’t mean every friend owes you a public defense. It does mean the fantasy of a truly neutral bystander is mostly just that, a fantasy.

Identifying Flying Monkeys: Witting, Unwitting, and Weaponized

Not all flying monkeys are the same, and lumping them together makes it harder to figure out how to respond to each one. In my clinical experience, it’s useful to think in three loose categories, though real people often move between them.

• Witting flying monkeys know, at least in broad strokes, what they are doing. They may agree with the abusive person’s account, or simply feel loyal enough to carry water for them regardless of the facts. They tend to be the hardest to reach with new information, because they have already decided which story to believe.
• Unwitting flying monkeys genuinely believe they are helping. They have heard one persuasive, emotionally coherent account and have no reason, yet, to question it. Many of the most painful flying monkey experiences my clients describe involve unwitting monkeys, precisely because these are often the people they love most and trust the most.
• Weaponized flying monkeys are deployed more deliberately, sometimes as part of a sustained smear campaign, sometimes as a single, targeted move, such as a call to an employer or a message timed to arrive on a hard anniversary. Their involvement tends to be more strategic and more clearly tied to an outcome the abusive person wants.

George K. Simon, a psychologist known for his work on manipulative people and covert aggression, has written extensively about how covertly aggressive individuals rely on other people’s discomfort with conflict to get what they want without appearing to be the aggressor. Flying monkeys are frequently drafted into exactly this function: they create pressure while the person orchestrating it stays, visibly, out of the room.

This dynamic connects to a pattern researchers call DARVO, and it is worth naming carefully, because I see it derail more of my clients’ attempts to explain themselves than almost anything else. Recent research on defensive victim-blaming responses found that when someone confronts a person about harmful behavior, a common reactive pattern involves denying the behavior, attacking the person raising it, and reversing the roles of victim and offender (Harsey and colleagues, 2024). Flying monkeys often unknowingly repeat pieces of this reversed narrative, because it’s the version they were handed first.

Research on the emotional weight of exclusion adds another layer to why flying monkey dynamics feel as destabilizing as they do. A recent analysis examining ostracism as a form of intimate partner harm found that being deliberately excluded or frozen out by a partner’s social circle can carry psychological weight comparable to more overt forms of mistreatment (Dvir and colleagues, 2026). When an entire friend group goes quiet, or a family chat excludes you without explanation, that silence is not a neutral event. It’s often a coordinated, if informal, act with real emotional cost.

There’s also a particular kind of disorientation that shows up when flying monkeys start reshaping your memory of events, not just your reputation with others. Recent work on gaslighting and memory found that when a partner or authority figure repeatedly challenges someone’s recollection of shared events, that person’s confidence in their own memory can erode over time, independent of whether the original memory was accurate (Darke and colleagues, 2025). I see this constantly: a client is completely sure of what happened, until three flying monkeys in a row repeat a different version, and suddenly she is Googling “am I misremembering” at midnight.

Finally, and this is the piece that keeps women in these dynamics longer than they intend to stay, proxy networks contribute to what researchers describe as psychological entrapment, the sense that leaving is more costly or more dangerous than staying, even when staying is actively harmful. A recent study of entrapment dynamics in partner abuse found that the perceived difficulty of exit, not just the severity of harm, strongly predicts how long someone remains in or stays entangled with an abusive relationship (Arriaga and colleagues, 2026). Flying monkeys raise the perceived cost of leaving. Every proxy contact is, functionally, a small tax on your decision to go no contact or maintain distance.

Both/And: Those People May Genuinely Care About You. And Still Be Instruments

Sunita comes to session furious at her cousin, who has been forwarding her ex-husband’s texts “just so you know what he’s saying.” She wants permission to cut her cousin off entirely and wants me to tell her the cousin is a bad person. I don’t, because the truth here is more complicated than a clean villain would allow.

Sunita’s cousin has known her since childhood. She was at the hospital when Sunita’s son was born. She is not, by any reasonable measure, a malicious person. She is also, in this pattern, functioning as a flying monkey, relaying pressure that keeps Sunita entangled in a conflict she has tried repeatedly to step back from.

Both things are true at once. Sunita’s cousin can love her, and also be, in this moment, a conduit for harm. Holding both truths, rather than collapsing into “she’s good, so this is fine” or “she’s doing this, so she must not care,” is some of the hardest emotional work I ask my clients to do.

What makes the both/and frame useful is that it changes what you do next. If Sunita decides her cousin is simply evil, the only response is to sever the relationship, which she may not want. If she decides good intentions cancel out the harm, she stays exposed to a channel reopening a wound she’s trying to close. The both/and position lets her do something more precise: love her cousin, and tell her clearly that the forwarding has to stop, as a boundary rather than a punishment.

I ask Sunita what she actually needs from her cousin, separate from what she wishes her cousin understood on her own. She sits with it for a moment. “I need her to stop being a messenger,” she finally says. “I don’t need her to pick a side. I just need the forwarding to stop.” That specificity becomes the entire conversation Sunita eventually has with her cousin, and it works better than the ultimatum she originally wanted to deliver.

This both/and reality also asks something of you that is often harder than anger: grief. You are allowed to grieve a relationship that used to be uncomplicated, even while protecting yourself from the role that person is currently playing. Grief and boundary-setting are not opposites. They usually have to happen together.

The Systemic Lens: How Community and Social Reputation Are Used Against You

It’s tempting to treat every flying monkey encounter as an isolated choice: this person decided to believe the story, that person decided to pass along the message. But flying monkey dynamics don’t happen in a social vacuum. They happen inside communities and professional worlds with existing norms about loyalty, conflict, and who gets believed.

In my work with clients from tightly networked families and small professional worlds, medicine, academia, specific regional business circles, I see a consistent pattern: the more interconnected the community, the faster a narrative can travel before the person being described even knows a story is circulating. High-trust communities are efficient at spreading information, and that efficiency does not discriminate between accurate information and a distorted account.

There’s also a structural bias worth naming. Communities frequently reward the person who appears calm and non-confrontational, regardless of who is actually telling the truth. Someone skilled at presenting composed distress often reads as more credible than a person who is angry or blunt about having been harmed, even when the anger is completely warranted. This isn’t a failing of any single flying monkey. It’s a pattern baked into how most communities process conflict.

Reputation itself becomes a resource that gets fought over, and driven women often have more of it at stake than they realize until it’s under attack. A physician’s standing among colleagues, a founder’s standing among investors, these translate directly into referrals and belonging. Systemic pressure to preserve public standing makes it genuinely costly to speak plainly about what happened, which is precisely why smear campaigns work.

Naming this systemic layer matters because it takes some of the weight off any single flying monkey and redistributes it to the structure creating the conditions for this to keep happening. It’s not that your community is uniquely broken. It’s that most communities, absent specific training around covert manipulation, default to conflict-avoidant, surface-level readings of who seems credible. Understanding that helps you stop personalizing every single instance and start thinking, instead, about which communities and relationships are actually built to hold complexity.

How to Protect Your Reality and Rebuild Genuine Support

The work of protecting your reality starts internally, before it ever becomes about other people. In my practice, the first skill I teach clients is what I call reality anchoring: writing things down as they happen, in your own words, close to the time they occur. Not for anyone else. For you. When several people repeat the same distorted phrase back to you in one week, your own contemporaneous account is often what keeps you oriented.

From there, boundaries have to become specific rather than global. “I’m cutting everyone off” sounds protective, but it’s rarely sustainable or even what you actually want. What tends to work better is what Sunita landed on: naming the exact behavior that has to stop, independent of whether the person agrees with your broader read of the situation. “Please stop forwarding me messages from him” is a request almost anyone can honor or refuse clearly, which tells you who is willing to respect a boundary.

Limiting engagement with people who have shown themselves susceptible to relaying pressure is not the same as declaring war on them. You can love someone and also decline to discuss your ex, your parent, or the state of the relationship with them. Most flying monkeys, especially the unwitting ones, will eventually get the message that this topic is closed if you hold that line consistently rather than re-litigating it every time they raise it.

It also matters who you let close during this period. The people you lean on most should be able to hold your account of events without needing to relitigate or “hear the other side” on your behalf. This is also where people-pleasing patterns are worth examining, since the instinct to keep everyone comfortable can quietly work against you here. A friend who says “I believe you, and I’m not interested in being a go-between” is doing something genuinely protective.

Professional support matters here too, and I say this as someone who has watched clients try to do this alone for far longer than necessary. A trauma-informed therapist can help you build the internal steadiness that makes flying monkey encounters land with less force. Recent research on survivors’ experiences of support after relational harm found that perceived helpfulness varied significantly by source, with survivors often rating structured, trauma-informed support as more useful than well-meaning but untrained input from friends or family (Cho and colleagues, 2025). Good intentions are not the same as useful support, and it is not a betrayal of the people who love you to seek support built for this.

This is the slower work of relational trauma recovery, and it rarely announces itself with a single breakthrough. Rebuilding your circle does not have to mean starting from zero. Some relationships survive this period intact, some need real repair, and some quietly end because the person was never able to stop being a conduit. All three outcomes can be correct. The goal is a circle where the people closest to you can hold your reality without distorting it, so the next flying monkey message, if it comes, lands as information rather than a crisis.

Carlota, almost a year after that night on her closet floor, tells me something I think about often. She and Renata are not close anymore, but they are not enemies either. “I stopped needing her to see it my way,” Carlota says. “I just needed to see it clearly myself.” She still keeps a photo from Renata’s wedding on her shelf. She has simply stopped waiting for a version of the friendship that required her to doubt her own mother’s behavior to keep it. Her closet floor is quiet again, but it is a different quiet now, one she chose.

Warmly, Annie.

Related Reading

Simon, George K. In Sheep’s Clothing: Understanding and Dealing with Manipulative People. Little Big Press, 1996.

Cialdini, Robert B. Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion. William Morrow, 1984.

Freyd, Jennifer J., and Pamela J. Birrell. Blind to Betrayal: Why We Fool Ourselves We Aren’t Being Deceived. Wiley, 2013.

Arabi, Shahida. Power: Surviving and Thriving After Narcissistic Abuse. Thought Catalog Books, 2017.

Medical Disclaimer