The flying monkey.

The familiar version, and why it isn't enough

Most survivors arrive at the term flying monkey already framing it as adversarial. The narcissist has enforcers; the enforcers deliver pressure; the enforcers are part of the abuse. This framing is not wrong, but it is incomplete in a way that matters. Treating flying monkeys as villains tends to push survivors into a defensive posture that does not actually help them — counter-arguing the framing, trying to expose the narcissist to the third party, sometimes cutting off relationships that, with more time, would have come back.

The more useful framing is structural. A flying monkey is, in almost every case, a third party who has been triangulated into the abuse system, carefully and over time, by a narcissist who needed an enforcer. Most of them do not know they are playing the role. Most of them believe they are doing something kind — mediating, expressing concern, holding a difficult party accountable, helping reconcile two people they care about. They are not, in their own experience, on a side. They are, in their own experience, the wise friend trying to help.

This article is about that gap — the gap between what flying monkey activity looks like from inside (helpful, well-intentioned) and what it does in fact (sustain the abuse system from outside the relationship). The gap is what makes the dynamic so resilient. People who would refuse to participate in obvious cruelty will participate happily in this version of it, because the version reaching them does not look like cruelty at all.

Why the recruitment works

The narcissist has been laying groundwork with this third party for months or years before any flying monkey activity occurs. The groundwork is the same machinery described under smear campaigns, but with one important addition: the third party is being positioned not just as an audience for the version of the survivor the narcissist wants installed, but as someone with a role to play in helping.

The flattery is part of the design. The narcissist confides in this person. Tells them, in a wounded tone, things they don't tell others. Positions them as unusually perceptive, unusually trusted, unusually able to see the situation clearly. By the time any pressure needs to be delivered to the survivor, the third party has spent months in the privileged position of confidant — and that position is itself a reward they will not lightly relinquish.

The framing of the request, when it comes, is also disarming. It is never go pressure them. It is I'm so worried about her, I don't know what to do. Or he won't talk to me, can you reach out? Or I just want them to know I love them, I don't want them to think I'm angry. The third party experiences themselves as responding to a sincere appeal from someone in pain. They are not, in their own framing, acting as an instrument. They are acting as a person trying to help.

And the structural pressure on them to comply is real. To decline is to break ranks with the narcissist (who has been so vulnerable, so confiding), to seem unhelpful or judgmental, to risk being recast in the next round of stories as the cold one who didn't care. Most people, faced with this configuration, do not have the framework to recognize what is happening. They do what would be right in almost any other context — they show up, they reach out, they try to mediate. The same response, in this context, makes them an instrument.

What flying monkey activity looks like

The recurring forms, in roughly increasing severity:

• The relay. Forwarding a message from the narcissist that the survivor has explicitly stated they do not want to receive. I know you're not talking to her, but she asked me to tell you… The friendship the third party has with the survivor is being used as a workaround on the no-contact stance.

• The mediation that isn't. Setting up what is presented as a neutral conversation — coffee, a phone call, a family meeting — with talking points that have been supplied in advance by the narcissist. The third party may not even realize the agenda is not their own.

• The surveillance. Casually asking the survivor about their dating life, finances, recent travel, mental health — and reporting back, often without registering the report as betrayal. The narcissist learns, through the third party, what they would otherwise have no access to.

• The defense. Defending the narcissist in mutual social contexts when the survivor isn't present. Pushing back on people who have begun to see the pattern. Subtly running down the survivor in conversations the survivor will not be in the room for.

• The pressure. You're being too harsh. She's really suffering. Think about the kids. Your mother just wants to talk to you. Each delivered with apparent sincerity; each calibrated to the survivor's specific guilt levers; each, very often, prepared in advance by the narcissist who knows exactly which appeal will land.

• The crisis pivot. An urgent reason to break no contact — a health scare, a family emergency, a child's birthday — communicated by the third party as something the survivor must respond to. Sometimes the crisis is real; often it has been amplified or manufactured. Either way, it functions as a hoover by proxy.

Who tends to become one

Not villains. Patterns. Structural positions where flying monkey activity is most likely to develop:

• The narcissist's own family — particularly siblings, parents, and adult children whose loyalty to the narcissist preexists the survivor's arrival. The framework that says family takes care of family works well in healthy systems; in this one it provides a built-in pool of enforcers.

• Long-running friends of the narcissist who knew them before the survivor entered the picture. Their reading of the narcissist has been set by years of pre-survivor experience; they have rarely seen the relationship's inside; they are predisposed to disbelieve the survivor's version.

• The survivor's own family members who were charmed early. The mother-in-law who liked the narcissist immediately, the sister who became close to them, the parent who has always preferred easy people to complicated ones.

• Children, particularly post-separation. The most damaging configuration. A child who has been positioned by an alienating parent as the protective ally — see parental alienation — can become a flying monkey without any awareness that this is what is happening.

• People who badly want to be the wise mediator. A small but recurring type: friends or family members who derive identity from being the one who solves family conflicts. The narcissist's framing flatters them precisely.

• People who cannot tolerate the discomfort of two-sidedness. Some observers, faced with a conflict in which the truth is not immediately obvious, resolve their discomfort by picking a side and committing. The narcissist's calmness during contested periods, paired with the survivor's distress, makes the survivor look like the unstable party. The observer picks the calm one. The picking feels, to them, like clarity.

What flying monkey activity actually costs the survivor

The surface cost is annoying messages, awkward family events, friends who keep pressing for reconciliation. The deeper cost is that the abuse system, which the survivor thought they had exited by going no contact, has reconstituted itself outside the relationship — running on the labor of people the survivor previously trusted. Every flying monkey contact is, structurally, a hoover attempt with the survivor's social ecosystem as the delivery mechanism. The same neurochemical work that no contact is supposed to do — extinguishing the conditioning, letting the nervous system register that the threat is gone — gets reset by every flying monkey contact that breaches it.

The other deep cost is to the social fabric itself. Each flying monkey episode forces the survivor to make a choice about the third party: stay close and accept being a conduit, or pull back and lose that friendship too. The choices accumulate. By the end of the first year of no contact, the survivor has often lost a meaningful share of their pre-relationship social ecosystem — not to the abuser, exactly, but to the flying monkey machinery the abuser activated.

What to do about them

The general principles are at the glossary entry. In one paragraph: do not relay messages, do not accept relayed messages, do not chase third parties to clear up what was said about you, decline to discuss the abuser with anyone who is in active contact with them, and state your no-contact stance once — briefly, without justifying it — when it needs to be stated.

Two things to add. First, you do not owe anyone an explanation. The pressure to defend the no-contact stance, to lay out the case against the abuser, to convince the third party that you are not the one being unreasonable, is one of the strongest pressures of the early no-contact period. It is also a trap. Every time you make the case, you give the abuser fresh material (through the third party) and you spend energy on a project that almost never works. The flying monkey is not, in most cases, going to be argued out of their framing. They are going to either eventually see the pattern on their own — over years, often — or they are not.

Second, accept that some of the people you lose this way will not come back, and some will. The composition is unpredictable. Some long friendships are durable to this and will be there in year three; some you considered stable will quietly disappear during the worst stretch. The post-exit social ecosystem is built largely from the survivors of this period and from the new people who arrive without prior framing. The grief about the friends who did not survive the test is real and is its own piece of the recovery.

If you have been a flying monkey

This section is for readers who have, while reading the rest of this article, recognized themselves not as the survivor but as a third party in someone else's situation. You have been the friend who relayed a message. You have been the family member who pressed someone to forgive. You have been the colleague who privately ran down a co-worker on the basis of what someone else told you. You are realizing now, possibly for the first time, that what you did at the time as helping was helping the wrong person.

The first thing to know is that this is not unusual. Most people will, at some point in their lives, do flying monkey work for someone in their family or social circle, very often without realizing it. The framing was designed not to be recognized. The fact that you are recognizing it now, in retrospect, is itself uncommon — most people never do.

The second thing to know is that there is something to do about it, and it is smaller and slower than you may want. Do not write the person you helped harm a long apologetic email. The instinct is generous; the result, very often, is that the survivor — who may have spent years getting to a stable post-exit equilibrium — is dragged back into the dynamic by a contact they did not invite. If you have been substantially absent from their life and a sudden long message arrives from you with the abuser's name in it, the message can feel, on the receiving end, like another hoover.

What to do instead, in roughly this order:

• Stop the activity first. Whatever you were doing — relaying messages, defending the narcissist in social contexts, asking the survivor questions whose answers you have been reporting back — stop now. This matters more than any reckoning conversation. The harm is in the activity, not in your unprocessed feelings about having done it.

• Decline going forward. When the narcissist next confides in you, asks you to reach out, presents you with the wounded story that has been working for years, decline the role. You do not have to expose them; you do not have to confront them; you can simply stop accepting the assignments.

• If the survivor is reachable and willing — many will not be — a short, specific, non-performative acknowledgment can be useful. Not a long apology. Not an explanation of what you now understand. Something closer to: I want you to know I see what I did and I am sorry. I will not do it again. I do not expect anything from you. Send it once. Do not follow up.

• Accept that the relationship may not be recoverable. Some survivors will, over time, restore a relationship with a former flying monkey who has demonstrably stopped. Some will not, and they have the right not to. Either outcome is theirs to choose. Your job is to stop the harm, not to be forgiven for it.

• Do the parallel work of evaluating the narcissist accurately. The reading you had of them was wrong. Sit with that. The full recognition of having been used by someone you trusted is, in its own way, a small version of what the survivor has been through. Take it seriously without making it the survivor's problem.

The hardest part

Some of the people who participated in your harm will never see what they did. Some of them will continue to defend the abuser for years after you have left, will tell the story in which you are the cold one, will treat their loyalty to the abuser as moral seriousness. You will not change their minds. You do not have to change their minds. Part of the recovery is the slow acceptance that the audience the abuser cultivated is not, in most cases, going to be re-cultivated by you — and that it does not need to be in order for your life to continue.

The other part of the acceptance: some friends were lost to the period of leaving. They will, occasionally, surface years later with a quiet message acknowledging what they now see. Some will not. The composition of your post-exit social ecosystem is not the composition of your pre-exit one. The new map is the actual one. It is, in time, more reliably yours.