Flying Monkeys: Why Your Whole Family Takes Her Side
- Maria Niitepold
- 16 hours ago
- 16 min read
By Dr. Maria Niitepold, PsyD | Licensed Psychologist | EMDR, Brainspotting & CRM
In my practice, there is a moment in many clients' stories that hurts worse than anything the narcissistic parent ever did directly. It is the day the phone rings and it is not her. It is your aunt. Or your brother. Or your grandmother, gentle, beloved, sounding pained, and she says some version of: I just don't understand why you're doing this to your mother. She's heartbroken. Can't you just call her?
And in that moment you understand something with a sick, falling clarity: it is not just her anymore. The story has been distributed. The conflict you thought was between two people turns out to have a staff, and the people on it share your last name, your childhood photos, your holidays. You set a boundary with one person, and the consequences are arriving from six.
There is a name for this, informal but precise, that survivors coined from The Wizard of Oz: flying monkeys. In the film, the Wicked Witch rarely does her own pursuing; she sends the monkeys. In narcissistic family systems, the parent rarely enforces her own narrative alone; she sends the family. The siblings who pressure you to apologize for things she did. The aunts who repeat her version at gatherings. The relatives who relay her hurt, report back your responses, and treat your boundary as the family's emergency.
This post is about that network: how it gets recruited, why good people end up serving in it, what it is actually doing to you, and how to respond to it without losing yourself, or every relationship that got conscripted. Because here is the part no one tells you at the start: the monkeys are usually not the villain of this story. They are its second wave of casualties. That does not make their pressure hurt less. It changes what you do about it.
Quick Answer: What Are Flying Monkeys?
Flying monkeys are the people a narcissistic person recruits to enforce her narrative and pressure her target: relatives who deliver guilt, repeat her version, push reconciliation on her terms, and report back. Some act maliciously; most act on incomplete information she supplied. The defining test: they arrive to deliver her side, not to hear yours.
Table of Contents
Where the Monkeys Come From: The Recruitment
The first thing to understand is that the network was built before you needed to recognize it, often years before.
A narcissistic parent does not begin recruiting when you set your boundary. She has been managing the family's information environment your entire life. You were described to relatives before you could describe yourself: the difficult one, the sensitive one, the one we worry about. Every conflict between you was narrated to the family in real time, by her, in her framing, while you, being a child and then a conscientious adult, said nothing, because you did not air family matters, because you were protecting her, because you assumed the truth was visible. The result is an audience that has been receiving one channel for thirty years and mistaking it for the news.
Then comes the triggering event, your boundary, your reduced contact, your refusal to attend, your one honest conversation, and the recruitment goes active. The mechanism is almost always the same, and it is important to see how little it requires: she does not call the family and issue instructions. She performs distress. She is heartbroken, confused, praying about it. She doesn't know what she did. She just wants her daughter back. Each relative receives this performance privately, packaged for what moves them specifically, and each one independently concludes that something must be done, and that the something is you.
Notice the architecture, because it is the same one I describe in DARVO and how the story gets twisted, now running at family scale: she has been positioned as the victim, you as the offender, and the family as the rescuers, before you have said a single word to anyone. By the time your aunt calls, the trial is over. The call is the sentencing.
The Roster: Four Kinds of Flying Monkeys
Not everyone applying pressure is doing the same thing, and responding well requires telling them apart. In the families I work with, the network usually contains four types.
The loyal enforcer. Usually the golden child or the parent's closest ally, the sibling whose role I describe in how narcissistic families assign scapegoat and golden child. The enforcer knows more of the truth than anyone, and enforces anyway, because their standing, identity, and inheritance of the family story depend on the official version holding. Their pressure is the most aggressive and the least persuadable, because it is not a misunderstanding. It is a position.
The peacekeeper. Often a grandmother, an aunt, sometimes your father. The peacekeeper may privately know exactly what your mother is. Their mission is not truth; it is quiet. Can't you just apologize, even if you did nothing, you know how she is, it's easier. The peacekeeper is not trying to hurt you. They are trying to make the family's pain stop at the lowest possible cost, and the lowest possible cost, as always, has been calculated to be you.
The oblivious relayer. The cousin, the family friend, the relative at distance who has only ever had the one channel and sincerely believes what they were told. Their pressure is genuinely well-meant: they think they are helping repair a tragic rift. The relayer is the most common type, the most reachable in theory, and the most dangerous in one specific way: everything you say to them flows back, lightly edited, to the source.
The dual agent. The one who calls you with sympathy, agrees she's always been like this, encourages you to open up, and then reports the conversation in full. Sometimes the dual agent is consciously playing both sides for standing; more often they are simply a person without boundaries inside a system that harvests information. Either way, the effect is identical: your private words arrive at the family gathering as exhibits.
The Missions: What the Network Actually Does
Once active, the network runs recognizable operations, and naming them as operations, rather than as a series of individual painful conversations, is half of disarming them.
Reconciliation pressure: the calls and messages urging you to fix it, where fixing means returning to the previous arrangement with an apology flowing in one direction. Guilt delivery: the bulletins about her suffering, she cried all through dinner, she's not sleeping, she's getting older, you'll regret this, which relocate her distress into your body while leaving its cause undiscussed. Intelligence: the casual questions about your life, your therapy, your marriage, whose answers surface later with her fingerprints on them. Narrative maintenance: the version repeated at every gathering you skip, hardening in your absence into family history.
And the ambush: the holiday or funeral where she is brought to you, or you to her, by relatives who decided the reunion just needed engineering, and your reaction to being ambushed becomes, of course, the newest evidence of your difficulty, the same conversion I map in why your one reaction becomes the whole story.
Run together, the operations have one combined effect: the conflict never stays between you and her. You set a boundary with one person and find it litigated in a dozen relationships, on her terms, on her schedule, with her framing, while you, the only person not distributing a version, become the only person whose version no one has heard.
Why It Works on You: When Consensus Feels Like Truth
Here is the question that brings clients to my office shaking: if I'm right about her, why does everyone disagree with me? Six people can't all be wrong.
They can, and understanding why is essential, because the outnumbering effect is the network's real weapon. Human beings are wired to treat consensus as evidence; when everyone around you converges on a verdict, the machinery of your own mind starts updating toward it, and that machinery does not check whether the six opinions are independent. Yours are not. Six relatives repeating one woman's narrative are not six data points. They are one data point with six speakers, the same statistical illusion I take apart in the common-denominator accusation, now wearing your family's faces.
And the consensus lands on prepared ground. If you grew up as this family's designated problem, the verdict arriving from all sides is not new information; it is the oldest information, re-confirmed, the assignment I trace in what it means to be the adult child of a narcissistic parent. The network does not have to convince you of anything. It only has to reactivate what was installed before you could defend yourself. This is why one phone call from your grandmother can undo three months of clarity, and why the doubt that follows, maybe it really is me, maybe I'm remembering it wrong, feels so total. You are not weak for wobbling under it. You are outnumbered by an echo.
If your certainty about your own history collapses every time the family applies coordinated pressure, that is not evidence you are wrong. It is evidence the pressure is working as designed, and it is exactly what trauma therapy helps you become immune to. I offer EMDR, Brainspotting, and CRM for adults recovering from narcissistic abuse and its family systems, across New York and Florida and throughout all PsyPact states. You can request a free 15-minute consultation whenever you are ready.
Or call or text (850) 696-7218
The Painful Part: Some of Them Love You
Now the part of this that the angrier corners of the internet get wrong, and that you need to get right, because your healing depends on it.
The survivor literature often paints the monkeys as a flock of willing villains. A few are. Most are not. Your grandmother pressuring you to call is not running an operation; she is eighty-one, she loves you both, she has been fed one story for decades, and she is frightened of dying with the family broken. Your cousin relaying guilt sincerely believes a daughter is abandoning a heartbroken mother, because that is the only version that ever reached him. These people are not your enemies. They are her instruments, and many of them are also her victims, conscripted into emotional labor on behalf of a person who has been managing them as long as she has been managing you.
Why does this distinction matter so much? Two reasons. First, because raging at the instruments wastes your strength and supplies the narrative: every relative you blast becomes a fresh witness to your difficulty. Second, and more important, because some of these relationships are recoverable, on the other side of this, with boundaries, and treating a confused, loving relayer the same way you treat a knowing enforcer burns bridges that did not have to burn. The network is her doing. Who remains in your life after it stops working is partly yours.
The Test: Genuine Concern or Errand?
Which raises the honest question this post owes you: how do you tell a flying monkey from a relative with genuine, independent concern? Because sometimes families worry for real reasons, and a post like this should not hand you a license to dismiss every hard conversation as an operation.
The test is simple and almost never fails. Genuine concern is curious; an errand is not. A relative with real, independent worry wants your account: they ask what happened, they listen past their discomfort, they can hold the possibility that the story they received was incomplete, and what you tell them stays with them. A flying monkey arrives with the conclusion pre-installed: the conversation exists to deliver her position and secure your compliance, your side is interrupted, reframed, or treated as the symptom, and, the most reliable tell of all, the information flows one way in and one way out, her message to you, your responses back to her.
Run the test on your last three hard family conversations. Did anyone ask what happened, and wait for the answer? The ones who did are not monkeys, whatever they currently believe. The ones who arrived already finished are not having a conversation with you at all. They are completing a delivery.
How to Respond Without Losing Yourself
So, practically. The phone is ringing. What do you do?
First, the master rule, from which everything else follows: never litigate your relationship with her through intermediaries. Every explanation you send through the network arrives at its destination edited, and every defense you mount becomes material. The fantasy, if I just explain it well enough to Aunt Linda, she'll understand, has been run by every client I have ever worked with, and it has approximately never worked, because Aunt Linda's understanding was never the obstacle. The information channel was. You cannot win a trial conducted in a court she owns.
Instead, one sentence, warm and total, deployed identically to everyone: I love you, and I'm not going to discuss my relationship with Mom with you. I'd love to talk about anything else. That sentence does three jobs at once: it refuses the errand, it preserves the relationship, and it tests the person, because what they do next tells you which type they are. The relayer, gently, eventually accepts it. The peacekeeper pushes twice and subsides. The enforcer escalates, and their escalation is your answer about them.
For the dual agents and the determined, add the information diet: pleasant, warm, and content-free. Your life's details, your therapy, your marriage, your reasons, become need-to-know, and the network does not need to know. This is not coldness. It is recognizing that in this system, information about you is currency, and you are no longer funding the operation.
Do not chase the narrative. The version of you circulating at family gatherings is painful, and you cannot edit it from outside, and attending in order to correct it puts you inside the ambush architecture. The people capable of doubting her story will doubt it eventually, usually when her pattern visits them; the others were never your audience. Your reputation inside a managed information system is not the measure of your reality, however much the old scapegoat wiring insists it is.
And if the pressure is arriving because you have reduced or ended contact with her, know that the network's siege is the predictable second act of that decision, not a sign you made the wrong one, and the full navigation of that territory, the guilt, the grief, the holidays, deserves its own complete treatment, which I give it in going no-contact with a narcissistic parent.
The Grief Nobody Warns You About
Here is what clients are never prepared for: the monkeys cost you more grief than she does.
You made your peace, painfully, over years, with who your mother is. What you had not priced in was the rest of them. The brother who knew, who lived in the same house you did, choosing her version anyway. The grandmother whose love you never doubted, weaponized against you in a voice that still smells like her kitchen. The family that, given a choice between examining one woman's behavior and losing you, chose, apparently without difficulty, to lose you.
These are real losses, plural, secondary, and almost completely unwitnessed, because the world has a category for an abusive mother and almost none for I lost my whole family to her story. The isolation is the operation's final product: the target, surrounded by a family she can no longer safely touch, doubting her own history, with no one left who shares it.
That isolation is also why this is therapy work and not just strategy work. The boundaries and scripts above protect your perimeter. The deeper work, processing the original wounds the network keeps striking, the scapegoat verdict, the terror of exile, the self-blame that still feels safer than the truth, is what makes the perimeter stop needing constant defense. In my practice that is EMDR for the specific scenes the family's pressure reactivates, Brainspotting for the wordless conviction of being the wrong one, and the Comprehensive Resource Model to build the internal ground that consensus cannot shake, so that six voices repeating one woman's story land, finally, as what they are: an echo, not a verdict.
Checklist: Is a Flying Monkey Network Operating on You?
Read slowly. Notice which ones your body already knew.
After I set a boundary with one person, pressure began arriving from several
Relatives contact me about her feelings, but no one has asked for my account of what happened
I have heard her exact phrases coming out of other people's mouths
Family members pass along her hurt, her tears, her confusion, while the cause of my distance goes undiscussed
Things I said privately to one relative have surfaced elsewhere, with her framing attached
There is a sibling or relative whose standing in the family depends on my version never being heard
I have been ambushed: gatherings engineered to produce a reunion, with my reaction held against me
The pressure spikes around holidays, illnesses, and family events
I leave these conversations doubting my own memory of my own life
The losses I am grieving are no longer just her; they are nearly everyone
If most of these land, you are not paranoid and you are not the family's problem. You are the target of a narrative that needed enforcement, in a family that supplied the enforcers.
Frequently Asked Questions
What does "flying monkeys" mean in narcissistic abuse?
The term, borrowed from The Wizard of Oz, describes the people a narcissistic person mobilizes to enforce her narrative and pressure her target: relatives and friends who deliver guilt, repeat her version of events, push for reconciliation on her terms, gather information, and report back. The defining feature is the direction of the conversation: they arrive carrying her position rather than seeking yours. Most are acting on incomplete information she supplied rather than on malice, which changes how you respond to them but not the effect of what they do.
Are flying monkeys aware of what they're doing?
Usually not fully, and the network depends on that. The typical roster runs from a knowing enforcer (often the golden child, whose family standing requires the official story), through peacekeepers who privately suspect the truth but prioritize quiet, to sincere relayers who have only ever received one channel of information and genuinely believe they are mending a tragic rift. Deliberate malice is the exception; managed ignorance is the rule. This is precisely why explaining yourself to them rarely works: you are not correcting a misunderstanding held in good faith, you are contradicting a decades-old information environment maintained by someone they trust.
How do I deal with flying monkeys without cutting off my whole family?
With one boundary, applied warmly and universally: refuse the topic, not the person. Something like, I love you, and I won't be discussing my relationship with Mom; I'd love to talk about anything else. Then watch what each person does with it. Sincere relatives eventually accept it and the relationship continues on other terms; enforcers escalate, and their escalation tells you what that relationship actually was. Pair the boundary with an information diet, warm but content-free about your life's details, since anything specific you share is likely to travel. You end up keeping everyone who was keepable. The ones you lose were enforcing, not relating.
Should I tell my side of the story to set the record straight?
To individuals who genuinely ask and genuinely listen, briefly, once, yes, that is a relationship being honest. As a campaign to correct the family narrative, no, and it is important to understand why: the narrative is not a misunderstanding floating loose, it is maintained, actively, by its author, through channels she controls. Every correction you issue gets reprocessed through those channels and returns as new evidence of your obsession or instability. The record inside her system cannot be set straight from outside it, and exhausting yourself trying keeps you inside the dynamic. Live your life legibly; the relatives capable of independent thought will eventually read it.
Why do flying monkeys get worse when I go low or no contact?
Because reduced contact is the one move the system cannot metabolize internally. While you were present, the pressure could be applied to you directly; once you step back, the narrative requires distribution, she needs the family to experience your absence as her injury, and the monkeys become the only remaining delivery mechanism for guilt, intelligence, and reconciliation pressure. Expect the surge, especially around holidays, illnesses, and family milestones, and read it correctly: the escalation is not evidence that your boundary was wrong. It is the system registering that the boundary is working.
Can a flying monkey ever become an ally?
Yes, and it usually happens one of two ways, neither of which you can force. Either the pattern eventually visits them, the enforcer falls from favor, the peacekeeper becomes the new target, and her behavior teaches them what your words could not; or the sincere relayer, met consistently with your warmth and your unbudging boundary, slowly notices that the dangerous, unstable person they were warned about keeps behaving with steadiness and love. Leave the door open for both. Do not stand in the doorway waiting. Your healing cannot be scheduled around other people's awakenings, and the relationships that return tend to return because you were visibly whole without them.
Can therapy help with family pressure like this, even online?
Yes, and this particular pattern is one where therapy earns its keep, because the network's power runs on old wiring: the scapegoat verdict, the terror of family exile, the reflex to doubt your own memory under consensus. Strategy and scripts protect the perimeter; somatic work, EMDR for the scenes the pressure reactivates, Brainspotting for the wordless layer, CRM for internal ground that outnumbering cannot shake, retires the vulnerability itself. All of it translates fully to telehealth, and I describe who online trauma therapy works well for if that fits your life. Many clients also find it quietly important that their therapy is the one conversation in their world that no one can relay.
The Verdict of Six Is Still the Voice of One
When the calls come, and they will keep coming for a while, remember what you are actually hearing. Not six independent judgments. One woman's story, distributed through six people she has been supplying for decades, landing on wiring she installed before you could read.
You are not crazy because the family agrees. The family agreeing is what her management looks like from the inside. Your account does not become false because it is outnumbered, and your worth was never up for a vote she counts.
The network can pressure you. It can grieve you. What it cannot do, once your own ground is solid, is overwrite you. Building that ground is the work, and I do it every week with people standing exactly where you are standing.
I work with clients in person at my Gulf Breeze, Florida office and online across New York, Florida, and all PsyPact states, using CRM, EMDR, and Brainspotting. You can see the areas I serve or request a free 15-minute consultation.
Or call or text (850) 696-7218
The verdict of six is still the voice of one, and it was never yours to carry.
Explore More
Why Smart, Self-Aware People Stay in Bad Relationships (The Neurobiology of the Trauma Bond)
Why Do I Feel Like I Lost Myself? (Narcissistic Abuse and the "False Self")
The Neurobiology of Narcissistic Gaslighting: Why You Feel "Crazy" (And Why It's Not Your Fault)
Why Do I Feel Worse After Talking to My Parents? (Hidden Signs of Emotional Neglect)
Dr. Maria Niitepold, PsyD
EMDRIA-Trained Trauma & Somatic Therapist
Serving High-Achievers Across New York and Florida
(850) 696-7218. Call or text anytime.
Healing doesn't have to be hard. It just has to start.
(Disclaimer: This blog post is for educational purposes and does not constitute medical advice, a diagnosis, or a formal doctor-patient relationship. If you are experiencing a mental health crisis or domestic abuse, please contact your local emergency services, call 988, or reach the National Domestic Violence Hotline at 1-800-799-SAFE or by texting START to 88788.)
Comments