When the Narcissist’s New Wife Acts as a Flying Monkey with Your Kids – A fellow survivor wrote to me asking how she could support her kids when her narcissistic ex-husband’s new wife is acting as his flying monkey.
According to her, this narcissist has put his new source of narcissistic supply in place as his mouthpiece and the kids feel like they are being reinjured as a result.
In this video, I’ll explain exactly what this mother can do to support her kids in this situation.
Video Transcript:
What do you do when you get divorced from a narcissist and you still have children together and then the narcissist gets remarried and their new spouse becomes a flying monkey. How do you deal with that?
Well, that’s exactly what we’re talking about today at QueenBeeing.com.
So let’s get started (Closed captioning provided by Athena Moberg
CPTSDfoundation.org)
My name is Angie Atkinson and this is toxic relationship rehab where I help you to discover, understand and overcome narcissistic abuse in toxic relationships. If that sounds good to you, hit that subscribe button and let’s get going.
So today we’re talking about a question from a viewer and the question she asked is regarding narcissists new spouses, new sources of narcissistic supply and children.
Her question reads: My ex and the father of my children has remarried quickly…of course. His new wife seems to be a flying monkey. I haven’t seen any narcissistic abuse coach address the new wife as a flying monkey. She seems to be his mouthpiece for our children. The children are all young adults mostly and they seem like they understand, but they still feel like she is reinjuring them.
Well, let’s talk about it. Chances are that you’re already aware of the fact that dealing with a narcissist parent in any
capacity puts a child at serious risk for long-term emotional and psychological trauma obviously, the more you can do to support them, in this case, the better, but there are a few things you have to remember first.
Number 1; you can’t make this about something you’ve done wrong. You can’t blame yourself for this situation. So if you are struggling with feelings of self-blame or regret or “I’m sorry that I’ve made that person my children’s father” or whatever it is, recognize that we all feel that way once we recognize what we’re going through.
It’s not just you, but you also have to recognize that it’s not your fault. You didn’t sign up to be with a narcissist and chances are you didn’t recognize it until it was far too late. The fact of the matter is narcissists are really good at sucking people in during love bombing, which we also call idealization. Narcissists very often hide their true nature and some of them hide it long enough that we end up having children with them.
Some of them come out with it sooner, but we don’t recognize it because maybe we grew up in a toxic home or there’s also the fact that this type of abuse is incredibly subtle, hard to detect sometimes, especially because very often the narcissist blames you or the source of narcissistic supply for the problem.
Anyway, whatever the reason was that you chose to get involved with this person, now you know better and that is good, but if you sit around and you stress yourself out and you waste your energy wishing you hadn’t done this or worrying about the effects on your kids, this is only gonna make things worse for both you and your kids in this case.
You said most of your kids are young adults, which is positive because now you can explain things to them in a really specific way, in fact you could even teach them about narcissism and dealing with the flying Monkey stepmother probably is more common than we would like to admit, same for a flying monkey stepfather if we’re being honest, but how do you support your kids in this situation?
What do you do to make sure that they don’t get further damaged by the new stepparent? I think the most important thing you can do here is to make sure that you personally validate your children as often as you can when it’s appropriate to do that and of course respect them and their personal space and their own needs and protect them where you can.
We can’t change the fact that their other parent is a narcissist and unfortunately, that’s something that your kids will have to come to term with, but what we can do is we can help your kids break the cycle, so that when they get to the place where they’re having children, they get into relationships things like that, we can help to educate them so that they don’t choose the wrong partners and they don’t end up subjecting their own kids to what they’ve gone through.
And you can do a lot to help make it better for your kids. You can help them develop coping skills. Like I said before validating their feelings is a huge part of all of this. A narcissistic parent, by nature, invalidates their children, their spouse, anyone that’s in their inner circle. This may include the flying monkey stepparent, but that’s not your concern here. Validating their feelings will allow them to recognize, number one; I’m not crazy. Number two, my feelings are real and my feelings are valid.
I know growing up that one of the biggest things I struggled with was feeling like my feelings weren’t real and they weren’t valid and I didn’t matter. If you’re familiar with the typical toxic family structure, the child who tends to be the scapegoat child is the one that you really have to pay attention to here.
This is the child that is constantly targeted by the narcissist and to validate the scapegoat child could change their lives so quickly for the better.
You need to let them know that it’s okay to be angry and that their feelings are justified, they have a right to be angry and that they don’t deserve what
has been happening to them and that they deserve to be loved and cherished like everyone else. Now, something a lot of people won’t say
to you is also to keep your eye on that golden child and the lost child.
Sure, the golden child may have had certain validation from the parent, but it’s almost never about the child, it’s almost always about how the parent sees him or herself reflecting on the child and the lost child, that’s the one you really need to watch out for.
The lost child, just like the scapegoat may feel very invalidated and very upset and very angry. Their feelings are real and valid and important. They need to feel heard. Whoever your kids are, however they fell into the toxic family structure, each of them needs validation of their feelings, each of them needs to know that their feelings are real, they’re allowed to have them and that they are justified.
A lot of times, we might find ourselves wanting to deny what happened or pretend it didn’t happen or pretend it wasn’t as bad as it was, because we feel like we’re protecting ourselves or we’re protecting our kids, but in reality that’s the opposite of what we need to do as parents of a child who has a
narcissistic parent and the same goes for the flying monkey. You want to help your kids not blame themselves. You want to help them understand that this is not their fault.
We know that narcissists love to blame other people for everything and they don’t take any responsibility on their own, so if a narcissist, there’s a temper tantrum or a fit or has a lot of complaints to say, they’ll usually claim that the problem
is you, you made them do that somehow, you made them have all the complaints or you made them have a problem with you and the same goes for your kids.
Narcissists need to believe that they’re above everyone else, they’re too good for that stuff. See, they have to think that they’re above it because they need to like cover themselves or protect themselves from seeing the actual truth about themselves. In reality, they feel inferior, blaming other people including and especially sometimes the scapegoated child/adult or otherwise.
Well, it’s like second nature for the narcissist, something they literally almost need to do. So, how do you help your kids? So helping them understand the truth and helping them understand what they’ve gone through, that the blame is not right, that it’s not acceptable, it’s unfounded, it isn’t real. it’s not their fault. Well, that’s gonna go a long way for the kids.
It’s gonna really take a burden off their shoulders if you will. So, depending on the age of your kids, I know in your case you said they were young adults,
like I said, you can tell them everything. For kids of different ages, just tell them what you can tell them given their age and intellectual ability to understand without demonizing the other parent.
Tell them the facts not the feelings and teach them how to deal with what happens from that point, as much as you can, teach them how to gray rock.
When it comes to the flying monkey stepparent, we have a whole other ball of wax here, but bottom line as long as your children are understanding – Hey, this isn’t acceptable. Hey, this person is also a victim to your narcissistic parent. Hey, this person is doing your father’s bidding, whatever it is,
they need to understand it from a logical perspective. From an emotional perspective, they have to understand their parent is incapable of validating them.
So this leads you to help them feel validated as we discussed. As parents, one of the most important things we can do for our kids is to teach them resilience, to teach them that they are deserving and worthy of love, to show them all of these things, to help them learn how to stand on their own two feet to get through life’s hardest parts.
So you can model this for them personally by of course being resilient in your own life and by giving them the unconditional love of which the narcissist is incapable and of course, then you can also show them through your own actions, through your own behavior and the way you live your life
what it means to have empathy for other people and how a person lives when they have empathy, how they behave toward other people.
You of course always want to encourage them and lift them up as much as you can for anything they’re doing in their life that’s right and healthy and good, but don’t give fake compliments. Don’t say, oh I’m so proud of you for, you know losing your job or something like that, say instead if they lost their job;
I’m so excited and proud of you that you’re looking for a new job already, it’s just been ten hours and there you are putting your resume together. So essentially it kind of supports their understanding of what competence is and it supports their ability to feel competent and to actually be competent, so you’re not lying to them, you’re not telling them – Oh, you’re amazing when they’re not.
You saying, hey, specifically I’m proud of you for this thing that you’re doing and I want to encourage you to keep doing that or hey, it’s really cool that you’re making the choice to stop doing this thing, and I want to encourage you to stay on that path, whatever that is.
And of course, you want to reinforce their ability to feel self-confident as much as you can and teach them to listen to themselves, listen to their own instincts, listen to what it is they feel when they’re around someone, because that lesson, that ability to understand how you feel when you’re around another person, that’s really the key to figuring out who’s toxic and who’s not in your life.
If you really think about it, if you’re spending time with someone and you don’t ever feel comfortable around that person, you don’t ever kind of let your guard down and feel relaxed around that person, that person probably isn’t good for your life, whether you want to call them toxic or you want to call them
a narcissist or whatever you want to call them, if someone makes you feel yucky every time you spend time with them, that’s a sign that person probably doesn’t belong in your everyday life.
The last thing I would say is that you might notice that your children tend to take out their anger on you sometimes or at least vent their anger to you and you might feel frustrated and overwhelmed by this, especially if it’s still kind of a new, painful situation for you, in which case I would say make a point of not taking it personally. It’s hard to do it sometimes, but recognize what your children are saying, even if you can’t actually give them an answer, simply
validate them; Oh honey, I so understand how that feels. I wish there was something I could do to help you, but here’s a way that you can deal, you know, teach them the gray rock method, don’t show them your emotions, don’t give them your emotions.
They can refuse to speak to the stepmother if they want to, but that’s only going to cause the father to pull further away in this case and if that’s the case, in my opinion, so be it. If it’s a problem for your children and your children gonna have to make some choices, they’re gonna have to make the choice to either continue the relationship and a modified way or to let go of the relationship because it’s unhealthy for them. I hope that makes sense.
I’m gonna suggest to you that you watch this video right here to help you kind of get your head around what the kids are dealing with a little better and some other ways that you can support children of a narcissistic parent/adult or otherwise, take a look at that.
Additional Resources for You:
- Here’s a relationship advice video that explains flying monkeys and what that means:
- This video teaches about what “gray rock” means and how to use it safely.
- Here’s a playlist on toxic families and toxic family structure that could be helpful for you.
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Angela Atkinson is a certified trauma counselor and the author of more than 20 books on narcissism, narcissistic abuse recovery, and related topics. A recognized expert on narcissism and narcissistic personality disorder who has studied and written extensively on narcissistic personality disorder and narcissistic abuse in toxic relationships since 2006, she has a popular narcissistic abuse recovery YouTube channel. Atkinson was inspired to begin her work as a result of having survived toxic relationships of her own.
Atkinson offers trauma-informed narcissistic abuse recovery coaching and has certifications in trauma counseling, life coaching, level 2 therapeutic model, CBT coaching, integrative wellness coaching, and NLP. She is a certified trauma support coach and certified family trauma professional. She also has a professional PTSD counseling certification. Her mission is to help those who have experienced the emotional and mental devastation that comes with narcissistic abuse in these incredibly toxic relationships to (re)discover their true selves, stop the gaslighting and manipulation, and move forward into their genuine desires – into a life that is exactly what they choose for themselves.
Along with her solution-focused life coaching experience, Atkinson’s previous career in journalism and research helps her to offer both accurate and understandable information for survivors of abuse in a simple-to-understand way that helps to increase awareness in the narcissistic abuse recovery community. Atkinson founded QueenBeeing.com Narcissistic Abuse Recovery Support, the SPANily Narcissistic Abuse Recovery Support Groups and the Life Makeover Academy.
She offers individual and group coaching for victims and survivors of narcissistic abuse at NarcissisticAbuseRecovery.Online.
