© 6/26/23
(edit on 6/27/23 for grammatical errors)
Most abusers have co-bullies, enablers, believers, henchmen and parroting sycophants. In psychology circles they tend to be lumped together and are called "flying monkeys" by many psychologists and therapists.
I'm not sure why or how the term "flying monkeys" came to be used, but I suspect someone saw the witch as a sadist in need of victims to terrorize, and the flying monkeys, with their so-called inferior monkey brains, were used to procure the victims for the witch.
But Dorothy has power too, helped by her ruby slippers. The witch wants all of the power, and in order to get it, she has to get the ruby slippers from Dorothy, but the ruby slippers give the witch a shock. Then the witch thinks up the grand scheme of getting all of the power, even the power that the ruby slippers are endowed with, by disposing of Dorothy.
When Dorothy manages an escape, and pours water on the witch to keep her from burning the scarecrow, the witch melts, and more importantly, it dissolves her power completely.
In a lot of ways, that is what happens in real life with domestic violence victims, and with child abuse victims: escaping victims make abusers feel they are losing power, control, the ability to influence ("Oh, my narcissism and entitlements are melting, melting, melting!"). So in order to keep victimizing, the flying monkeys need to keep doing her dirty work in keeping the old victims victimized in some way or another (just for having escaped), and help in procuring new victims. They would be called co-conspirators. However, there are all kinds of flying monkeys and I list them below.
In real life, even if both parties agree to leave the relationship, the fact of the matter is that almost all perpetrators still want to hurt their victims. They are used to abusing you, and they don't want to give it up. With abusers, withdrawing from a relationship is never going to be about agreeing that you don't get along and therefor need to separate, and about agreeing to go in peace, even if you both say the words.
Believe it or not, abuse, for them, is hard to give up. Really, really hard to give up, just like it was for the wicked witch of the west. If anything, they want to escalate the abuse, not give it up. And for that, they tend to feel they need to enlist their flying monkeys (to get you to "stay in the game" and to get you trapped again, to get you to submit to them under the community pressure of their flying monkeys).
In order to avoid push-back from their victims, narcissists need the most vulnerable-to-brainwashing monkeys they can find, or the most stupid, or the most blindly loyal, or Pollyannas who are in denial that abuse escalates or even exists, never mind that some narcissists have sadism addictions. They also have to get rid of any evidence that they are less than perfect (why some of them resort to stealing evidence, although these days there are scanners and cameras).
Narcissists are notoriously lazy about solving their own relationship problems. They want the person they have a conflict with to solve everything, of course, but when the other person fails to solve everything to the narcissist's exacting standards, they then enlist flying monkeys, the term psychologists use (another link and another link). They use flying monkeys to manipulate, bully and lecture a victim while keeping their own hands clean. They also use the flying monkeys to solve their relationship problems.
Once the narcissist has unleashed their flying monkeys on you, you are officially a scapegoat. Scapegoating has a lot of dangers to it, precisely because the flying monkeys have their own agendas, not just the main narcissist's agendas. It can be very dangerous. Even with people who have the best of intentions, they can be brainwashed into scapegoating you too to go along with a crowd.
I know a highly educated lawyer who spouts justice, fair and equitable treatment, and liberal ideas like peace, brotherhood, biodiversity, "No Mow May", and other causes on her Facebook every day, all through the day, and is even against abuse and domestic violence, who got roped into the flying monkey role, and if she can be brainwashed, I figure anyone can.
As a survivor of abuse who now has to survive what the flying monkeys are doing, it can be overwhelming and it can feel like there is no justice in the world, that everyone is out for themselves, that narcissists are oppressing everyone else without the push-backs necessary to create some justice, that false narratives are "believed" over the truth. With enough flying monkeys in the picture, it can be hard to tell who is working for who and what false narrative is being spouted by which flying monkey.
My wild guess? Probably the one who initiated it, however since narcissists tend to "flock together", one of them can certainly get the upper hand over another one: "No. This is the way we're going to do it instead" ... and before you know it, one narcissist is letting another lead the aggressive charge.
And narcissists love the bullying, and with enough bullies, they can do pretty much anything they want to you - unless law enforcement, police, domestic violence, child protective services, and the like, get involved - important because co-bullies are more likely to escalate the bullying very fast, and even commit crimes.
If this is a family situation, it's heartbreaking, but I don't think there is any other way to truly deal with being scapegoated than to leave the family behind. I don't know many scapegoats who stay in the family, and the ones I do know about, are trying to find a way to get out. Some of them feel they must leave without the family expecting it, or disappear forever, some of them try to set up a life overseas which makes them harder to track. Some try the gray rock method, but find it to be a disaster because of the number of flying monkeys they have to use it on. The family seems determined to traumatize, and re-traumatize, and most scapegoats get pretty severe symptoms from the traumatic experiences they are called upon to live through again and again. Anxiety, lack of sleep, inability to focus, muscle aches, headaches and all kinds of other symptoms from being around an abusive family make it impossible to stay. Some feel trapped, hopeless and commit suicide instead, especially if they are in their teenage years. Believe it or not, I haven't seen narcissists who care when this happens. They are still likely to insult their scapegoats (you can look into the details of Phoebe Prince's death to know that her bullies were still insulting her in public and on social media after she hung herself - and you can also see that she was a scapegoat and prejudiced against afterwards too - usually both go hand-in-hand).
Abusive families can treat their scapegoats no better than Phoebe Prince was treated. The problem is that with family, it is much harder to find members with a conscience because bullying, abuse and isolating victims from familial belonging has been normalized. Even the better members can be like what Martin Luther King talked about, the members who are good people, but do nothing.
But most abusive families, let us face it, have the "I get along with them" types of members. These are the members who feel if they get along with abusers and difficult members, then their world is okay, and they aren't going to rock it just for you. They don't care what you are going through; they don't care about what the flying monkeys are doing (even if the monkeys are breaking the law to hurt you - they are eerily silent even about that). They don't even care what it is doing to the family reputation except when it is at a critical mass, and even then, they side with whoever it is convenient to side with.
But back to how the narcissist(s) deal with flying monkeys ...
If the flying monkey doesn't manage to say and do everything the way the narcissist wants it to be done, then they too can be victimized. However, often they aren't because of the ambition flying monkeys have to stick together to abuse, to try for more power for themselves, or to be loyal to the narcissist for a reward, or just to keep from being attacked.
So again, why would they want to keep hurting you? And why would they want to enlist others to hurt you too?
With most abusers, it tends to be a habit, via the cycle of abuse at best, or an outright addiction to causing someone pain at worst. I cover why in this section.
Even if you are no longer in a relationship with them, and have both agreed it is time to separate, they are still in "the habit" or "the cycle" or "the addiction" most of the time. It's part of the research on this: once they have initiated hurting you a number of times, they'll want to keep it going.
And why do they want to cause you pain? And why do they think other people will help them in that?
One reason is that they think it will make you change your personality, your mind, your thoughts, your looks or your behavior in such a way that it suits them. In other words, they bank on you fitting more and more into a mold and role that they want. They want you to be more pleasing and pleasant to them (it doesn't work, and here is why, and even they eventually realize that), but it also tends to be their hope, if an ever-diminishing one. You'd think they'd understand why people don't change all that drastically because they are the most unchangeable people on the planet.
They want people to seek their approval always (they act like royalty, no matter what the realities and their social standing and behaviors really are, what their ethical behaviors reveal about them, and what their financial status is - usually nothing close to royalty). They like and prefer people kowtowing to them. However, if you are being repeatedly abused, it gets to the point where you not only do not want to kowtow (typically referred to as fawning), and as the abuse continues, you probably don't particularly like talking to them either. That is because almost all emotional subjects with abusers are usually about intimidating you, lecturing you, making demands of you - none of it reciprocal, trying to get you to be submissive to them, arguments that are demoralizing and degrading to you, and where they insist on winning the argument, or they play the victim or do a DARVO to get empathy focused on them instead of on you, which is frustrating, nauseating, and unappetizing for a victim of abuse.
This points more towards "habit". Perhaps you were more open or engaged to what they had to say in the past, or when you were a little child. It could be anything. Perhaps you were more open to being brought into arguments. Maybe your self esteem was more battered than it used to be (self esteem tends to be battered when you have some desires to still engage with people who hurt you). At any rate, they'd like you to be back in that role of getting your self esteem knocked, of getting insulted, of looking at them as someone you actually want approval from. When you don't want or need approval from them any more, they can go into a narcissistic collapse. So, to prevent that, they prefer to keep hurting you. Usually if they can't get positive narcissistic supply from you, they'll go towards getting negative supply. And that usually means enlisting flying monkeys, getting other people to ignore you, disapprove of you, to parrot what the narcissist says and other possible aggressive acts like harassment or possibly even law-breaking on the narcissist's wishes.
With the bigger issues in life which bring a conflict to the narcissist's attention, narcissists will always bring others into the conflicts you are having with them. They refuse to deal one-on-one with the bigger issues between you. The flying monkey is either with them to convince you that you are wrong and the narcissist is right (often without knowing all of the details, or of having an open mind enough to hear your side of the story), or the flying monkeys are there to bully and intimidate you into action, or reaction.
Either one can create unforeseen problems for the narcissist. It will become obvious as to why further in this post.
If you don't want to talk to the narcissist, the flying monkeys are there to talk to you, and to hurt you by proxy - narcissists, and especially malignant narcissists, do not like the idea of you living pain-free. Since they don't want to be accountable for hurting you, they get others to do it for them, primarily through shaming, but they also choose bullies to do their dirty work too.
Most victims do not and cannot tolerate flying monkeys very well, and in anything but school bullying situations, or underage-child/adult situations, it tends to set off a "flight reaction" in the victim more than other kinds of reactions. An underage child can still experience pronounced flight reactions, but they are usually hostage, unfortunately.
A second possible reason may be that after you refuse to engage with them in the way that they want, many abusers want to punish you for not engaging with them in terms of their demands (i.e. arguments where they win at getting you to be submissive to them). They may say they want nothing more to do with you, but wanting to punish you over not getting their way is still probably going to be in the forefront in their minds for awhile, and especially if you have thwarted a lot of their lectures and shaming sessions. Usually they want some outcomes from their punishments too, kind of the way despotic rulers want certain objectives to be reached by battering a country. It's the objectives of their punishments that make them dangerous, so let us say that you back away from them some more, that you aren't expressing how hurt you are by complaining, crying, saying "it's not fair", or that you hate them for what they've done to you or your life, or respond at all to anything they do (and sometimes you actually don't feel any of these things regardless - a lot of trauma can shut down reactions and feelings - potential link to an article I am writing, which I hope I can publish this Fall).
Narcissists don't tend to see relationships the way most of us see them. They don't love in the way most of us love others either. They tend to view others as utilities for their use, and they will be manipulating their relationships to achieve what they want. This is why they can discard people so easily and swiftly: you weren't living up to the narcissist's expectations, so now you are deemed useless in terms of their uses.
They are always ready to reject at a moment's notice, even their own children, their spouse, and so on. Their concerns always come first, and your concerns are either barely considered, or not considered at all. They almost always deem that other people are to blame for interpersonal conflicts that arise. They criticize others a lot but cannot stand any criticism themselves without going into a tirade. They have very little empathy towards you, but expect you to have so much empathy for them that you are walking on eggshells around their temper and demands. They tend to have broken relationships with at least one of their children, and often a spouse too (ex). The way they do relationships is to manipulate you into a position where you are submissive to their power, domination and control (which is how you become a mere utility to them). It is a very lonely, painful relationship for the victim, if you can call it a relationship at all.
You are either a one hundred percent loyal ally or you are not. Again, it is more like how a royal figure or a king would see the people around him: either you say nice things to the King, and about the King, despite who he is or what he has done, and how many people he has hurt, or put to death. You are expected to bow to him, and be submissive to everything he expects from you. "Realize my power over you" is the constant underlying drumming of their message to you, even if it is just this grandiose fantasy of his or hers.
Except that many of us, especially if we are from the USA or Europe, don't live in a world of kings and queens any more, and we certainly don't want our spouses, parents, friends, siblings, and children to be acting like one, and to be lording things over on us, and threatening us, just so they can live in their sick fantasy.
It's for a good reason most of us don't want to live like this - most royal figures were or are tyrants, and either reject, banish, enslave, torture, commit crimes and/or kill someone eventually. And they do so for a lot of god-awful reasons, many of them prejudiced-based, or totally based on paranoid fantasies, or over the popularity of the people, or the result of alternate ways of thinking about issues of the day such as new religious or political thought, or issues around being agreeable to a dogma, or their family based decisions - see "The Sibling Slayer"). But, since many abusers are often in this fantasy, they need allies like a king needs allies.
So they enlist who ever they can find who they deem to be good at being brainwashed, and/or good at lecturing with very little information about their victims, or torturing (enlisting the sadistic minded), or who they think they will ignore or hate the victim in some way (picking prejudiced-minded people, or people who are easily swayed into prejudiced perspectives). Some of them pick criminals to do this work. And some of them may also pick people who seem very easy to brainwash to do this work. Some of them pick people who are already entranced by them or their wielding of power. Some of them pick sycophants who they feel they can easily threaten ... they use every tactic and trick at their disposal.
The third reason they may still want to hurt us has to do with sadistic reasons, that they get enjoyment out of inflicting pain, and in seeing us hurt.
This would point to an addiction, more than the other two reasons above.
Patterns are hard to break, but addictions are perhaps much harder to break or control. Sadists aren't necessarily in the cycle of abuse where there is respite from abuse via "a honeymoon make-up period"; it can be on-going.
The darker narcissists (malignant narcissists), sociopaths and psychopaths tend to take the sadistic route.
They decide they need to cause you pain, or bully you over some issue, however small or made up it may be, that is not meeting their perfection standards. You react and they either get calm or they smile afterward. They have gotten their fix.
However like any addiction, it is not long-lasting, and they will need another fix again soon. So they go into a tirade every time they need a fix. And it can be all day long. You can see it coming, and the excuse for going into a huge tirade will be another "perfection issue". For instance: you didn't fold the towels right - "don't you know how to fold towels, idiot!?" ... or you didn't look to see that you left the cap off the toothpaste "Why are leaving the cap off!? You did this on purpose! Just for that, I'll -" and they will threaten you ... Or you took a walk without asking permission from them - "You're my wife! When I want you to go for a walk, I'll tell you when you can do it!", or for any similar reason. They tend to be super-controlling micro-managers, even in a close personal relationship (i.e. they are not your boss). And of course, in the situation you are in, you are likely to be "held captive" or "feel captive" in some way. This, of course, makes you vulnerable to micro-managing, and they take any situation in the environment to use for their sadistic fixes.
And most sadists are micro-managers. They find little things to blame you about to justify to themselves their use of sadism. It takes very little to set them off because it is not about the tiny thing that they are getting enraged or upset about; it is their desire to get the next sadistic narcissistic fix. They also like the power, control, domination and feelings of grandiosity they get afterwards from these incidences. Like other narcissists, it makes them feel like a king.
Alcohol can make this worse, of course, because sometimes the micro-withdrawals from alcohol happen at the same time that they also need a sadistic fix.
Which is to say that addictive personalities can have addictions to moods (alcohol is a mood soother for a lot of alcoholics). Causing someone pain can also soothe the mood of a sadist ("I'm in control of what that other person says and does, and I can get the peace I want at their expense; isn't it sweet that I can get them to do what ever I want, when I want it, and that they'll cry when I provoke them? I must mean a lot to get these reactions! I must be awesome to get everything I want!" - my guess is that this is the way most sadists feel based on some of the chatter I see from narcissists in forums ... here is just one).
No one wants to be someone else's "sadism addiction", and it is likely to get very dangerous besides. If you are deemed to have an autonomous thought or to do things the way you want to do them, they find it way too challenging, and the aggressive response is not likely to stay at just the rage level.
It is hard for many sadists to move on to another victim because it requires putting their reputations on the line again with someone new. It will be hard to tell whether they can get away with the same kinds of abuses that they did with you, and whether they have family who will serve as flying monkeys again with a new victim. And they don't know if they can get other people to hate the new victim as much as they did you.
So they tend to want to isolate you so much from others, that you lose all of your prior support. Sadists are so single-minded in their objectives about this, and in trying to convince others endlessly that you deserve sadism, with many, many false anecdotes, arm-twistings, charm, fake compassion, and persuasions, that people tend to believe them. Being white, a male, having success or money, having another entourage of co-conspirators, tends to help them get away with things (they are the dominant race, the dominant sex, have the dominant financial status, can more easily be a dominant boss).
A sadist, a white fairly wealthy male, managed to rip apart some relationships that we mutually shared. The fact that these relationships could be ripped apart so easily and swiftly by him meant they were probably tenuous relationships to begin with, not substantial, not close, not significant. It shows that some people who claim to love you, really do not, and probably never did love you at any time, no matter what they said, and it is particularly evident when they discard you over what someone else says.
Belief-oriented people do get sucked into biases. We just have to look to politics to see how many belief-oriented people there are (and who they believe for their news sources too).
The reason for a sadist using isolation tactics to get you separated from other people is to get you defenseless. In most cases, even when you were getting along, and they seemed happy with you, they are stabbing you in the back (being two-faced: nice to you in person; hyper-criticizing you, and making up things about you behind your back constantly, with gaslighting, calling you crazy, being one of the features). If no one will defend you, or very few will, it makes his abilities to attack you that much greater. Crimes become a little easier to commit too, although there are things you can do to make it fairly certain they will get caught.
The sadist who was in my life also has a criminal mind, so the warning I take from that for my readers is that protecting yourself, your assets and the people within your household should be high on your priority list. Sadists try to find holes in your defenses where they can slip through and wreak havoc, and, as I have said before, they can be so singular in their focus to hurt you (it's an addiction, and we know that things that get in the way of addictions are challenges to be knocked over, if they feel that they can knock them over without working too hard or getting caught - and since many of them are grandiose, they often make attempts).
Part of protecting yourself is to talk to as many people as you can. Sadists want their dirty deeds to stay a secret. If your community or neighborhood knows what has happened, then authorities are more easily tipped off. This is much different than what they do, which is to tell false versions or narratives of what you did in order to get people against you, bullying you. I have no interest in bullying, and neither do most victims. I just want the particular person out of my life and to leave me alone, and it is what most people want in similar situations to mine.
At any rate, it takes other people, co-conspirators, people who like to shame other people, people who think they are acting loyal to the narcissist, to keep a sadist's addiction going. It also takes other people to bully you into a situation where you are alone without support. It also takes other people to bully you so that the sadist feels that bullying is condoned and a-okay to do. As I have said in so many other posts, abusers generally target people who they believe are weak, ill, alone, children, unsupported women, or disenfranchised, not part of the dominant race of their particular country, and sadists are no exception. The weaker you appear to be, the more attacks you will receive. This is where boundaries are absolutely critical, and sometimes it takes just one sadist to make you realize that having good boundaries is absolutely necessary in all relationships and a way to a happier life ("good fences make good neighbors").
Having boundaries from flying monkeys are necessary too. If one of them sees the truth, which some of them eventually do, then you can decide whether you want to re-instate any kind of relationship with them again, but I think that it will be very, very hard to trust them. It may be traumatic to have them around you in any meaningful capacity. Once people have sided up with a perpetrator, it means they are pretty prone to brainwashing. Trust takes forever to re-build any way, and unless they have been through hell with the perpetrator too, it's pretty likely that distrust will always be part of your relationship or contact with this person. It's just better to put most of your energies into people who have always been steady, who aren't so easily swayed or lured, who aren't so quick to disenfranchise others over heresy, and have always been compassionate about your struggles. Even the most awakened flying monkeys can never be that.
The benevolent enabler
A benevolent flying monkey is someone with a sociotropic nature that makes them an easy target for manipulators. Sociotrophic individuals suffer from the so-called “disease to please,” which means that they tend to put the needs of others ahead of theirs.
Often they unwittingly aid and abet a narcissistic person’s campaign of emotional abuse because predatory manipulators are quick to sniff out a sociotropic person’s powerful longing for external validation.
Benevolent flying monkeys are not consciously trying to cause harm. A benevolent flying monkey is likely to have been subjected to the narcissistic person’s love-bombing and gaslighting tactics. They are usually acting in good faith based on the narcissist’s persuasive vilification of the person they’ve targeted for abuse.
The narcissistic person will have used the DARVO tactic to manipulate their perception of events and the people involved so much so that the benevolent flying monkey wrongly views the victim-survivor as the perpetrator of the abuse. Once the narcissistic person has effectively pulled the wool over this person’s eyes, they triangulate them into the conflict and with strong incentives to protect and “rescue” the narcissist.
The malevolent enabler
A malevolent flying monkey is misanthropic in nature. They are bad faith actors who knowingly participate in narcissistic abuse because inflicting harm on others gives them a sense of power. Malevolent flying monkeys tend to identify with highly narcissistic people and NPDs because they are equally narcissistic in their own right. They usually share the same attitudes and beliefs and feel a sense of belonging in the narcissistic person or NPDs in-group.
Because a malevolent flying monkey is morally bankrupt, it doesn’t matter who is right or wrong. In fact, they are usually fully aware that an injustice is taking place. However, these types relish an opportunity to deny dignity and justice to someone who they feel is “not like them.”
Malevolent flying monkeys function as gatekeepers. Often they are foot soldiers of a larger system of oppression, i.e. sexism, racism, etc. and they engage in the conflict for the sole purpose of protecting a hierarchy that serves them.
I found her sub-categories very, very helpful, and it's always useful to decipher which of these types of flying monkeys is coming at you with the latest denigrating. Note: most of the denigrating will usually contain lies, misinformation or exaggerations from the narcissist, or the narcissist's pity-play where they are playing the victim (when they were actually the perpetrator - it is extremely common for narcissists to discard their so-called loved ones, and especially children, and it's not always easy to tell that from the stories narcissists like to tell in terms of how they got to their pitiful state). The benevolent enabler may not realize that, but they are also likely not to play rejection games with you the way the narcissist does. They are more open to your side of things.
However, it's still weird, immoral, blind, highly aggressive and counter-productive for them to be denigrating you, or anyone else, over your relationship choices, or whether to stay in a relationship or leave.
Even with parents, there are more youth today than ever before who are estranged from their parents. It is now the national trend, just as divorce was in the 1970s. To go from divorce being an acceptable trend in the 1970s to being estranged from a parent being an acceptable trend in the 2000s is perhaps for the same reason: women were divorcing their husbands because of the "submission expectations" of their husbands, and children are divorcing their parents for the same reasons. Expectations about submissiveness never adds up to love, or valuing a person based on who they are, but only on what role they play in the family. The main takeaway from both trends is that human beings do not like being submissive.
Careers and jobs were and are highly important elements in both cases too. Women were expected to be home-makers, child-rearers and to not seek jobs outside the home at the end of World War II through the 1960s. They are still under-paid compared to men. Youth have also made jobs and careers their main focus, and relationships that take away that focus, or try to "control" what a child does with his or her own adult life is no longer acceptable. The main take-away here is that human beings do not like to be controlled.
And since narcissists like to "make" people be submissive, and like to be ultra-controlling of other people, children are first in line in being targeted by the newest trends in broken relationships. They are tossing their independent-minded children off like crazy, but then complain that their children tossed them off instead. It is true that abused children do toss off their parents eventually, but it is usually after the parents have tossed them off first, or many times, the message from the parent being: "This is a tenuous relationship, and my love is never going to be consistent or anything that is stable, or to take seriously".
Of course, narcissists play the victim over this, so it is hard to tell that they "discarded" their child first, or over half a dozen silent treatments, or boycotted so many events because their child did not allow their parent to control events carte blanche, the extremely likely scenario when you are dealing with narcissists. This is what I have seen in most forums for child abuse survivors. The parents do a discard of their child a number of times, and finally, the adult child does not go back, and the parent wails in public as though they've been discarded by the child instead. With that kind of DARVO, it's no wonder children refuse to go back.
And that is also the case when their parent's flying monkeys try to shame the adult children to go back too.
Heavy narcissistic traits in parents are generally something that children find unappealing and often too counter to growing up to become full adults.
It's not the same as in spousal relationships where the sexual bond, perhaps, makes it much more traumatic and harder to separate. My observation is that most adult children roll their eyes at haughty, self-aggrandizing, know-it-all, abusive, bossy parents. They prefer more humble calming parents, parents who listen carefully and with an open perspective, who live what they preach, and who mostly speak kindly of others, and who are moral and ethical all of the time (not just the few times it suits some agenda), and aren't out to hurt other people. In other words, hate-speech, prejudices and trash-talking is not part of family past-times. The closest parent-child relationships I see these days, the ones that aren't part of the trend, are the ones I talk about above.
As I've said before in other posts, tolerance and peace go together.
Being intolerant of a spouse's or parent's narcissism is perhaps the exception, but it is hard to be tolerant of people who aren't tolerant of you.
Part of showing how intolerant the narcissist is towards you, is what the flying monkeys' job is. What the flying monkeys say to you will generally also show what the narcissist's perspectives are, plus a lot of intolerance, of your decisions, and of your person (which will just be about parroting the narcissist's perspectives, because narcissists don't want to say it themselves - they want to blame the flying monkey for saying it if things go in an undesirable direction). It's very triangulation-oriented, in other words, something narcissists love to do too. They also don't like to be accountable for anything and so with all of that going on with narcissists, flying monkeys, to them, are a dire necessity. It gets all of their points across without actually being accountable for what they say.
While Ms. Wakefield's two types of flying monkeys may be all that you need to know, I decided to break them down further, and to tell how effective they might be or not be in getting the narcissist or sociopath what they want. If all that is happening is denigrating you, know that this is another narcissistic tactic to break your self esteem. You've probably been getting this anyway, right from the narcissist. Now it's just going through other people, that's all.
Narcissists must break your self esteem in hopes that you have doubts about who you are, as if personality-changing is entirely up to them and their manipulative maneuvers. They apparently think who you marry, what you are doing in career, life, relationships, lifestyle, and so on, can be changed by them too by their manipulations and persuasions (or their magic wand). You can see that again, this is childish under-developed thinking since narcissists are the most fixed personalities on the planet, and are often much worse morally and ethically than the victims they like to shame.
If they can't change who they are, how do they teach or expect other people to change?
The short answer is: They cannot stand someone else's autonomous thoughts and actions that differs from what they want. You must think the way they do about yourself, and your interests, lifestyle and your relationships must change into what they want too, as if they can manipulate it all away. This is the reason for breaking your self esteem: "I hate you the way that you are!" They automatically assume that you've got your self-respect tied to their opinions because they are that arrogant. They think their tirades and lectures are listened to with baited breath, but what is probably happening instead is that it is a trauma response, a survival response to being around someone who has almost no empathy at all, who is highly volatile, unstable emotionally, cannot be counted on (because they "discard" people), is so ego-centric that they cannot stand any variations of anything except what they want or dream up. This leads them to think that you will change who you are just for them. They believe they have the power to do it too, that you will automatically take their bad opinions of you into your heart and let them fester there, and let all of the negativity they have about you ruin your self esteem, ruin your prospects and dreams, ruin your life, ruin everything other than being a sycophant for them. It's a power, control and domination scheme.
Note: the reasoning behind these lines of attacks is that if your self esteem is shot, they can come at you more easily to mold you into the puppet that they want. So if you see or hear only denigrating from the flying monkeys, just chalk it up to: "The narcissist is having a fit about my self esteem again, or what I'm doing in my life, because they need to control me." And most of the time, it is nothing more than that.
Anyway, here are the more nuanced definitions of flying monkeys:
THE CO-BULLY
the narcissistic or psychopathic co-bully:
Note: when I am talking about the psychopathic bully I am referring to bullies who have some of the traits of Antisocial Personality Disorder, the bullies who have and show no remorse for hurting other people, no matter what the circumstances. They have their agenda, and if hurting other people is part of it, or it gets them where they want to be, they'll do it for the sake of the agenda.
They tend take an even more aggressive stance than the narcissist you are having issues with.
They may be physically abusive, or they like to use certain sadistic maneuvers, or they love false imprisonment, or they just like insulting and seething at you. If they have Antisocial Personality Disorder and are not particularly Machiavellian, they will tell you which one of these they prefer, and which one they fantasize using on you.
Most of these co-bullies are very aggressive, and it is mostly unwanted, and unsolicited. Some of them bomb you with texts, or e-mails, or letters, or phone calls and insult you like crazy, or call you names, or tell you what they want to do to you for not behaving the way Ms. or Mr. bully boss wanted you to behave. Unless you were trying to hurt the bully boss and feel guilty about it, this will not be welcome.
Some of them act just like the co-bully on the playground: "Say ________ to (the bully boss), oh lord and master, or you are going to get it!"
Or it can go further, where they say that they will hurt you, and keep hurting you, and hurt you as much as they can, knowing your vulnerabilities, unless you submit to them, or the bully boss.
For adults, this is irritating, and it can be frightening and disturbing as well because this is behavior that should have been abandoned when they entered junior high. It shows twisted behavior besides. Unless you have always cared what this person's opinions are, and you have a warm, endearing relationship with them, and they are highly moral ethical people, and they have showed empathetic, compassionate thinking and behavior towards you and most others you know all along, except in this once instance, it is not only going to be ineffectual, but it will boomerang back on the narcissist.
Any sane person is going to tell you to protect yourself or call the police when this is happening. Harassment is not to be taken lightly. Nor are threats to hurt you. Threats to divide up your relationships is abusive as well. Threats about false imprisonment are illegal in some countries, and is definitely illegal in the U.S.A. as well as other countries like Great Britain. Some of them will break the law to hurt you. Putting you under force to get you to say certain things to another person is like playground bullying, and illegal for adults.
In most cases, the best result the bully boss will get is that their victim will tell this particular flying monkey not to contact them again.
That is overwhelmingly what I see in forums, and it is the road I took when I was in a situation like this.
Sadism with perspecticide is definitely dangerous.
They are probably all going to be gaslighting you too (even if the gaslighting has drastically different tactics: the agendas will be suited to the particular bully).
We already have one narcissist or psychopath to deal with. We don't need another. And unfortunately they attract one another, so maybe they should just co-exist in their own narcissistic bubble and forget about most other people. I hope they decide not to have children, however.
The parroting sycophant may not be as dangerous a bully as others, but they repeat everything the narcissist does. They aren't very smart. They just want to be on the bullying team, and they learn that if they parrot they are rewarded.
Whereas puppet soldier bullies have been told what to do and what to say to whom most of their lives. They are groomed to be prejudiced most of their lives against a person, or people, or race, sex, type.
Neither type know who these people are that they are bullying, of course. They feel the main bully is great, or the family they are operating from is great, or the country they are fighting for is great. They want to show the main bully that they are loyal, that they are strong and can beat down any enemy of the main bully, and that any enemy that the main bully has, is their enemy too.
Most of these "leaders" are too cowardly to fight their own battles, so they enlist brainwashed not-very-bright puppet soldiers to do the fighting for them.
The leader just inspires them either to fight, or shame, or not talk to, or not negotiate, or not compromise with the bully's enemies - i.e. only that battle, prejudice and hatred should commence.
In some instances, puppet soldiers do not have any real sense of who they really are, what they think, and they don't research anything, or weigh situations out. They count on the narcissist to make all of their decisions for them. They are like echoists, but in the "battle" sense of the word. They are molded, probably from early childhood to do what they are told to do, how to do it perfectly, what to say, how to say it, who to talk to and who not to talk to, and how to fight for the head narcissist.
This, of course, is supposed to intimidate the victim, that dumb prejudiced aggressive soldiers will turn on the victim or scapegoat, do anything, and everything, for the narcissist and inflict what ever damage the narcissist tells them to inflict. The narcissist will say to the victim, "Everyone is against you! No one approves of you! We have overpowered you with our minions! Look at who doesn't approve of you now!"
When they take someone not very bright and mold them in this way? See this situation for what it is: desperate.
It is also a very obvious ploy to make someone else prejudiced.
And when this enlisted soldier makes a mistake and is too aggressive against the victim to the point of breaking the law or codes of conduct, then what do they do? The head narcissist will stick him with the consequences, of course! Again, it is the coward's approach because they don't want to fight their own battles. It also gets them off the hook in terms of treating people with dignity and respect, of compromising. The message that they are trying to send here is: "I've got all of these soldiers on my side, ready to decimate you! I don't need to treat you better! All your talk of compromise is not going to do any good because this soldier is going to get me everything I want! Especially if he doesn't talk to you and know who you are - I've taken care of that by telling him who you are, and not to talk to you!"
These co-bullies are not necessarily unethical in other situations. The danger here is that, on the slim chance, that if they talk to you, and get to know your side of the story, and your story sounds reasonable, they can back away from being a puppet soldier for the leader. This is happening to Russian soldiers in Ukraine, for instance, and it can happen just as easily in families too.
Also, for narcissists who are primarily self serving, it is hard to keep puppet soldiers in line. Sure they have been molded to do what they are told to do, but if they are in a situation that they don't know how to handle, because the narcissist doesn't understand, or the narcissist isn't available for instruction, they will have to make their own decision. And because they tend to be not too bright, they will be making a lot of mistakes, or fighting too hard or too soft, and they may get shouted at for their mistakes: "Don't you know that is against the law?! What were you thinking!!!!"
People who aren't too bright in the "battle strategy department" can also drive narcissists crazy enough so that they pick on the soldier and shout at them ("What's the matter with you? Are you stupid!? What a dumb strategy! You should have known that wasn't going to work!!"). No one likes to be shamed. It can break the loyalty of the brainwashed puppet soldier.
And it is hard for narcissists to be loyal themselves. If they aren't getting exactly what they want, when they want it, and they can't count on their soldiers to read the narcissist's mind, then it is only a temporary kind of loyalty, based on utility.
Some are so dependent or co-dependent on the narcissist, and if they don't bully for the narcissist, they know they are going to get into deep trouble for it. They think the risk is better than the consequences they will face from the narcissist.
Narcissists constantly want you to prove that you are loyal to them. As I've explained, no person is 100 percent loyal. Anyway, being loyal to a narcissist is a trauma - survival response for most people. Even in the old days, most people at a king's court had their own agendas and dreams. It is obvious when you really delve into history. These flying monkeys were only loyal up to a point, and it shows. Being in a narcissist's king's court was not a safe place to be considering all of the changes in personnel via executions, being drawn and quartered, your head being chopped off, being the victim of torture chambers, being exiled, and so on. Narcissists still change their "personnel" constantly, but the personnel in present day is their close personal relationships instead. They are looking for "the perfect" loyalist, and that is one reason you may have been thrown out - they are constantly looking at new people to "try out" in the loyalist role.
A golden child can also be enlisted as a loyalist to bully a sibling. Usually older children are chosen for the role and also serve as a babysitter to the younger children, but not always. Sometimes they learn to bully by example, and sometimes they are taught, or encouraged to hurt their siblings.
Any of these co-bullying strategies make for a very toxic family situation, where life threatening violence can and does occur.
These flying monkeys aren't doing anything to inspire, or contributing to mankind, or any causes. They are just doing a dirty job, a job to please the parent, or if they are young children or are severely disabled, to survive.
Most people don't change by being tortured or hurt. The main response is a trauma response, primarily "flight". I discuss that in the post, Hurting or Punishing Others to Teach Them a Lesson - Does It Work?
the co-conspirator:
Some of these loyalists can be narcissists and sociopaths too, and perhaps they share the same prejudices (which put them in the co-conspirator category), and that's the only reason they are a flying monkey. They are a "flying monkey" by default, not because they have any particular relationship with the perpetrator. The only thing they have in common is that they are prejudiced in the same way.
Some of them can be "swept up in the moment", to have taken up a prejudice because so many people around them have done so.
Some of them can appear to be edgy or frightened. Some of them can look like they feel apprehensive, that their heart isn't into it.
Some of them are so misinformed, but feel bullying or battling will help in some way.
Some of them are so enchanted and enamored with what the bully says, that anything the narcissist wants, they get, including a co-bully.
Some aren't so enchanted, but see that other people are, so they think should be. They "go along to get along."
Some are drugged and go along with bullying because they aren't in full use of their faculties.
Some of them are with cults or cult-like leaders, and the leaders are telling their followers that they need to bully, and they feel like something is wrong with themselves if they don't follow the herd.
Some of them aren't particularly chomping at the bit to bully you, however. Their attention is focused on pleasing the narcissist to the point where you, the victim, are just a thing, a concept, a by-stander to that.
Some may have Stockholm Syndrome, and are only bullying because they are under constant threat. They bully because they feel they have to.
Some are so dependent or co-dependent on their co-bully, and if they don't bully for the narcissist, they know they are going to get into deep trouble for it. They think the risk is better than the consequences they will face from the narcissist, or from society.
My post on Jeffrey Epstein covers how co-conspirators contribute to abuse.
The invisible enabler:
This is the flying monkey who heads to the garage when his wife is abusing the kids. Or sticks his head in a newspaper when he is being called upon by the narcissistic parent to help in disciplining his children (the way his narcissistic wife wants it done, of course). Or heads out for a drink when his child is begging him to intervene in stopping the narcissist's violence. Or a woman who is financially dependent on her husband with four small children and lets the bullying happen because divorce is just too much to think about (so acts like it's not happening, or that she can't deal with it because she has "too much on her plate", or that she'll deal with it later when she feels stronger and not so overwhelmed ... or a teenage girl who has been defended by her bully brother many times, but who bullies others for no reason, and can't seem to talk about what is wrong with that).
Invisible enablers add to the dysfunction, and even the evil, by refusing to get involved.
A lot of the spouses of narcissists go invisible for many, many reasons, only to learn that things have gotten so out of control in the family that they are beyond fixing.
Some invisible enablers are in this role for a lifetime. Some of them feel powerless, that what ever they try to do to create a peaceful environment doesn't work, so they head to the garage to putter even when the family has violence going on in it.
Some of these enablers say things like: "Well that's who your mother is," or "That's who your father is." Or: "I can't change (him or her)." Or "You're going to have to talk to (the narcissist) about that. He won't listen to me. I'm sorry that I can't help you; you're just going to have to relate to him on your own." Or "I've tried to talk to (her or him), but I don't get anywhere, so just be like me and stop trying to." - except that there is aggression involved, and aggression will always be something our bodies and minds will either defend against, or fight against, or fawn against, or flee against. Most people can't take someone else's aggression lying down without getting trauma symptoms, thus in order to fight the traumatic responses, your body and mind will always look for other ways to deal with other people's aggression rather than absorbing it.
But as the abuse escalates, which it will, sometimes they can no longer sit by and be silent. They are listening to their child's cries, or to them talk about suicide, or talk about running away, or that they are tired of getting hit. They can no longer watch it happen or pretend it didn't happen. Usually a narcissist tries to divorce this kind of spouse.
Jay Reid, a psychotherapist from San Francisco writes about this kind of "disappearing" parent: ‘Better you than me’ – Going unprotected from narcissistic abuse by the enabler parent. This is a really good in-depth article about the various ways the enabling plays out. I highly recommend it. I usually read the comments left by readers too, and in this case they are also informative as to how big the problem is.
The "everything is excusable" enabler:
Some of these enablers might say, "Well, you know that he had a terrible childhood. He's just acting out what he grew up with."
Some of these enablers might say things like "God meant it to be this way. Everything was divinely preordained."
There are other enablers who say things like, "Well, you did have it better than he had it. Maybe you can find the compassion to forgive, since this issue can't be resolved through the usual ways."
The "everything is excusable enabler" can say things like, "Well you did say he had an alcohol problem. Maybe you need to understand how your talking about his drinking could have caused him to be violent."
Here are some others:
To a child: "You took away his toy, so he hit you! You understand that you can't take away his toy, right?"
To a child: "Oh, he gave you a boo boo! All little brothers hit their sisters at one time or another!"
To a child: "I'm sorry you got hit! But you must have done something to deserve it, right? There is always a reason, right?"
To a wife: "If you hadn't tried to go grocery shopping so late in the evening, you wouldn't have gotten raped."
To a brother: "Well if you had tried to soothe her, and comforted her, and treated her like a woman, something more special than your job, maybe she wouldn't have thrown that frying pan at you! Shame on you for not treating her like the love of your life!"
To a sister: "Granted, your husband is a bully, but you could have tamed him. Women tame a man by 'putting out'. You probably didn't do that enough."
To a parent: "I know Dad has been terrible all your life, but you stayed with him because somewhere deep inside him, he's a good man, right? You must have thought he was 'okay enough' to put up with his abuse and yelling for so long. I mean, he is a good provider and he paid for our tuitions. He's not a bad man most of the time. He always apologizes every time he goes off the rails. That should be enough."
Some others: "If you just excused him for what he did to you, you might be able to (mend some fences), (have a meeting of minds), (have a meaningful relationship), (work on loving each other), (learn compassion and love heals everything), (to stop thinking about this), (to stop being traumatized - without knowing the real routes to healing from trauma, of course), (that we are all flawed), (that we are all human and we make mistakes), (that you're a better person, and therefor can make some excuses for his behavior), and so on.
Empathy is a good start, but empathy is not about shaming a survivor of abuse because they aren't reaching some "holy" standard that you have. Let them heal and move on from their experiences in their own way and time. Usually a lot has been done to them to get to a point where they can't live up to someone's holy standards; some have been so beaten down that they shouldn't be doing much more than healing.
The "Forgive and Forget" enabler:
These enablers are "a dime, a dozen". They are everywhere, it seems. They share a lot in common with the "everything is excusable" enablers.
These enablers just want you to move on from your experiences, to clear your mind of your perpetrator(s), and to forgive them so you can let go of them and the bad experiences they wrought on your life.
Some of it is because they are generally concerned and don't want you living the rest of your days in trauma and in pain. Others want you to move on because you are making life miserable for them (i.e. for selfish reasons). And sometimes it is hard to tell what their motivations are for telling you this.
So since this is the path many, many enablers take, I have an entire post on it called Should You Forgive Abusers.
The Pollyanna enabler:
These enablers are tied to the idea that everything and everyone is great, that we all need to give people a chance, and that no one really means to be cruel ("They are just having a bad day, and you just need to give them some slack").
These people just like to think the best of everyone, and you're deemed to be unrealistically cynical if you can't have that view.
These people can be the most toxic enablers because they try to persuade you that the world is full of good people, unicorns and rainbows, and that most people are just waiting to work things out with you in a just and moral way.
This can create cognitive dissonance in a survivor if you take this to heart, where you are vulnerable to going back to an abusive relationship - so be aware of how the Pollyannas are effecting your decision-making. Being swayed by them can put you into a lot of hot water again (it's better to get a more realistic view from a mental health professional, like a domestic violence counselor instead).
It is also a form of victim blaming and shaming. The Pollyannas can sound like they are blaming you for not seeing so much good in violent, and frankly dangerous people. Not all abusers show their abusive sides to everyone, and frankly, they use Pollyannas to give them a good image.
Where it gets particularly dangerous is when the Pollyanna is in an authoritarian position and is not informed as to how domestic violence patterns really manifest.
Dr. Ramani Durvalsula talks about the Pollyanna enabler, and so does Florentyna Domanski, and there are links to their research on this below, so I don't feel it is necessary to go into it too much here. Dr. Ramani's video on this subject is absolutely brilliant, and absolutely necessary for people in positions of power to hear.
The "How Could You?!" enabler:
This is the enabler that has been talked into the narcissist playing the victim.
They sometimes get involved for an instant, but run away shortly after shaming you.
Sometimes the enabler either doesn't or does have good intentions, but they always come at you with shaming:
"You should apologize to him! He's your grandfather!", "You need to get along with your brother! You'll never have another one!", "You can't be serious! Your cousin?! Well, family has to stick together. You can't just ignore or divorce someone from your family!", "You shouldn't have walked out of that relationship! You could have worked it out!" - the drumming is to work out issues with abusers. But anyone who has lived through an abusive relationship, knows that most of the time it isn't possible. This post tells why. Sure you might get a honeymoon period in some cases, but once abuse starts, it always escalates (and will continue to do so even with many, many honeymoons and people pressuring both of you to work it out).
It's simply not going to get better over time; it'll get worse (and that goes for the reasons they tell you as to why they hurt you, as well as escalating to more traumatic forms of abuse).
The other kind of "How could you?!" type of enabler is usually a do-gooder, maybe a close friend of the family, who sees the narcissist in a lot of pain, but you aren't rushing to save the narcissist. You are seen as a devil, a heartless, ruthless, cruel person who leaves narcissists to lie in their pain day in and day out. Except these enablers don't know the whole story, usually.
And many of them don't want to hear it either. They just want to "shame and run". Why? Maybe they think that will motivate you to rush to save the narcissist. It mostly doesn't work, and if it does, it can expose you to more danger. Trying to force a make up should never be done for this reason.
Most of us who have been around narcissists a long time, and have been abused by them more times than we can count, also know that narcissists play the victim more times than we can count too. And we also know that it's a trap. If we rush to save the narcissist, what will the narcissist do? They won't say, "Thank you for coming!" No, they will use it as a trap: sometimes it is a false imprisonment trap. Most often it is a "shaming, blaming" trap at the very least, where they will try to make you culpable any way they possibly can for everything, and I mean everything, that has happened between you, and to justify it all by abusing you again, perhaps worse than when you left (because, again, abuse escalates). Maybe it's a trap of intimidations and verbal abuse. Maybe it is a trap of on-going threats. Maybe it is even a death trap. Abuse is dangerous and you can never know. But these are the common things survivors of abuse go through when they try to save their perpetrators.
However, the tall tales and lies of what the narcissist tells these do-gooder enablers about their victims usually do not inspire the victims to save their perpetrators. The lies, the made up stories to blame, the made up "victimization" that goes with every abusive situation that they commit, feels like another horrific trap of abuse, and an aftermath of trauma. Narcissists tend to be much, much more unethical and immoral than most people.
You are trying to do good in an unethical and immoral environment. Even if they aren't "crying wolf" for once, they aren't going to heal their narcissistic injuries by you going into that environment, and you certainly won't heal either.
The co-dependent enabler:
The co-dependent enabler is so wrapped up in a "give and take" relationship with your abuser, they don't feel they can defend you and lose what they have worked so hard to get.
Let us say that there are 3 sisters working for "the family business" in a very small rural town many miles from the next small town. Let's surmise that the siblings are 16, 17 and 19 years of age.
Let us say that you are the middle sister and you are being bullied and micromanaged by the older sister, especially when Mom and Dad aren't around. Let's say the bullying is exceptionally bad: physical, emotional, psychological and verbal. If you don't do what she tells you to do at the exact time she tells you to do it, she grabs you by the hair and leads you to the place she wants you. She insults you and tells you that you are incompetent and that Mom and Dad should fire you, even in front of customers. She is also stealing, something that budding narcissists also do.
You keep bringing up the issues with your parents, but they say things like: "You all need to get along. You are sisters," and they won't listen to what kind of bickering is taking place.
You refuse to work, saying that you don't need the money, but your parents insist that you do so that you can learn about money and business. Your big sister is asked to apologize to you, but it has no effect and she's back at it again.
You've had it with your hair being pulled, so you shave off all of your hair and buy a wig. Your parents only response is to say, "You had such pretty hair! That's a shame that you did that! She probably didn't mean to hurt you or grab your hair." And when you tell your parents that your little sister will vouch for you, she looks frightened, and notices how much the older sister is getting away with the bullying, and weighs the situation as to whether she will be in danger too if she tells, so she decides to lie and say, "I haven't seen it. Or I might have seen it. I just don't know." When she gets bullied by the big sister even worse than what you received for saying "Or I might have seen it", you suggest to your younger sister that the two of you should tell Mom and Dad.
But your little sister has decided that the big sister has, and will continue, to get away with it over and over again, based on what she has seen, and she's seen it for years. She has also decided she needs the money so that she can escape the family and go to college far away. The little sister apologizes to the big sister for having said, "Or I might have seen it" just so the big sister will no longer bully her. It's a co-dependent pact they have made: big sister won't bully little sister, if little sister doesn't defend you or come forward about what the middle sister is going through.
This little sister was your best friend. So you feel like you've lost her. While it is not a "two sisters against one" situation, it could become that, and it seems to be going in that direction, so being around either one of them makes you extremely anxious. The anxiety is a trauma response, by the way. This situation would probably provoke many more trauma symptoms than that, however.
This is more of a co-dependent situation than a trauma-bonded situation because the little sister has actually decided that she will sacrifice you in order to meet her own objectives: to get away from the family altogether. She definitely sees it as toxic, that there is a lot of bullying going on, that the bigger sister is getting away with stealing, that your common parents are too busy making orders and sending orders to take you seriously, and so you've been hung out to dry by the whole family. In fact, little sis is super sweet to the older sister so that she won't be bullied again, and tells you that she is just faking all of the sweetness in order to get through the experience so that she can go to college. And she tells you that if she can do it, you can do it too. But nothing works. You are still bullied and trying everything you can do to make it stop. And in the meantime, little sis starts thinking she is better, and can protect herself better than you can. She is getting arrogant, in fact.
Little sis would be the co-dependent enabler in a situation like this.
However, co-dependent enabling doesn't just exist in families. It can exist in workplaces, among friends, among marriage partners, in wartime, in any situation, really.
The "I don't get involved because I'm going through enough stuff" enabler:
We can actually understand why certain people cannot hear us, and cannot get involved in helping us.
Some of these people have already been hurt by the perpetrator, and don't want to put themselves or their families at risk again. They are traumatized. They are trying to get away from the perpetrator, and they know what kind of position you are in, but don't want to "rock the boat".
And some of these people are good people, but they don't want to get involved, even if you are in a life-threatening situation, or something illegal has happened to you.
Some of them sit on the sidelines and watch it happen, even when they are watching violence unfold.
And in some situations it may be understandable: "I've got a kid who is disabled at home. If I get involved, I'm putting the caretaker part of me at risk, plus my disabled child. Who will he go to if I defend this (or those) people?"
Some of them don't want to get hurt too: "If so-and-so is a bully, I don't want to get bullied too just for standing up for you! I've got a right to save my own skin!"
But some of them are just cowards: "I can't! But good luck!" And some of them are even worse than cowards and give you lectures: "Maybe you brought the bullying on! Maybe you are partly to blame! Maybe you egged him on. You should have looked at the issues that could set him off like that!" - These are people who don't understand why domestic violence happens and think domestic violence is a fix-able relationship issue (and it is also victim shaming).
And some of them are arrogant: "I don't get involved because domestic violence doesn't happen to upstanding people like me. You're inferior. You draw violent people to you, whereas the rich and famous are drawn to me. I party all day long at wealthy poolside parties while you're dealing with a domestic violence issue day in and day out. Maybe I should feel sorry for you. If you were as good looking as I was, and behaved the way I behaved, and learned when to speak and when to hold your tongue, and had the upper class schooling that I had, you wouldn't be in this pickle!"
And some of them are perpetrators of domestic violence themselves. "I don't get involved. It's his wife to beat around. I've got my own wife that I put in her place!"
The peacenik enabler:
A guy I met at a party thinks peace is the highest priority, that the best and brightest of human-kind never gets involved in violent situations, doesn't pick sides, that nothing is worth fighting for, or blocking. For instance, he thought, and still thinks, that Ukraine should have allowed Russia to invade it just to keep from being brought into a war, even to the point of surrendering it's own government and elected officials.
To my mind, it allows aggressions and aggressors to win, for people to be enslaved.
Perhaps the idea is to have peaceful resistance instead: you protest. Except with tyrannical governments, you may be sent to prison for life for protesting, or killed in front of a firing squad. In other words, leaders and a population have to have a conscience in order for peaceful resistance to work, or even be seen (dictators tend to control the media too).
This stance allows an aggressor to do anything he wants to do to you: murder you, steal from you, cut you, punch you, rape your children, leave you homeless without food ... you are supposed to remain pacifist through it all to achieve what? Holiness?
But here is the problem: the more aggression you endure, the more violence you endure, the more symptoms you will endure, the more liable you are to getting PTSD, even PTSD that makes you disabled. There are reasons we have laws in this country against aggression. If anything, states are passing even more laws against aggression, not fewer of them. This is saying: "Aggression is not okay. You don't have a right to steal, or smash up someone else's property, or punch someone at a bar, no matter how drunk you may be." For newer laws: "You and other adults do not have a right to sexually abuse children, and we are giving children some recourse to have you arrested or to get civil damages when they become adults. You don't have a right to threaten and isolate people. We have coercive control laws now. You don't have the right to convince your child that their other parent shouldn't be loved or seen. We have parental alienation laws on the books now and we are assigning attorneys to children to keep this from happening." And so on. Some of the narcissists and psychopaths in our world like to aggress on all of these issues, and more, so more and more laws need to be written.
Allowing aggressive people to aggress on you, or your loved ones, is masochistic. You are still allowing violence to happen, maybe even more so. By letting yourself to be treated as badly as they want to treat you, it is actually increasing the violence, and the propensity for violence, not decreasing it. What will be next on the menu in terms of making way, and normalizing aggression? In a lawless, let-anything-happen "because-we-believe-in-peace" environment, all kinds of atrocities will be committed.
In abusive families, more than half of golden children become perpetrators. They are the ones who are spared the rejections, the fault-finding, the violence while they often see the perpetrator abusing everyone else around them to one degree or another. It shows that if you allow aggression, it will grow, not diminish.
Zelenskyy made a good point in allowing Ukraine to push back on the Russian invasion, to keep the invasion sequestered and swamped in part of his own country (Eastern Ukraine) so that the Western part of Ukraine, and other countries on the "invasion list" aren't taken over too. Everything he asked for and was denied in terms of weaponry, is now being given to him. It takes intelligence with a lot of foresight to know what you need to push back on aggression. I suspect he knows a lot more about human nature than a despotic dictator.
Anyway, when it concerns domestic violence, it is like saying: "Just allow yourself to be punched and hit. You can block, but you can't hit back" - which isn't even good defensive martial arts strategy. You will get hurt if all you do is to "block".
It's one thing to be anti-aggressive and to throw aggressors off your trail. But being a martyr peacenik was something for early Christians, not for today with the knowledge we have gained about aggression and violence and how it usually plays out in the real world.
In fact, I think many of the martial arts have something to say about peace, and achieving peace: you don't go looking for a fight, but if someone else starts one, you have a right to defend yourself, and part of defending yourself often has in it, ways to disable the offender momentarily at least, both physically and in the way they are oriented. Then once you have taken away his ability to attack you, you make a run for it. The philosophies around martial arts, I have found, are some of the best ways to say "no" to violence and aggressive unlawful acts, but also acts against individuals.
Many women who are victims of domestic violence fight back, whether that is to escape, or get the perpetrator to let go of them, or to get to the phone to call police, or to get the perpetrator to stop thinking of them as a sponge for battering. There can be a myriad of reasons. One of the reasons is simply a "natural fight or flight response" to being attacked. If you can't get away, or get the batterer to stop, there is no possibility of flight. Fawning often doesn't work because it gives a batterer the impression that you are "a sucker", low in stature, that they can escalate abuse with ease.
The whole movement of "be nice to bullies" is the same "let 'em walk all over you" mindset I have talked about in this post. It has NEVER worked in my own life, or anyone I have known who had to deal with flying monkeys, not once. I used to think that if I did nice things for mean co-workers that they'd stop being mean. Nope. They got more mean.
So that leaves the "fight response". If you don't put up resistance, your trauma symptoms can be much, much worse, another reason the all-in-peacenik approach doesn't work, and is just not the way we are built to deal with abuse.
Do seals just lie around to be eaten? No, they have their strategies for trying to survive, part fight, part flee.
Don't let people talk you into abuse being a road to holiness (it's a favorite of abusive families, and how they get away with abuse: many pretend to care about peace and other liberal causes).
They deny that you were abused (even when they weren't there). They deny that the narcissist has capabilities to hurt other people (even when they weren't there). They deny what you experienced (in whole).
They are not open to what you have to say in the least, what the evidence is, the possibility that you were hurt.
All that they are interested in propagating is that the narcissist is a peaceful person, and would never do anything at all to hurt another person, that it isn't what they know and perceive. We see politicians getting away with this kind of thing. And it is possible in close personal relationships too.
What they are doing is denying reality, and believing totally in a lie.
Narcissists really like these "total deniers", these "I never would have suspected" kinds of people. Narcissists usually have a lot of skeletons in the closet, things that they don't want revealed to anyone, perhaps cheating and stealing they have done in the past, and which they may feel they still have to do to keep from being exposed, and these flying monkeys, to their way of thinking, keep all evidence hidden.
Again, they think it is another "win" for them.
When these people are fooled, and act so foolish, so easily?
Again, being fooled to this extent can work against the narcissist eventually. The fact that these flying monkeys can be talked into something without a backward glance means they can do it to the narcissist just as well.
THE BELIEVERS
These people can have the same beliefs and prejudices that the narcissist has, and so they are willing to overlook the narcissism, abuse, lies, and so on.
Or they believe the narcissist has been anointed by God to lead them.
Or these people can be deniers plus they are totally enthralled with the narcissist. The narcissist is the greatest person they have ever met. So wonderful, in fact, that any perceived dislike, attack, complaint against the narcissist is reason to go to battle for the narcissist.
People who put other people on pedestals can be other narcissists, or worse. Most of us don't put other people on pedestals, no matter how great they may seem on the surface. We recognize that we don't know a lot about other people, and that it takes a great deal of time, and effort, contact, delving into their personal life and relationships, and even living with one another to establish who they really are.
Someone told me that she doesn't really know anyone other than the people she lives with, that it takes living with someone day in and day out for many years to truly know someone. That is the healthy approach.
So when you hear other people putting another person on a pedestal, it is highly suspect, unhealthy, not particularly intelligent, and can lead to a lot of stupid brainwashed violent reactions.
However, narcissists love this: they have always loved the superficiality, secrecy and grandiosity that they bring to relationships and these people fall for it like blind soldiers. In fact, if anything, narcissists want more of these kinds of relationships. However, they can be in as much danger from these people as their victims are - if they only look at their own behavior to see how far someone can fall from pedestals narcissists erect, the same thing can happen to them. And it doesn't take much to fall off of a pedestal built by an incredibly unstable and volatile narcissist.
The more intelligent among us realize this: no one deserves to be worshipped. Maybe deities of religions. Or the Jesus that lived over 2,000 years ago. Or the Buddha who lived even longer ago than Jesus did. Or God. But to think anyone is grand? It's a slippery slope to disillusionment, and narcissists know it is, from one person to the next, to the next, to the next, as they look for some sort of "perfect" narcissistic supply that doesn't exist.
And to get narcissistic supply from the brainwashed, from bullies, from people who bury their head in the sand, from people who can barely think for themselves and spend their lives parroting someone else? - what a cast of characters to get your grandiosity from.
I realized when I was performing music for audiences every weekend these things:
There were people who absolutely hated my music, people who were indifferent, people who were engaged and liked or loved my music, all the way to being looked as an angel, someone who would heal them by my very voice. The people who put me on the pedestal fell in love with a vision or sound (as music is partly about emoting, even emoting in such a way that it isn't always totally authentic for the moment, just as ice dancers look like they are in love with their ice partner, but are not: they are often married to separate people). It's not good to be that in love or possessed with an idealized vision of someone else. I got to the point where I was not invested in whether I was off the pedestal or on it; I just performed the best I could with my own standards, not anyone else's. And I noticed that some of the people who put me too high on the pedestal were invasive, could get to the point of stalking.
Many narcissists haven't reached that conclusion. They are in love with their own inauthentic images. They love posturing an act, pedestaling others, and manipulating others to see them as better than they actually are.
Enough already. We're just biological machines who have evolved up to a certain point, nothing more, nothing less.
My own exposure with narcissists in my own life is that all but one committed criminal acts against someone at some point or another, stealing being the most common among them. One of them is a photo and document stealer, another an heirloom stealer, another takes loose change and sometimes jewelry, another takes narcotics after someone has come home from surgery or hospitalization. In other words, they just go into someone's house, uninvited, and "take".
And usually if you confront the person or people who stole, or you try to complain to a person who is close to the thief, you get total silence.
People who do not help you solve a crime, or who give you false information, or refuse to talk to you (even if they don't know anything), or who condone the crime in some way are henchmen.
Co-bullies are bad enough, but once a narcissist has enlisted henchmen that allow them, or help them, commit a crime or highly unethical act, have few, if any morals or ethics at all, and because of that, usually no empathy either, or even redeeming qualities that make them reasonable people to deal with, or talk to, on any level.
These are bad people to be around, and if the abuse has escalated to the point of them wanting, or feeling they need henchmen to take on their crimes, or excuse their crimes, you know that any more escalation of abuse that they do from that point forward will be horrific. And with narcissistic abusers, they always escalate.
It is time to call the police in these situations.
A SIBLING IS BULLYING YOU
WHEN HE OR SHE IS A GOLDEN CHILD
AND IS USING THEIR NARCISSISTIC PARENT AS A FLYING MONKEY
To make clear what a bully golden child is: it is the favorite child of a bullying parent (usually a parent that has a lot of narcissistic traits), that the parent uses to inflict more bullying and pain on to another child the parent has. I write about the bully golden child here.
In other words, it is a team approach to hurt another child the parent has.
Some parents are just Pollyanna enablers, the kind I talk about above, who think if you just saw the good in your abusive sibling, then everything will be fine again (however, this usually does not happen).
But then there is the hurtful parent, who refuses to hear you out, who decides to withdraw their love unless you make up with your sibling. And then there is the parent who throws you out of the family, convinced that you are "no good, and never will be" if you don't make up with your sibling.
What ever kind of enabler/flying monkey they are will be listed above.
It can be a very dangerous situation to be in because the sibling relationship is different from the relationship between child and parent.
The parent, even if they have a scapegoat child, will want to use the scapegoat for a designated purpose, mainly to blame, and also to punish, when the parent feels bad, hurt, disappointed, in a rage about something. They don't necessarily want the child out of the picture, unless they are feeling that the child is hopelessly out of their control, and they deem the child isn't acting useful to them. So the point of the relationship is to use the scapegoat, unlike the bully golden's agenda.
The sibling relationship in normal non-narcissistic families is both co-operative and competitive. When they are young, it may lean a little more towards competition than co-operation, but with good parenting, it becomes more and more co-operative over time.
When you've got a narcissistic sibling who is enmeshed with his narcissistic parent, the rivalry may be the only thing that exists. The sibling may not want to co-operate on anything. Most likely the narcissistic sibling will assume he is boss over his other siblings, a role that is not healthy for anyone. The rivalry will grow to the point where, for the golden child, that it is all that he wants to exist between him and his siblings, or sibling.
I have written about the overwhelming feelings of jealousy that narcissists feel briefly in this post (with more to come about the topic), and how it causes them to feel competitive in many more situations than the rest of us feel.
They are not only competitive, but they are entitled as well. It manifests in this way: that they deserve the best from the parent, that they deserve more than the other siblings, that they have the better relationship with the parent, and so on.
Narcissists want people fighting over them, and that includes pitting children against each other for the sake of the parents getting narcissistic supply. As children we may not have realized this was happening (we might have been putting verbal and reading skills first, for instance, to notice this particular mind game), but if you look back on your childhood, every time you had a problem with your parent or your bullying sibling, what did they do? The parent told us that they loved our sibling more, and stonewalled and rejected us in some way, right? And the sibling acted more entitled - to bully you, to boss you, to get what they wanted from you, and they came to the realization that co-operating on anything with you was not necessary, right?
Anyway, that is what a lot of scapegoats experience.
And it is classic narcissistic parenting, something that other parents don't do because they have empathy, don't want to hurt their children, don't want to hurt the relationship with their children, don't think siblings should be fighting with each other over love (the reasoning being that loving children should always be automatic, something in the genes, and unconditional, and something that should be taught to children rather than putting them in a war against each other). Narcissists seem blind to all of that and always go in the opposite direction.
When the relationship turns into a relationship where the golden child is expected to bully his sibling to show support for his parent, the so-called rivalry can, and does in many instances, turn into domestic violence and sibling abuse (hitting, scratching, pushing, and many, many other styles of abuse, even sometimes, sexual abuse). It really is about getting his sibling out of the nest so that he can have the nest, the parent, and the family resources to himself.
Bully narcissistic siblings are highly, highly likely to hijack the parent's Will, or at the very least try to. Many try to get his other siblings out of the way with false narratives and erroneous blaming, and save the threats and violence for the scapegoat, reasoning that the scapegoat isn't loved any way and that there won't be much push-back if he pushes that one away.
A parent being a flying monkey for a golden child makes the child even more entitled than he already is (sometimes to the point of break-ins and stealing), and can ease the way for him to become violent. A parent wanted their golden child to fight the parent's battles, but now the parent is fighting battles for the golden.
Most narcissists support other narcissists, and if a bully golden is one of those narcissists, they will not only support his bullying actions, but also support him in old age, often exclusively, as though he is entitled to the whole inheritance. And with narcissistic parents, it very often all goes to the golden anyway, even when the scapegoat is the full time caretaker, which many scapegoats get talked into with guilt trips, and because they have empathy. But, their role is to take sh*t, and no amount of caretaking or kind of caretaking will be good enough for the parent. Scapegoats, don't forget, have been deemed to be "all bad" since they were mere toddlers (most of them). You will not get an inheritance for that reason, and often it is the only reason. The only time they are not deemed "all bad" is when the parent is "miffed" over something the golden child said or did (i.e. there wasn't enough narcissistic supply in it).
When the bully golden child gets the entire inheritance, he will then say he always deserved it for putting up with the extremely difficult parent. And to a narcissist, a super needy parent, which most narcissistic parents are, isn't something another narcissist wants to deal with, especially when times get tough. They are supposed to be on top of the world giving orders instead. If the scapegoat gets knocked out of the family, and he had a big hand in it, like a lot of bullies, he'll resent the fact that he had to take on the whole chore, even when he set the stage to make sure it happened that way by getting rid of his siblings in any manner he could?
Narcissists are also "damned if you do and damned if you don't" double bind people, especially with scapegoats. In other words, the guilt trip will be heavy, no matter which way you go.
At any rate, bullies use people and love things and money, and they will do what they can to make sure they are the sole inheritors when they've got a narcissistic parent. Usually. That is why they can be so dangerous.
When parents become the flying monkey for the bully golden child there really is no other choice for other children than to be estranged.
However, sometimes that's not the end of it. If you've got several narcissistic family members, they won't enjoy that they are the flying monkey instead of the person pulling the strings, "the brainstormer" in the situation. They've all got the opinion that they are the most intelligent schemers in the group. Let them all fight with one another about how well the flying monkey schemes are working, and how well or awful each one is doing at getting the schemes to work. It keeps the focus off of you. You are just "the thing", "the past utility", "the victim", the one they thrust their aggressions on. Which aggressions they choose are never going to become clear when there are that many narcissists in the picture.
But even if you are a partner, the fact that the younger generations are so much more knowledgeable about what constitutes bullying and abuse, and can see through tactics (like power trips), it's getting so much press that it's making narcissists uncomfortable, and in cases where they aren't so filled up with the gas of grandiosity, they are feeling more ashamed too.
In order to be a narcissistic or sociopathic parent these days, you practically have to home school your kids, hold them prisoner by lock and key, and disable them in some way. But instances like the Turpins, the Kornegays, and the Kendrick Lee case are bringing forth the need to check on children who are not in school (to see if they are enduring false imprisonment and abuse instead).
So that's what is happening in the country for folks under the age of seventy. They are waking up about the fact that hurting people does not bring about good results ever, for anyone, and they are waking up to an important fact that many psychologists talk about, that if someone is bullying, and is hard to get along with, who is showing he has to have his own way, is controlling and spiteful, they probably have a Cluster B personality disorder. And one of the main people in that space is a hitherto quiet psychologist, who wrote books like many psychologists do (and still wasn't very well known - except among survivors of abuse - and even then, not as well known as she should have been). Her main expertise is the Cluster B personality disorders and she started research in a not-very-busy lab at the University of California. She went on to start a You Tube channel after seeing and counseling people with difficult relationships. "Cluster B" were often the words. Her You Tube channel exploded with viewers. While she may not be a household name (yet), it's amazing to me how many people have heard of her who aren't survivors. It's remarkable what one person can do to change the world.
She's our next Harriet Beecher Stowe perhaps.
Here is one she recently did on the flying monkey situation (and in this case another survivor - why wouldn't another survivor get why you can't just make up with someone who abused you? - hard to figure out ...). I listed some of her other must-see videos at the bottom on this subject.
Telling people that a lot of those difficult relationships are actually difficult because of Cluster B issues helps a lot (for a lot of people that includes dealing with someone's narcissism, controlling behaviors, gaslighting behaviors, arrogance, having your experiences and feelings constantly invalidated by that person, dealing with Dr. Jekyll/Hyde change-ability, hair-trigger rage, abusive behaviors - all a sign you are dealing with a Cluster B).
And who is listening to all of the talk about narcissism? Generally people under retirement age. And people who are looking for answers as to whether they should end difficult relationships, or end jobs with difficult bosses or co-workers. And people who wonder what the fuss is about; i.e. why is everyone talking about narcissism these days? And people who wonder why their children are walking away from their families. And people who wonder why family life seems so screwed up these days.
Mob bullying is not all that popular any more, and with recording devices, it can make it very unpopular. So what tends to happen instead is that if you ask them a question, or you try to get a hold of them, they go silent on you instead. They let you know that they are with the narcissist that way.
Sometimes mob bullying works on older people (elder abuse), but even a lot of them have become savvy. Even one of my family members in his seventies came to the conclusion recently that controlling people are usually bullies. Yup! It was heartening to see that he reached that conclusion. So many folks in their seventies grew up in times when most of their classmates came to school with belt marks, scratches, bruises and other signs of bullying and abuse. Even the parents of those children thought that hurting kids was a good practice, that it taught them to respect their elders, to be responsible, to toughen up enough not to give into "weak emotions". What it produced instead was a huge generation gap, grown kids who didn't have much respect for how their parents raised them (many of them becoming rebellious, hating authority, and bringing up their kids the opposite way from how they were brought up).
And when the reports started coming out in the 1970s and 1980s that hurting children often produced worse results in terms of getting discipline and respect out of children, these parents often didn't change their attitudes. "Oh, a good belt whipping never hurt anyone! It didn't hurt me when I grew up! Everyone is too sensitive today for their own good!" Books like The Battered Child from 1968 certainly rocked professionals in the field of pediatrics and child psychology, but parents, by and large, still preferred to hurt their children when conflicts arose. It produced adult children who were closer to each other, their peers, than to their parents. You could complain to your friends, and they would absolutely understand what you were going through because they were going through it too, and it made separating from parents, even if just emotionally, a whole lot easier.
I knew a lot of young adults under the age of 20 who went "no contact" in the 1970s with their parents long before "no contact" was a common phrase, or even the common occurrence that it is today. And the flying monkeys of their parents helped them to make that choice. The false narratives being bandied about to keep up an image really disgusted these young adults and college aged teenagers. Suburbia was looked at to define the parents of that generation: "Keep your lawn clean, without weeds, but beat up your children inside your house and pretend you are upstanding parents because of your lawn" is how it was phrased to me once. It was all about keeping up a false image.
I think writers like James Howard Kunstler who grew up with a not-so-wonderful childhood except when he went to summer camp, and who has nothing good to say about suburbia, echoes a lot of what I heard from the "no contact" children of the 1970s. And Jann Wenner, founder of Rolling Stone Magazine, and a peer of James Howard Kunstler, has made comments that his generation was saddled with the worst parents of any generation.
The reason for enlisting flying monkeys (to get a mob bullying situation going), for the narcissist, is to put social pressure on the victim to submit to the narcissist.
However, a lot of flying monkeys don't know it is the primary, and often the single-minded agenda of the narcissist. As I've said before, narcissists love to play the victim, especially after they have perpetrated an attack or a number of attacks on a victim. If the attacks don't work in getting their victims to submit, they enlist the flying monkeys.
"Oh, that poor (narcissist)! They've been treated so badly!" - this is the premise that the flying monkey goes on. It is a masterful acting job on the narcissist's part, probably full of tears and feigned righteous anger, full of proclamations that the narcissist did everything they could to heal the relationship, had many, many talks, and even went to therapy with their victim. It's all lies, of course, because narcissists rarely, if ever, go to therapy, and if they go, they usually quit if they perceive criticism from a therapist (making them impossible to treat). And there are really not any talks that narcissists have with their victims except to get them to submit, to intimidate them, to threaten, to break their victim's self esteem, with heavy amounts of blaming, shaming, criticizing and gaslighting, and "You must do ---" commands. And because they don't want to suffer from social derision themselves, they feel they must make sure you are saddled with social derision instead; they feel they absolutely must play the victim ... And how's that manicured lawn going?
Most adult victims of narcissists are disgusted by the narcissist's victim stance. In fact having these flying monkeys is usually a sign that the narcissist is willing to be quite unethical and immoral. How immoral and unethical they are has a lot to do with how many lies you hear coming out of these flying monkey's mouths.
But, in general, most narcissists will choose to spiral down further and further into unethical and immoral behavior when their victims do not submit, when the narcissist is unsatisfied with how the interpersonal conflicts are working out with their victim. The flying monkeys become, to the narcissist, someone to tell lies to, and to get the flying monkeys motivated to bring further hurt and harm to the victim, and the victim's reputation. It is a sickening display, and you wonder how far down into dark evil deeds the narcissist is willing to go with these agendas.
Survivors realize as soon as the monkeys are enlisted that the narcissist uses people - there really is no real authentic connection with their flying monkeys. The relationship they have with these people is totally built on lies and usage. It's what the victim used to be to the narcissist, a utility to lie to, and to see how many lies they could tell to you, including lying about loving you. When you are discarded by a narcissist, you realize instantly that they never loved you. When they refuse to work together with you on solutions that can make both of you feel loved and happy, they show they don't love you or care about you. That takes place right after the discard.
And when they lie to all of these flying monkeys too about what happened, you realize they don't love them either, and if they are lying to their spouse, which most of them are, every single relationship they have is a sham. Their spouse is just as utilitarian and disposable as you were especially if the spouse(s) don't submit and refuse to be their most "effective" flying monkey.
And usually all flying monkeys have much more of an allegiance, on a personal level, to the narcissist than they are to you, so you are probably not going to be swayed by the flying monkeys based on that.
Some narcissists and sociopaths do try to enlist your children and spouse in their flying monkey brigade to go against you, if they can't get to you with their own minions. But it is not likely to work either unless your spouse and children have a long standing relationship with the narcissist, can be brainwashed easily, that they believe in authoritarianism to some degree, and unless the narcissist is bending over backwards for them (many, many gifts and privileges to put doubts in their minds, i.e., - "_____Mr. Narcissist____ is giving me all of these presents; perhaps they aren't such bad people after all! Maybe you should give them another chance!" Having a close familial relationship, like the narcissist living with your children, or doing constant babysitting, prior to their playing the victim and enlisting flying monkeys, also helps the narcissist's cause. The lesson here is: don't live with narcissists or let them babysit your kids).
Note: I see it being reported in forums and groups that a survivor's children are being brainwashed by their narcissistic parent, and more rarely their spouse too, so I know that it happens. But in my own personal life among adult child abuse survivors, these manipulations by their narcissistic parent didn't work at all, and backfired in a big way to the point where the narcissist doesn't have a relationship with his or her child and also his or her own grandchildren either. Granted, most of the survivors I know personally are not part of an "enmeshed" family, and many are independent minded artists, musicians and teachers, and that seems to be where the difference lies: if you are from an enmeshed family where they all live in the same town, and where the attitude is that family must stick together no matter what, even through horrific abuses, then your children can be talked into things like putting grandparents and their views first. If you are from a family whose members are distant geographically, where there are a lot of estranged members, where there are a lot of members who are educated, independent and "doing their own thing" and don't particularly want to get involved with any particular family struggles, splitting you from your own children or spouse won't work.
Mob bullying discussions by mental health professionals and in schools usually have something to say about flying monkeys, so it is getting really difficult for narcissists to use these tactics with any amount of success. At least among the educated class. If anything, it gets the victim running away faster because of the downward moral spiral that the narcissist shows. And they especially show it when they have flying monkeys.
There are several videos in the beginning, two by people diagnosed with Narcissistic Personality Disorder and one who is a psychologist who explains that having flying monkeys is a purely transactional relationship where they reward the flying monkey with something afterward. They don't have respect for the flying monkeys (after all, they can be lied to and brainwashed so easily). They look at them as "dumb followers" and the narcissist in one video refers to his flying monkeys as "soldier ants". Ants are rather tiny, so it is a derisive term.
I've seen a little too much of flying monkeys having been exposed to a lot of people who grew up with abuse and being the daughter of a father who had to deal with lots of different kinds of flying monkeys. When it became my time to deal with flying monkeys, I knew what to expect and had decades to figure out responses. Here is how I dealt with a work situation.
Lisa Romano, whose video I feature below, talks about how an ex tried to sully her reputation in places like stores, and places she went, and through her kids, and well, just everywhere. When an ex has that much time on his hands to sully the reputation of another person to that extent, you know he's eaten alive with hatred, another problem narcissists have. They don't get anywhere in life because hate has taken over their brains, their ambitions and their entire beings. They feel they must, must, must have these flying monkeys, and lie to these flying monkeys like crazy to feel good about themselves. It's part of almost every narcissist's doomed playbook, and therefor nothing you can avoid entirely.
Just remember: this is how they feel good about themselves. Wow, they must be pretty far down in the moral dumpster to feel good about spreading hate around and firing up and lying to flying monkeys to attack people!
So that's my takeaway: it's no better than someone who hates the place he worked and therefor feels inclined to bomb out the building. We are usually disgusted by those kinds of actions, aren't we?
While I don't agree with Lisa that in all circumstances you should just roll your eyes at the little annoyances that flying monkeys and the desperate hate-filled narcissist brings to your life, because in some situations it can produce dangers you are not aware of, especially if some of them are flying sociopaths who are just in it to get to hurt someone, anyone, who get a charge of feeling like a great soldier of fortune because they hurt people. A usually bored-with-people sociopath can become energized when called upon to bully. But it certainly does not deserve the attention of feeling emotionally shocked. Immoral people are programmed to want to do immoral things.
My own thought on how to handle the narcissist is to back away and get a report going, either with police, or domestic violence services, something where you have a record in case they go after you. If they get really dangerous, you probably don't have any other choice than to move.
Handling the narcissist's aggressions and schemes against you:
With the flying monkeys (the way I've handled them):
As for whether they want to give me the cold shoulder and make me feel I am not part of their junior high-like bully clique: fine. I know it hurts a lot of you to be suddenly unmoored, and it did for me in the beginning too, but the way I look at it now is that after all of the darker criminally-minded flying monkeys still in that circle, I really don't feel comfortable with any flying monkeys even if they are just the frightened "I-don't-want-to-go-through-what-you-went-through" ones. The scared ones are still attached and enmeshed with the criminally-minded ones, so that means they are still being emotionally toyed with, expected to "report", and I see that they are pretending to be 100 percent loyal and enamored with the darker personalities just to keep from being attacked and devalued.
They will have to figure it out as I did. Which is to say that I was a deeply frightened flying monkey at one point in my life too, I'm ashamed to say, the enabler kind I talk about above, who does not bully, but puts her head in the sand hoping all of the threats and mudslinging will go away some day, that the older ones would "mellow out" and get "with the times", that it would evolve into a peacenik love-fest instead of devolve into something worse. It's the Pollyanna fantasy! At one time I told one traumatized person in the tribe that maybe they should go back if they were so unhappy. If I had known what I know about domestic violence, I would have said, "Don't go back! Abuse escalates! I'll be here to comfort you when times get rough." So, in a way I felt I deserved at least some of the more enabling kinds of flying monkeys just so I would wake up to why being a flying monkey in any capacity is not a good idea. Like a lot of flying monkeys, when I screwed up and refused to be loyal and go along on one issue, I was dis-membered (my way of saying "no longer a member", because those narcissists weren't much different than "off with your head" dictators).
And I was shamed by people who were some of the most unethical people, some without any morals whatsoever. I was shamed by some of them for being disloyal who were the most disloyal, two-faced people I had ever met in my life. I was shamed for not showing "enough respect" by people who actually went over-board insulting others on a daily basis as a leisure pastime, calling people animal names, who told other people they were worthless, who were abusive, even of children, and who laughed at other people in the most haughty chest thumping way imaginable. Once I learned that arrogance and abuse go together in narcissism, even when they've committed crimes, apparently, then I started to look at all of the rest of the traits too: false narratives (check), insulting others (check), gaslighting (check), threatening others about membership (check), especially members who aren't total doormats or dishrags (check), and all of the other traits (check, check, check ... ).
When you have your peace shaken up and toyed with for years, plus dealing with a lot of future faking, threats about your future membership, and lots of trauma symptoms, you can think, "Being on the wrong side of these monkeys is something I can't deal with. I'm already shaken up by things outside of this. I'll just put up, shut up, be on the very margins and sidelines all of the time." But after having these flying monkeys do their dirty work at the worst period of my life where I was dealing with multiple medical crises, and deaths of loved ones, I can say that seeing the flying monkeys aggressions during these kinds of times pointed to who they really are (people without empathy, for one, and people who like to pick on others who are traumatized, two). It also alerted me to why no one should be a flying monkey ever. A tribe as bad as that one is never going evolve into a more peaceful one. The tribes that get more peace-oriented have members that are already all heading towards more and more peace anyway, who are inclusive and talking about their feelings already, who are open and encouraged to talk about what they went through, and not full of people trying to shut you up about your pain, rubbing their hands together at the chance to bully you some more, or moving on to victimize someone else who also showed signs of trauma. What was I thinking!?
What I was thinking was not about reality, but some fantasy that the situation could be a lot more rosy if I just lived what I preached: that if I just stayed and talked about integrity, and talked about doing ethical good deeds, and had causes like the environment, animal rights, child rights, places in society where justice-seeking was necessary, what produces good mental and physical health, that I could change some things from the inside out. What I didn't realize was that I wasn't listened to, or valued for what I brought to the table, not at all, let alone these causes being accepted on any level. I was just another faceless, voiceless number on the inside of the flying monkey clique. It was depressing to learn that. I felt I had wasted my voice and my life. Who wants to just be an extra body just so that the narcissists in the group can count you as one of their loyalists? I'm sure they used my ethics to make themselves look better too ("Look who we have on our team! We are approved by someone who is involved in a lot of causes! We don't bully, hate and have prejudiced minds! This person wouldn't be in our group if we were bad people!"). And guess what? They not only did not care about me a bit, and probably not anyone else, nor did they care about any of these causes, except to use it to prove something to others. It was so obvious that "the group" was much more about violence, invalidating others, smear campaigning, committing crimes when possible, and just so much awful-to-listen-to trash-talking about other people that I didn't fit in at all.
In a way, it was easy to be an ex-member, just because of that. I did not belong and never will.
And I no longer felt loyal to that group. I felt ashamed of the group, and that I had hung on to membership for too long. And as it turned out, I was probably always a tentative member any way, being an independent-minded artist, maybe unknowingly taking after Beatrice Wood in many ways. I felt disgusted with them, with myself, with what I had aligned myself to with unrealistic hopes. Those hopes now looked like deflated destroyed balloons.
I am much more adaptable because of that experience, though. It was easier to be more independent, not less so. Freedom cannot be underestimated.
Then I occasionally met others who seemed like good friendship material on the surface, and who I had a lot in common with, but who were gossipy and insensitive and starting to show narcissistic traits: "Back away!" I told myself. "This is not your kind of person; you've already lived through that." I don't look for approval from anyone any more unless their ethics are absolutely clean, or better than mine, and it takes awhile to know. I definitely no longer seek approval from the Pollyanna enablers, or any flying monkeys, or people who try to shame others into compliance (all of whom are usually hypocrites), and even the frightened, I-must-stay-enmeshed-to-the-group-to-avoid-disaster members. Not even the lawyer with the long list of causes I wrote about above, though that made me flinch a little bit more than any others, admittedly. I was never into flying monkey-dom to such an extent that I could attack, pull back afterward, and close my ears to the response (when you throw missiles and bombs, you act like that, right?).
Although the narcissists and the one sociopath in the group weren't the worst people I have ever met in my life unfortunately, some of them were so bereft of any discernable ethics, more than I wanted in my life, more than I imagined they would be. Once I knew where their real ethics lay, and not just the Dr. Jekyll things they spouted for their own image-making to get along in society, I did not want their brand of ethics anywhere near me. It was unbelievable how they acted, especially the older ones, the ones over 50. You'd think older people would have learned in junior high that arrogance, hatred, lying about others and a resistance to being kind, thoughtful, and intelligent about relationship issues gets you nowhere. It's amazing that some people remain so arrogant after they commit such horrific acts of aggression against others too. I guess you have to be arrogant to live full time with your own immorality.
Which is to say that I won't be a domestic violence counselor, after all, even though I have studied so much, and devoted a lot of my life to this cause, mainly because the best therapists in the field of domestic violence therapy and research, work with victims and perpetrators. In some cases, it is absolutely necessary to work with both. No, I do not want to work with perpetrators. Most perpetrators don't go to therapy except when they get arrested, and most choose jail over therapy when given the choice, and not kidding. Repeat offending is highly, highly likely no matter which road they take. And the ones who do engage in therapy? So many of them are out to fool therapists, and keep their unethical minds going in the same direction they have always gone, end of story. So all you are dealing with as a therapist is just more narcissistic manipulations, all of the twisted tragic head games they like to play, day in and day out. No thanks.
I'm choosing the path of trauma research and healing techniques instead, hopefully at a university with the best trauma researchers in the field. Therefore there will be a limited number of posts on narcissism after I publish the last 4 big ones. There are so many good researchers in the field of narcissism right now that I don't feel I have much more to add.
Healing is the best direction to go after abuse anyway, assuming you make a good safety plan to exit. Most human beings can't deal with a lot of aggressive power hungry narcissists without trauma symptoms and without wanting to flee (the exception are primary psychopaths who like the challenges of dealing with emotionally toxic environments and are "trauma resistant" because of the different autonomic nervous systems they were born with). Most people who are hurt by narcissists become estranged from them, and sometimes narcissists become traumatized and estranged from each other if there is a power struggle.
Even more importantly, it's even hard to talk to the frightened enablers who are part of that group, and are on the very edge of discard or leaving themselves, who also want peaceful, and less "loyal-to-the-group-think" solutions, but on the other hand, feel so powerless and overwhelmed with fear that they can't seem to find a way towards any peace without selling their souls. In some cases they are asked to prove their loyalty and alignment by flattering narcissists publicly just so they won't be targeted again. Unlike me, they aren't trying to talk about ethics or peace; they are just trying to survive the whole sorry mess, keeping quiet, silent, flinching, with minds full of trauma, and feel they can't talk about much of anything without crucifixion. So sad.
I can be the type of healer they go to after they learn that abuse escalates, and that narcissists rarely change and often get worse, and when the survivor can't take it any more. Which is to say that I'm definitely a proponent of "no contact" as I think it is nearly impossible to heal and discover who you really are with narcissists in your life (who constantly and disparagingly describe you and your motives to fit their own agendas, and all of the loyalist flying monkeys who come to the table trying to push you with your Pollyanna positions on abuse, or push you to "forgive and forget", or push you out of membership. Pushing, is, of course, aggressive, and no one wants, likes or asks to be aggressed upon).
And the group has gotten worse, by the way, not better, so I made the right choice. They still believe that hurting children teaches a child good lessons. They still believe that women should be submissive, and if not, hurt and ostracized. They still eat meat at most meals. They still believe "children should be seen and not heard", that they don't deserve to have a voice in anything, including defining their reality, their feelings, their thoughts, their character, and their decisions, or have any rights, even to common decency and respect. They are still arrogant and laugh at people, and too critical of way too many human beings than I want to sit around and listen to, but are hyper-reactive to criticism themselves, and cannot take even a mini portion of what they dish out. They still believe in scapegoating. They still are wasteful with resources, going on vapid boring luxury vacations talking over each other with their drunk-induced opinions, looking down their noses and laughing at the "peons" around them, deciding on the next person or group to disparage and bully, or which person cannot be invited to which particular event, take your pick. They are still making decisions on what self aggrandizing statements to make when they could care less about morals, ethics, justice or the health or state they leave people in. In other words, they tend to be what I term as "fake liberals", authoritarian dictators who pretend to be bleeding hearts but who are downright heartless - unless they have an awful lot to gain from it, or an image to make out of it, pretending to tout peace when their families are a mess of non-peaceful "it's-up-to-everyone-else-other-than-me-to-make-relationships-work" lazy-ass solutions: ostracisms, divorces, estrangements, silent treatments of people who they professed to love and care about for long periods of time, daughter-hating, grand-daughter hating, step-people hating, in-law hating (especially women in-laws), pretend victimizations, persistently angry that their kingly and queenly entitlements haven't been met yet, and resentments over who refuses to be dominated and commanded by them, the "they should" kinds of liberals when it comes to their personal lives, their politics, and societal ills, as if everything should be someone else's problem to solve, not theirs except in the sense of opinion-making and minimal ineffective back-seat driving, causes for governments to decide even - with a divided country, the last government infighting that we've had, the moral drop of people at the top?! Pppptttt!.
And considering all of this, and the fact that they solve relationship issues by playing the victim while being the main perpetrators of estrangement and run smear campaigns against so many "exes", and other people who refuse to "follow the leader", and enlist flying monkeys only for the purpose of shaming people into compliance and total submission to what the narcissists wants out of people they discard, would you really want to be a flying monkey in that kind of group, or with that kind of agenda? Not me. What about you?
Especially when they act like this and this and this and sometimes even like this behind closed doors? And when there are so many flying monkeys who think they, themselves are the real ones in charge, and some who would commit violence and crimes just to have more control?
As I've said before, since they are mostly soldiers of fortune working for the narcissist, and getting rewarded for doing so, wouldn't it be better if they fought about who was the supreme god among themselves instead, while you escape to a more peaceful life? Aren't coups, and plans for coups part of the picture?
Also once the army has arrived, what is the agenda? Usually with any army it is either to enslave, or to destroy. People who are hostile to you do not want peace, including peace for themselves or peace for you. Not at all. Enslavement causes pain, and destruction causes pain. Don't bother talking about your pain to them. They don't have the empathy to care.
Also you can see that every cause I've ever cared about and "lived" for decades (children's rights, animal rights, etc.) was given the cold ear and rejected.
I would say, "Don't waste your time like I did." Aggressors/criminals/fakers/dictators + co-dependents and enablers = toxic environment, period, with no change. All with an incredible amount of confirmation bias, gaslighting, usage, and "don't trust, don't talk, don't feel" closed mindedness, and the most uppity un-empathetic "they should" people you would ever meet - it's like putting yourself in a dumpster.
"Not my monkeys, not my circus" is a phrase I've heard a lot recently. It would describe my own present situation.
I've also come to realize that when narcissists send their brainwashed flying monkeys to take care of you in a hostile manner, what the narcissist is really admitting to you is (if they spoke honestly, that is): "I'm threatened by your power! I don't want you to have any because I never learned how to handle it in a healthy way. I want all of the power! Please! You can't have any! It's mine! I'm boss! I don't want you in my life without that because I'm too threatened by the fact that you are making more of your own decisions than I'm comfortable with, so I'm going to send out my flying monkeys until you submit and let me control you again! How dare you not let me control you! As if you know how to live! You need me to make all of your decisions for you! You used to be so good at letting me run your life! Why can't you just stop being so headstrong and step in line again? I wanted you to stay in that role forever! But you didn't like that role (so ungrateful!), so now you must be punished for going outside that role! After the promotions, the flattery?! Never mind the abuse; what about the flattery? That means nothing to you?! Okay, so the flattery was fake, but you never deserved to run your own life because I'm so much better at it than you are: more intelligent, more desirable, more popular, more talented, better at everything! Well, at least I pretend to be all of those things because to think otherwise, I'd be scared to death as to who I really am! No, I'm not going to look at how abusive I am; I'm only going to be looking at how I flatter people, and how grateful they should be for the privilege. So I have to believe you're nobody compared to me if I'm only willing to look at the good stuff I do. I have to convince you that I'm much better at being in charge of you than you are of yourself. Just look: people do what I want all of the time! Look at how many flying monkeys do what I want, when I want, even the ones I don't reward! - which admittedly aren't very many, but hey, money talks! Even when I'm unethical, they never think to look, or they ignore it, as they should! - isn't it wonderful? That's why I can ignore it too, and why you should do the same. They don't want to risk not having me in their life if they know what is good for them! But you! You think you can get around my threats, my bullying, my disdain! They skip over my unethical deeds (good for me! - that makes me superior!) and I can do anything I want to anyone at any time, even you, and never get in trouble for it, because to defy me would mean punishment for them. No, most people will put blind faith in me. Why can't you just do the same? What's wrong with you that you can't just ignore my lack of ethics and do what all of the flying monkeys are doing???"
And when you ask them to stop this B.S. because their attitude is Wicked-Witch-of-the-West thinking, not helpful, not moral, and not wanted, or that it hurts, they are going to tell you that they will stop it if you agree to let them have power and control over you again, plus a lot more than they had before. When they are like this? These are not realistic fantasies to have, and I think even they realize they are mere fantasies after awhile. If they are malignant narcissists and they know this is hurting you, they will think, "Oh, this is SO GOOD! Ha! They're feeling pain! Let's keep this going!!"
And by the way, anyone who doesn't care what you experience or feel, and who thinks your pain is a good thing, is likely to have a Cluster B personality disorder, most likely with every single one of the narcissistic traits.
Would you be a flying monkey to someone knowing that? And most of all, would you tell someone to go back to, or stay in a relationship like that?
If a narcissist is your parent, and you've been told in your religion to respect your parents, remember that respecting them does not mean obeying them. You can respect them for giving birth to you. You can respect them for "trying" in which ever way they contributed, but it doesn't mean that you have be in their company, to be abused, disrespected and traumatized. Or just take Dr. Ramani Durvasula's advice: Stop telling people to respect their elders! "Respect your elders"... enabling at its finest (the link leads you to her video on the subject). I am also sharing some of the comments of this video below, and I also share my own comment about what I think the "saying" should change to.
There has been an outcry recently as discussions about narcissistic abuse have been greatly ramped up on television and social media, but many narcissists are saying so much of society is being taught to be prejudiced against them (with psychologists leading the way, people they think, who are supposed to administer mental health treatment to everyone, and not just ditching narcissists when they rage or get entitled). It's interesting that the prejudiced are complaining about being prejudiced against for the first time in history. And I have had struggles with this myself. Am I as prejudiced against them as they are against me? But here is the difference: I am not trying to hurt them. I am not brainwashing flying monkeys or dealing in false narratives. I am not trying to control what they do with their own life. I am not trying to shame them for normal reactions to pain. After I went through that work situation, I could care less whether they even think about me.
Most of us are prejudiced against people who try to, and go out of their way, to hurt others. A normal response is outrage, anger and hurt, even if they are hurting someone else and not us (it is empathy at work, a good thing). Self protection or protecting another is usually also part of the picture. Trauma too. Symptoms, if we the narcissist is in a close personal relationship with you. Compassion for those who are suffering. Denial is possible, but then so is your vulnerability to becoming a flying monkey. So is fear (which is when you get to fawning over people who hurt you, and giving into their toxic entitlements - toxic for you, that is, because it never means they will treat you justly, but also toxic for everyone else because "giving in" is allowing them to arrogantly feel they deserve these entitlements, and more ... their entitlements to hurt others should probably should be crushed instead).
Most of us don't want narcissists in our lives for the very reason that they cause us to have symptoms, a general feeling of ill health, and no peace. And their qualities (the gaslighting, the triangulations, the discards, the arrogance, the inauthentic love, the constant manipulations and competitions, and most of all the flying monkeys to keep us in compliance with these agendas) - it's way too much for most of us to deal with, and not necessary in terms of living a happy life. We will always break good ethics, even if just to fulfill one of their entitlements under pressure or threat, to stay in their graces.
Many of us would like it if they stopped hurting others voluntarily, but the high majority of us also realize that won't happen. It's cooked in to their character for good. So I am just trying to bring awareness to others that if people see certain characteristics of people in their family, at their job, in positions of power, expect to be hurt by them, or for them to meddle in your life in such a way as to get you fired, or take over a parent's inheritance, or to sabotage you in some way (remember that their jealousy is off the charts), or doing what ever they can that they think will garner the most pain for you.
The best that can be hoped for are societal measures and laws, with the good people of the world trying to flood their constituents for better laws, for people to stop abusing children (abusive families are where you find the next generation of budding narcissists, dictators, aggressors and abusers - so it has to stop if we want peace in the world). You can always save your own children by not exposing them to your worst relatives. It's a step.
I also like the fact that this subject has become so popular and that more people are making a stand (which includes going "no contact" with abusive families, giving up on toxic bosses and work environments, refusing to have bullies in your life, period, no matter who they are or what kind of conventional connections we are expected to have, refusing to expose your children to triangulating narcissists, refusing to be a flying monkey in gossipy friendship circles, and bad dictators), and listening to the discussions being raised by the best in the field who study narcissism full time. Here are some who rise to the top of the field for me:
"Are Flying Monkeys Also Narcissists Or Just Cowards?"
Dr. Todd Grande's video,
"Narcissists' Flying Monkeys":
Dr. Ramani Durvasula's video,
"How to handle flying monkeys":
Lisa A. Romano's video,
"Bye Bye Flying Monkeys":
How the Narcissist views his FLYING MONKEYS - video by The Nameless Narcissist (my note: he has been diagnosed with Narcissistic Personality Disorder and tells what it is like to be a narcissist - in this video, he tells the audience that he always views people hierarchically, that it's just how he is, with himself at the top telling people what to do and how to behave - and what he actually thinks of his "ant soldiers").
Another person diagnosed with Narcissistic Personality Disorder explains it too: A #Narcissist Explains: Flying Monkeys from the #narcissists perspective. Blind support is expected - by Mental Healness
When enablers say "the narcissist is just under a lot of pressure" - video by Dr. Ramani Durvasula
When narcissistic enablers say "they didn't mean any harm" - video by Dr. Ramani Durvasula
Stop telling people to respect their elders! "Respect your elders"... enabling at its finest - video by Dr. Ramani Durvasula
Your narcissistic family tells you this... - video by Dr. Ramani Durvasula (discusses how flying monkeys can be family who never have your back)
The fate of the brainwashed child - video by Dr. Ramani Durvasula
Dealing with a narcissist's enablers pollyannas and flying monkeys - video by Dr. Ramani Durvasula
The Pollyanna narcissistic enabler - video by Dr. Ramani Durvasula
The self-serving narcissistic enabler - video by Dr. Ramani Durvasula
The ignorant narcissistic enabler - video by Dr. Ramani Durvasula
6 things narcissist enablers say to you - video by Dr. Ramani Durvasula
Narcissists, Flying Monkeys and Sibling Estrangement - by Ali-John Chaudhary, Psychotherapist
Narcissistic Parents and Sibling Estrangement - by Ali-John Chaudhary, Psychotherapist
SIBLING ESTRANGEMENT in families that SCAPEGOAT - by Rebecca C. Mandeville LMFT - Scapegoat Recovery
The COVERT Narcissist MARTYR Parent and the Scapegoat Child - by Rebecca C. Mandeville LMFT - Scapegoat Recovery
The enabler parent in the narcissistically abusive family - by Jay Reid, Psychotherapist
(note: I found the comments section to this video interesting. There is one child abuse victim - now an adult - who said that his mother used her children as a shield from getting abused herself, so enabling takes many forms). I put some of the comments at the end of this section.
Moving out of the narcissistic parent's home for scapegoats (LEAVING IS DANGEROUS AND NECESSARY) - by Jay Reid, Psychotherapist
Trust what the narcissist shows you NOT what you hope for (seeing is believing) - by Jay Reid, Psychotherapist
Why a narcissist says you're "too sensitive" (DISLIKING ABUSE IS NOT BEING 'TOO SENSITIVE') - by Jay Reid, Psychotherapist
Narcissists Are 100% Done With You Forever After They Do This | NPD | Narcissism | BehindTheScience - video by BehindTheScience
Eleven Reasons Why Adult Children Cut Off (Not Just Toxic) - by Morin Holistic Therapy
What's Fuelling Family Estrangement? | The Agenda - The Agenda TVO Today
from Dr. Ramani Durvarula's video:
If I had left an opinion, I would have said this:
from @ Lise:
The saying really should be: "Respect your children, and respect your parents." Narcissistic parents have run with this theme to mean, "I am entitled to respect and telling people what to do, but I don't have to respect, to acknowledge, or to be kind, to anyone, especially my children." A society that promotes only respecting parents without respecting its children, will be like the narcissistic family: dysfunctional, toxic, divided.
from Dr. Les Carter's video:
from @heidihaeni7783:
Dr. Carter's response: Well stated.
from @DeborahLArmstrong:
reply by @nicolececilia6593:
reply from Dr. Carter:
What Nicole said. Dr. C
reply from Dr. Carter:
Thanks for this good food for thought! Dr. C
Flying Monkeys: The Inner Circle of the Narcissist - book by by J.B. Snow, Author, D Gaunt, Narrator, JB Snow Publishing (Amazon)
Narcissistic Enablers: How to Recognize & Deal With One - by Hailey Shafir, LPCS, LCAS, CCS, Reviewed by Heidi Moawad, MD for Choosing Therapy
Enabling the Narcissist: How and Why It Happens - by Julie L. Hall for Narcissistic Family Files
The pollyanna enabler, the narcissist's most treasured minion - by by Florentyna Domanski
The Narcissist and the Enabler – A Match Made in Hell - by Carla Corelli
How Do Narcissists Use Flying Monkeys? (A Complete Guide) - by Elijah Akin for Unfilterdd
excerpt:
... The time wasted on the narcissist in efforts to heal them, save them, teach them, reform them, etc ... they all fail because they were always nothing more than a delusion. There was never any real progress or victories. Just mirroring, parroting, faking, and pretending.
How the Scapegoat is Gang Bullied by their Family - by Mary Toolan, Scapegoat Child Recovery Coach for her own website
These flying monkeys look too cute. They need to be more menacing.
ReplyDeleteBut they smile while saying the most cruel things, and when they have a Pollyanna viewpoint about abuse.
DeleteHi Lise,
ReplyDeleteWould you say that back in the early days when Johnny was still in your good graces, that you potentially may have been a flying monkey towards his ex-wife? The one he told everyone was crazy? I ask because "Johnny" reminds me very much of a particular family member of my own. This person is perceived as friendly, charming, decent, (perhaps a bit impulsive, fun-loving) guy to most. That is the impression he gives off. Unless you're the one he's targeting (usually a vulnerable and isolated female). Everyone else gets the "good" fun side and doesn't see the malevolent lies, slander, physical intimidation, and bullying. If you're known for telling the truth, he'll work very hard to convince everyone you're a liar. If he's threatened by a particular truth or power you have, he'll tell everyone you're crazy. They believe his spin. He's very smooth with false narratives, gossip, acting faux concerned...in short he excels at inciting others against a single isolated person.
Been excelling and getting away with it since high school with his reputation intact. If anyone accuses or confronts or tries to hold him accountable for his acts, he has been able to dance around it by coming up with more lies. Usually by slandering another person or accusing them of what he did. He basically just projects-and it works! I don't think anyone but his victims would perceive him as a narcissist or dark type of personality. Quite the contrary. Some might think he exaggerates sometimes or is overly confident, but that's about it. They see him as a fun, likeable guy. Were you also fooled by your Johnny's outward personality? Can these types have wonderful relationships with most people, including their current wives, their friends, MOST of their family members...while keeping their abusive side directed narrowly at a select few? I believe that's how they get away with it for so long. Does no one but the victim ever see them for who they are?
On Johnny: I wasn't hostile at all towards her. It was expected of me, but I didn't go there. Was Johnny convincing in terms of viewing her a certain way? Sort of. A person could talk about an ex the way he did and interpret the loud impressions of her character as going through trauma. I think most people would interpret his stories that way. But he'd also describe her with total dismissiveness, with insults, and it always seemed "off" to me. What I describe as "trash-talking". Most people don't describe traumatic situations that way. Hate seemed to take over.
DeleteWas I flying monkey? I'm so embarrassed to say I was the "I don't want to get involved" type of flying monkey. I was going through a lot of trauma myself at the time, and I didn't think I could handle it. But there was definitely a part of me that thought I should be loyal to Johnny because he did seem to be experiencing pain, and feeling overwhelmed. When I saw the dark side (the false narratives, the Jekyll/Hyde personality and so on), wow, I practically had a panic attack! Maybe I did. Most people would go the emergency room if they felt like I did. And I just had this awful feeling: "Oh, my God! What have I done?!"
The longer I live, the more I resist flying monkey-dom. If you have empathy, you will always feel uncomfortable, especially if there is any bullying at all, and it can eat you alive with guilt afterwards. So, that's my lesson from that.
In terms of narcissists having good relationships with a lot of people and saving part of themselves for scapegoating someone else? Absolutely, but I still would not describe them as good relationships. I think it was the Boston Strangler who "appeared" to have a great relationship with his wife, and children (looked normal, no abuse, no family murders, acted like the good family man), but murdered lone women on the side as a "pretend single guy". How narcissists scapegoat the vulnerable is more like that, where they have a secret life of dark acts and motives that they never share with wife and family. They may not murder, but they are violent. Or steal. Or falsely imprison. So the relationship with the wife and kids is a sham because there are toxic secrets and probably lies between them. He's covering something up, but all narcissists cover up something nefarious or unethical.
And yes, some people describe Johnny in absolutely glowing terms. A very few look at him as an absolute golden god. It's nerve wracking because all you are seeing is that their mind is full time on negativity, entitlement, evil motives, even crime. Very disconcerting. Narcissists are all charming, and often too ingratiating and familiar, and they can gush that that they love you more than they have ever loved anyone - as long as they are getting awards, winning competitions, getting their ego stroked, or there is money involved. When you catch on to who they really are (the master of manipulation), they can turn on you. Malignant narcissists can be very retaliatory and be obsessed with hurting you.
continued....Are they genuinely good people when they're with the folks they get along with, or is that all an act for them? Do you think Johnny knew he was lying when he made up crap about you? His first wife? Or do you think he believed it? What is going on with these Jekyl/Hyde types? How can they maintain loving relationships with some people and still DO these cruel sadistic behaviors to others (usually the nicest, least threatening, most giving kind). Do they know they are bullies and are they being fake 90% of the time when they are with everyone else? If their good side is false, just maintained for keeping appearances and an image, then they are living a lie with everyone else. That seems far fetched. Perhaps they truly aren't conscious of their bad side. Perhaps they believe their projections? What say you? Their public image is so opposite to their secret agenda of destroying another person's reputation/life. Their goal of inciting a mob against their target. Do you honestly think they know what they do? That would be dark indeed! And it is so hard to believe that about a family member. How can they have all these other normal relationships if that were true? Is it only because those people are sycophants who adore or believe everything they say? Can they only have good relationships with those who don't question them?
ReplyDeleteMy question to you: would you have believed his ex-wife if you hadn't eventually experienced first hand what she did? Didn't he fool you for a very long time with a very different impression of him for years?s The only way you opened to the truth was to experience his maltreatment first hand? Even you, a sensitive, discerning, smart, conscientious woman? That doesn't bode well for us. Nor for the truth ever coming to light. For them ever being held accountable. Because they'll always be hurting others, and getting away with it by fooling, charming, and manipulating everyone around them. They're never going to show their bad side to enough people to be exposed or held accountable. Even with recording devices, most flying monkeys would still side with and continue to support this person. They've invested too much to change their loyalties. Their perceptions. Only if they were on the receiving end of this horrific treatment would they wake up to who this person really is. Yet my main questions remains: WHO IS THIS PERSON? Do they compartmentalize away all the lies and cruelties they commit against the innocent when they are hanging out with their friends/family, acting like the good guy? Are they secretly loving getting away with it? Or do they actually believe they are the good decent person they act like when they're in public? Do they split their bad side off into denial in order to do this OR do they know full well what they're doing and just gloating, loving getting away with it?
cont ...
Delete"My question to you: would you have believed his ex-wife if you hadn't eventually experienced first hand what she did?" - I have always had an open mind, but not as much back then. So maybe not. Isn't that sad?
"Didn't he fool you for a very long time with a very different impression of him for years?" - yes.
"The only way you opened to the truth was to experience his maltreatment first hand?" yes, a much, much wider truth, that is.
"Even you, a sensitive, discerning, smart, conscientious woman? That doesn't bode well for us." - Yea, I'm afraid our evolution isn't at a good place in terms of "discerning" and "signals". Too much of the monkey brain still.
And so many people are lining up behind dictators. People who are dictatorial and authoritarian tend to be narcissists. It's depressing and a slide back. I don't think we are caring about the new generation enough. Babies need extraordinary amounts of attention, even single-minded attention, and people are distracted and stressed with jobs, phones, lack of money, drugs, and the babies are way more neglected than they should be in terms of human interaction and touch. That's part of it from all I know about attachment theory. Insecure attachment probably has a lot to do with the recent trend in estrangement too.
I notice that when a baby is in the company of five adults, for instance, and we are all interacting with the baby, and when the baby comes first, she doesn't get fussy or stressed and can go long periods of time without getting tired. Seems to learn at a more rapid pace too. If we all get distracted, she starts fidgeting and turning her head away, and making distressed sounds.
cont ...
One more comment I'd like to make as I slept on this overnight ... Most run-of-the-mill narcissists choose infidelity as their main avenue of unethical deeds. It's a lot less fraught with risks of arrest, and many, many narcissists get away with it - and telling others that their spouse was a cheating, incompetent, insane, overly-emotional, abusive person instead, especially during a divorce (I cover that in my post about word salad arguments).
DeleteWhen they get caught, or their spouse doesn't feel like living with the narcissist's double life, narcissists' ethics do spiral downwards in those situations, and they can spiral down pretty far. They can commit crimes in those situations, and they even get a dopamine "high" for awhile, but then if they are not the malignant narcissist type, they will experience shame and paranoia afterwards. So narcissistic collapse is sometimes inevitable no matter what they try to do.
The more malignant brand of narcissist will specialize in something usually, whether stalking, sexual assault, domestic violence, abusing someone they perceive as weak or a minority, all kinds of crimes. Some of them take up all of them, but they tend to get caught a lot more quickly if they don't specialize.
Malignant narcissists feel very little remorse or shame, and they spend inordinate amounts of time justifying their actions with those they feel closest to, who tend to be other narcissists. When their main source of narcissistic supply are other narcissists, the moral decline can be extremely rapid in those cases. Many co-narcissists encourage it too: like "You pounded her good! That will teach your wife a good lesson!", "Oh, you got that thing you wanted without being caught?! Good job!", "You won? Fantastic! That'll teach people to sue you for sexual assault!" and so on - then the moral decline can be so rapid as to be absolutely shocking for past victims: "What?! Last time I saw him he was just stealing candy. Now he's arrested for armed robbery and he's killed someone?!" - the flying monkeys in narcissist's lives really contribute in a big way to all of this. Will they shame one of their co-narcissists for these activities? Not too likely unless their images are being sullied. Even then, they aren't going to come forward and say, "Officer, he's been sexually abusing all the little girls in the neighborhood. I think he should be arrested just so he can get on a better track." No. That kind of thing is only reserved for people with ethics and empathy.
If they do shame or turn in their co-narcissist, they realize what will happen, which is why they don't do it. Thus the moral decline continues.
Wow! I always thought narcissists could change their ethics, that it is a choice. I guess not! Are you going to be writing about all of what you have said in the comments in depth at some point?
ReplyDeleteYes. They will be two separate posts: one about the moral spiral downwards when they are being held accountable (which, by the way, is just the opposite for the rest of us: our ethics tend to rise after our failings and regressions) and the second about why they have a general lack of ethics, and what is the driving force, which I touch on very briefly in the comments section above.
DeleteBut first I need to publish two posts that need some editing on 1. narcissistic collapse and
2. the lack of a "definable "self" in narcissism
... which is important to the topic of why the lack of ethics exists in the first place. The above in the comments section is the mini version.
BTW, narcissists have a choice to change their ethics, but the overwhelming majority choose not to.
Thank you for reading my blog. I hope you will continue to come back for those other posts as I think it will help you to understand on a deep level why violence and crimes happen, even events like school shootings, and why it is so hard to rehabilitate offenders, or even to rehabilitate society into thinking about these events as totally unacceptable and more importantly, not to be enabled on any level.
You can see the moral collapse in government, and in society already. You can even see the rise in narcissism, authoritarianism, and hate crimes. All of it will cause a huge rise in lawlessness and internal wars, in a way that we, in this lifetime, have never seen, and won't be able to stop unless we do something very soon.
Left unchecked, it will be an apocalyptic event, much like the environment is just starting to be.
And all of it has a lot to do with "enabling", which is what this post is about, in part.
TO MY READERS (and especially to readers like the one above who know they have a family member who is charming most of the time, but who, behind the scenes, is seeking out vulnerable, innocent, or minority people to abuse):
ReplyDeleteYou can put in an anonymous phone call to police to describe who is being abused. If they go talk to the victimized individual, they may very well suggest resources and outlets for safety. It is rare for abusers to change their behavior, and it often gets worse the more they get away with it, so it is up to the rest of us to help the victims find safety and support, and police are the go-to people for that.
So what you are saying is that they are acting all of the time? What about passionate love? Is that an act too? I just can't believe it is. Isn't the withdrawling from their relationships about disillusionment instead?
ReplyDeleteI am not saying they are acting all of the time, rather the narcissists who have gone public about their condition are saying it. That is an important distinction.
DeleteOn disillusionment: yes they experience that too (but again, that comes from narcissists who have gone public). And from all I have seen and read, it is going on internally a lot more than most of us realize, even when you don't suspect it, when they are "acting" loving.
From all I have read and seen, they see and focus much more on the negative of other people than any positives, and if they see positives they are plagued with overwhelming jealousy, which again, is a negative emotion - which creates a desire to do negative things to that person, or to use them in some way. Malignant narcissists can be focused on the negative all of the time, and when they get exhausted from "acting" nice, they go home and feel most comfortable letting off steam in their negative "deprecating everyone" way.
It is also why they discard people so easily. It is also why they hang out with other narcissists: they have negativity trash-talking fests together - it raises the comfort level greatly for all of them, and it helps to promote the idea that they are so superior to others, that the prejudice of others is absolutely a-okay. The prejudice gets to a certain point that even aggressive acts against others is met with applause, because they have been applauding each other all along for their negative thoughts of other people.
How awful! That doesn't bid well for a lot us. That's the reason for school shootings do you think? I think I understand finally where you are going with this.
DeleteExactly! Mass killings (of which school killings are just one kind) are mostly perpetrated by two types of murderers: one of them mentally ill, and the other personality disordered.
DeleteWhat plays a huge part in the personality disordered is that they have pretty pronounced heavy duty prejudiced perspectives (usually starting in childhood or adolescence with family or with peers).
And the way it gets there is via group trash-talking. Impressionable minds can soak up what they hear from elders and they tend to adopt it to be accepted into the group. Don't forget that children are captive, so many of them are going to adopt attitudes that they deem to be safe, that get them to adulthood in one piece.
But growing up in this kind of environment has been found to be traumatic for children, even if they act grandiose and start to pick on children they have been taught to be prejudiced against. It's part of what I'll be be talking about when I get to the "trauma subjects" and "trauma healing modalities").
Trash talking actually frightens them and feels threatening because they don't have the same kind of hardened fixed opinions and confirmation bias that adults can have, and underneath it all, they know that they could be picked on if they were born a different sex, or different race, or different cultural background.
And the ones who speak out against it, can be abused. So there is tremendous pressure by adults to adopt the perspectives and even to adopt the perspective that you are superior to people that the group is prejudiced against and should act the "superior part".
I can't talk about the process they go through to get to the point of being a mass murderer as it's too long to state here.
But you can see that these groups would have co-conspirators, co-bullies, enablers of all kinds, and loyalists.
There are other elements that add to the direction a person goes to become a mass murderer, but the flying monkeys start it, and keep adding to it and adding to it, until entitlement to aggress upon people you feel superior to takes hold of your thoughts and attitudes.
Thanks for writing in.
I was wondering if you notice or could write about narcissists obsessions to hurt you. For me it is at my job.
ReplyDeleteHere's my story. I was dating this woman for many years, and she broke up with me twice, wanted me back, and I went back, not knowing it would be a habit of hers. The third time we broke up, I thought it was amicable. She said that our chemistry wasn't right. I didn't see it that way, but I thought that if she was unhappy with me, we should not continue. Then I found out she was dating someone else at the end of our relationship, before we broke up. It was tough on my self esteem. And after grieving, I found someone new.
Then she started dating someone from my office. I only minded it a little as no guy wants his face rubbed in it, and I had my own girlfriend, so I just tried to get busy and avoid her when she would come to take my co-worker out to lunch.
But she interpreted me avoiding her in a hostile way. I didn't want to see her, true, but it was because it brought up painful memories. She told my co-worker I was crazy and a brute to her in our past relationship, but it was all lies. I was just the opposite. I'm a calm guy who put pleasing her above everything else, if anything. And then his stories got spread around the entire office. I think he wanted me out out of he office or obvious reasons. I felt victimized. I got anxiety attacks. I often felt ill. I had some hold-outs who didn't buy into the gossip, but the majority went along with the two of them.
It seemed like overnight that she became obsessed with hurting me and my reputation.
One of my co-workers said something about "pay no attention to those flying monkeys!" She told eventually told me a little about narcissism and how narcissists operate. I looked it. Sure enough ...
Before then, I was actually going to quit my job, but I was also worried that it would make me look like the guilty party.
So my question is ... do narcissists become absolutely obsessed with hurting you. How far do they go? And when do they stop?
It has to do with narcissistic supply (and in this case, getting attention). They don't forget their exes, or some part of their exes, and become obsessed about your dating life, what you have that they want, if you are happy without them, and so on - so your comment about obsession is true. The narcissistic supply is, perhaps, baiting you for an emotion: "Am I getting some emotion here? Maybe a little jealousy?", "Do I see a little glimmer of him wanting me back?", "Is it driving him crazy that I lied about him and all of these people believe me and not him?" - Oh, yes, they play these kinds of games.
DeleteAll of this is extremely upsetting, but you do eventually get to a disgust stage. It's like the stages of grief except instead of acceptance at the end you get disgust. Also remember that as they feel insecure and keep ramping this up, their morality is spiraling down to meet their narcissistic supply needs. That's why you get to the disgust stage.
And by the way, narcissists tend to be "make up, break up" people unless they are old, or it will make their lives worse.
Several years ago I talked to a guy at a party: he was separated from this woman for almost two years, and she was spreading some false gossip about him too. And during those two years, he started noticing things moved around, put in odd places in his apartment. His first thoughts were: "Am I going insane here? Why did I put this here?" Only to find out his ex had kept a key to his apartment and was getting in to see if he had a new girlfriend.
If they are provoking you, realize that they are not done with you. They are obsessing about you, the girlfriend you have, the job that you love - it can be anything. And how they are attacking you has something to do with what they think they are lacking. They are "I have to be on top" people, and if you are perceived to be content in your new relationship, they can attack you in some manner to make you obsessed about your peace being rocked by them.
As long as they are trying to do anything to you, they haven't moved on.
If I were you, I'd invite some office people to dinner with you and your new girlfriend. Keep inviting them, and eventually your new girlfriend may say that you are a wonderful guy. Often these situations don't work for narcissists because people find out the truth. Many go through cognitive dissonance, and then they feel guilty for having looked at you a certain way, and angry at themselves for falling for lies.
I have also learned an unfortunate lesson myself: that you practically have to turn your home into Fort Knox, with lots of security, when you have narcissists in your life.
When they aren't trying to disturb your peace, or making up stories about you, or playing the victim after they attack you, then they have moved on (but don't believe it until it has been years, not months). In the meantime, it's best to arm yourself for escalation. A lot of people go to domestic violence centers or police on how to deal with situations like this.
Also remember that narcissists are mostly all the same. Their traits are similar from one narcissist to the next. So maybe think of these people as traits (imagine a particular species) rather than as people you used to love and know.
I hadn't thought about doing a post on narcissistic obsessions. I have to think about how I'd write it. It might be good to write about dating tips to avoid narcissists in your life too. However, I'm also trying to get away from this subject, to focus on healing strategies and how trauma effects the body, brain and mind, and how to transform some of that to get to a better place in your overall health.
I hadn't thought about my home. I think I'll change the locks tonight.
DeleteGood idea.
DeleteAbusers and personality disordered bullies always lie and twist the truth - telling everyone who will listen that their victim is the real abuser/crazy/etc. They always ascribe to the child-like "I know you are but what am I" routine where they paint their targets black, so that no one will believe them. One way for flying monkeys (or people in general) to discern who the actual abuser is is to forget about what people SAY and look at the objective reality of both parties: is one of them withdrawn, isolated, shaken? That's the victim of ongoing abuse. Is the other party confident, having a successful career or otherwise getting along in their life as normal (having a good time socially etc)--that's the bully. The one who's life is unaffected by abuse will have a life that reflects that. Their words are just that-words, gossip. Are they energized by telling narratives about how crazy/bad/evil this person is? That's a sign that they aren't really the victim in this dynamic. That's the true bully. The person who is actually being bullied is probably too intimidated to tell anyone...and it they are brave enough to tell others, they are also clearly shaken, disturbed..and NOT excited by the telling of it. They also aren't likely to fake faux "concern" for their abuser. The abuser always slying works in that they are "concerned" for the person they are trying to paint as the unhinged aggressor. Don't look at their words; look at their lives. One will be in shambles. The other going on about their life just fine. That's how you tell who is who in an abusive situation. One of them has power, the other does not. People often mistake a traumatized person for being "crazy" because that is what the abuser is telling everyone, and most people are too involved in their own lives to bother looking beneath the surface...they want what's easy. Easier to stand with the one with the power, the social connections, the money, whatever it is...than to stand with an isolated traumatized victim. Easier to dismiss them as crazy and go along with the crowd, than to believe that their boss, buddy, relative is a liar and a terrible person. Most people are sheep going along with whatever person or narrative has the most power behind it. However, it is easy to see who the traumatized person is. It's obvious and right there on the surface for people with eyes to see - if they would only open them and be objective. Unfortunately, most people invest more in stories and social power groups rather than the obvious objective reality right under their noses. We tell each other stories, we let stories and narratives rule in our heads, and are blind to external realities that should be plainly obvious.
ReplyDeleteThank you for this comment. A psychologist once said, "Look for who is being called crazy, ostracized from the group or family, who is going to therapy to heal", and it's likely to be a victim of a narcissist.
DeleteMany domestic violence counselors do tell survivors of abuse to "break the silence" - that abusers count on victims not to say anything, or to protect themselves, which can actually help perpetrators escalate attacks. "Too scared to tell" is actually not a good thing, but I agree that in social circles, or in work circles, it's uncomfortable.
I do know a lot of scapegoats who share their stories with each other. Not all victims stay quiet (some eventually get sick of being the quiet-forever absorbent-to-attacks scapegoat and talk openly about it on Facebook, sometimes with their entire friends' list, or some particular ones, even survivors who are famous).
Any family scapegoat, any family member who is ostracized with some extreme exceptions, is the sign of a toxic family according to most psychologists.
Many domestic violence victims suffering from their partner attacking them, do go quiet for a long time. My own observations are that they just want their abusers to forget about them, to leave them alone, and to move on. But even there, some exceptions exist depending on the counseling.
But I do agree with you mostly.
Thank you for your thoughts.
As I consider this, of course there could be exceptions such as an abusive bpd who's life could be a wreck (these types can be genuinely traumatized for other reasons aka self-traumatized, perpetually traumatized), and of course a drug or alcohol addict can be abusive and have their life in shambles. I guess my description above was more specific to the narcissstic type of abuser. But it still holds true that if one party is claiming to be the victim while painting another person black and it just doesn't reflect in their life (no signs of trauma)...be suspect!
ReplyDeleteI agree. The signs of trauma are the biggest indicators of who is the true victim.
Delete