When A Narcissist Turns Others Against You

When a narcissist turns others against you, you'll need to know how to handle those flying monkeys. In this episode, Lisa A. Romano gives you her best tips for how to handle this rough patch with family, friends or colleagues.

Transcript

Welcome to the Breakdown to Breakthrough Podcast.

My name is Lisa A.

Romano.

I am a life coach,

Bestselling author,

YouTube vlogger,

Meditation teacher,

And expert in the field of codependency and narcissistic abuse.

I am a believer in the power of an organized mind.

My aim is to help people learn what it means to live above the veil of consciousness rather than living a reactive life.

May your heart feel blessed,

Your mind feel expanded,

And your spirit find hope as you spend time with me here at the Breakdown to Breakthrough Podcast.

Today we're going to be talking about what you can do when a narcissist begins to turn the people you love against you.

When we're thinking about narcissists,

We have to understand that a narcissist's agenda is to win.

That is supreme when it comes to a narcissist,

Right?

So it doesn't matter what a narcissist has to do to win,

They're going to do it.

Healthy people have a line that they don't cross,

But when it comes to a narcissist,

Any idea that they might be losing control over a target causes them great distress.

And what they need to do quickly is to regain the power and control over losing control over their target.

In my situation,

When I was going through my divorce,

I found myself really struggling with my inability to protect myself and to share my inner reality with the people that I love the most.

And my ex-husband would do and say things that I just wouldn't do,

Like make up stories that were not real.

And when I found myself realizing that there were stories out there,

That my family was even listening to these stories,

I was absolutely devastated.

I felt abandoned.

I felt betrayed.

I felt disillusioned.

I felt alone.

I felt like I was literally swimming in the middle of an ocean without a boat,

Without an oar,

Without a life jacket.

I just couldn't believe the feelings that I was feeling.

And so when you're dealing with someone with high narcissistic traits,

It's really important that you recognize that their agenda is to win.

And unfortunately,

Their agenda is to win by making sure that you lose.

So what will hurt you?

Your reputation will hurt you.

Your relationship with your children.

If a narcissist is able to get in the middle of that,

That will hurt you.

What will hurt you?

Not being able to support yourself.

That will hurt you.

What will hurt you,

Not having a good relationship with your best friend,

Not having the ability to find another job,

Not having a car,

Not having the financial means to move ahead.

When you are leaving a narcissist,

You have to remember that doing so causes them to feel out of control.

And when a narcissist can't control you,

Then their agenda is to control how at least other people see you,

How other people perceive you,

How other people treat you.

They're going to try to control whatever they can that's outside of you.

So does that mean that they will go to just about any length to make sure that your life is uncomfortable?

Yes.

Does that mean that they will lie to your children about you?

Yes.

Does that mean that they will make up stories to your family about you?

Yes.

You may have heard me tell you the story that one day during an argument when my ex-husband and I were first separated,

He came back into the house and he told me he wasn't going to pay the mortgage anymore.

And I had no access to funds at that point.

And the supplies in the house,

They were running low in terms of food because he took control over all the money.

And he left the house that day and he called my mom and he told her that I had just threatened to commit suicide and that never happened.

He also claimed that I said things about other family members that I never said.

And so what was happening was the smear campaign was happening.

Now I would never tell you that I was the perfect wife because I wasn't.

And I would never tell you that I didn't have some sloppy moments during my separation and my divorce because that's just not the truth.

The truth is it was sloppy.

It was over emotional.

It was a mess and I made plenty of mistakes.

But I will also tell you that I never lied about my ex-husband and I never made up stories because I wanted to win.

All I wanted to do was extricate myself from the marriage.

I wanted to get loose from the marriage.

When we got divorced,

I separated the photo albums in half.

I gave him half the plates,

Half the forks,

Half the knives.

But it took me a long time to recognize that he was not playing by the same rules.

And it was overwhelming.

It was mind bending.

It filled me with grief when I realized that there was a line that was being crossed,

That lies are being told,

That stories were being exaggerated,

Situations were being manipulated and there wasn't a doggone thing that I could do about it.

So I would say to anybody who's experiencing this,

If you are going through a narcissistic breakup and you are having someone or a friend or friendship that turning people against you,

A mother-in-law is turning people against you or someone at work is turning people against you,

You have to first recognize the feelings that it feels when this happens because they are devastating.

The reasons it's important to take basically an inventory of the grief that this is causing is because what you don't acknowledge is going to persist.

You might be reactive to the disillusionment and you don't want that.

You might go into fear and you don't want that.

You might go into defending yourself and you don't want that.

You might go right into having an argument and finding the person who said what you heard they said.

You might want to hunt the flying monkey down.

You might want to stand in the street or maybe even get an airplane and ride across the sky.

That is not true.

But I am telling you as someone who has lived through it,

It's not going to work and it is the wrong use of your energy.

Your energy will be drained trying to control things that you absolutely cannot control.

I think it's important that you,

Number one,

You acknowledge that this is going to be tough.

Do not be disillusioned.

Do not think that this is going to be easy.

Do not expect that you will not deal with flying monkeys.

They will come into your life.

They will call you.

They will act like they are your friends.

They will call you and see how you are doing.

They will invite you to lunch.

They will try to get information out of you and they will go back to the narcissist.

How many narcissists act like they're concerned for you?

They send people to talk to you and they tell the flying monkey,

I'm really concerned about her or I'm really worried about him.

The flying monkey calls you up or texts you,

Invites you to lunch and is asking all of these questions,

These intrusive questions about you and you think that they really care.

Maybe you open up and you share something about your separation that you would have never shared with this person had you known they were flying monkey.

And then this person goes back and tells the narcissist and then the narcissist texts you the next day and tells you,

Oh,

I heard about this and I heard about that.

You are completely betrayed by the flying monkey.

That hurts.

That is a terrible situation to be in.

I've experienced it.

I've lived through it and it's not fun.

And I can tell you that in the moment I wanted to react and there were times that I did react like,

How could you believe this person?

How could you believe that?

Why aren't you believing me?

I'm your sister.

I'm your daughter.

What is wrong with you?

I reacted.

I lost myself.

And so I think it's important that we all recognize that this hurts.

And the second thing that I want you to think about is when this happens,

Try to take a fair inventory of who has suddenly come out of the woodwork.

Who are the people that you can trust?

Make sure that you know who you can trust and who you can't trust.

In my situation,

I had to go no contact with my family for about a year because I realized that they were all flying monkeys.

And I realized there was absolutely no way that I was going to turn this around.

And I also needed every ounce of energy that I could muster to get out of bed in the morning.

The depression was real.

Healing codependency knocked the air out of me.

It was so hard.

And in addition,

I was a love addict.

I feared being alone.

I had this toxic loneliness.

I hated it.

And it felt like my skin was being ripped off.

And I had three kids to take care of.

And I knew that I was sick.

I was emotionally and spiritually sick.

And so I needed to go no contact with my family because it was too exhausting to stand in their company and know that they didn't believe me and to know they were part of this flying monkey smear campaign and to know that they thought that they were doing me a favor.

They believed they were drinking the Kool-Aid and they didn't believe me.

They believed the other side.

And it was everything that I could do to just get up in the morning,

Breathe and take care of my kids.

It was that bad.

But when you're being talked about in such a negative way,

This picture is being painted of you.

And when the person that is offering this painting is so believable and so charismatic and so manipulative,

There's nothing that you can do to change what people believe about you.

So I say the third thing is do not defend yourself.

Do not get into confrontations and conflicts with people who do not believe you.

Do not get into conflicts and confrontations with people who don't care to listen to your side of things.

Do not get into conflicts or confrontations with people who are there just to pick up information and relay it back to someone who is a narcissist or has high narcissistic traits.

Do not defend yourself.

The next thing that you want to do is you want to make sure you're doing everything to not engage with the person who is in,

Who has created the smear campaign,

Who is turning people against you.

You want to make sure you're not engaging.

That can be really hard.

In my situation,

Our kids had sports.

You know,

I could not keep him from attending the sports until I got the order of protection,

But I had to spend time with him and it was really hard to be in his presence.

But I learned to shut the shut the.

I learned to sit there on the blanket watching my kids play flag football and say nothing to make no eye contact,

To ask no questions,

To not respond to body movements.

It was really hard.

I got used to not engaging with terrible text messages and the words that would dribble out of his mouth when I dropped the children off for visitation.

I had to develop this ability to disengage and to not talk back and to not give my power away.

You know,

When you're not used to this type of experience,

It can feel like you are giving up.

You feel like the narcissist is winning when you don't defend yourself.

And I'm here to tell you that you win when you don't defend yourself.

It is so powerful to hold onto your energy because what a narcissist needs to do is win and winning at all costs.

So seeing you unravel,

Seeing you get angry,

That fuels them.

Actually just getting the reaction out of you.

Right.

Getting the reaction out of other people and getting information back from other people,

Knowing that they are able to create a rift between you and your best friend.

All of this is a source of narcissistic supply.

I've dealt with clients whose mothers and mother-in-laws have called social services and claimed that the daughter or the daughter-in-law who has decided to go no contact was hurting the children.

It was all a lie.

It was all part of a smear campaign.

It was to turn people against her.

It was to punish her and to be vindictive because she wasn't acting the way the mother or the mother-in-law wanted her to act.

Now this is a big issue when it comes to narcissism because narcissists just don't accept that you're a 3D autonomous human being and you have a right to say no.

Right.

So a narcissist wants to control what they can't control.

And it is human to struggle when you are in a relationship with someone and they are not behaving the way you'd want them to.

But healthy people ultimately surrender and accept what they can't control.

It's not an overnight process to accept that your child isn't doing what you want them to do.

They aren't in the career you wanted them to have.

But a narcissistic parent,

For instance,

Is going to and can launch a smear campaign against the child that refuses to be an engineer and who instead wants to go into music.

So now the child's own mother,

Own father can launch a complete smear campaign against their own child because the child doesn't want to do what the mother wants that child to do.

The mother can have a cousin,

A sibling,

An aunt,

An uncle become a flying monkey and now actually go to this child and try to get information out of them to relay it back to the narcissistic parent that the child may have decided to go no contact with.

This is such a difficult situation when it is your own family.

So let's say the narcissist is your own family.

You have to accept that you cannot control.

That's the next thing that you have to do.

You have to look at this situation realistically and logically and through the lens of rationality.

In other words,

I have to be rational about what I'm perceiving.

I can't control my mother's reality.

I can't control what she wants from me.

I cannot control my mother's perception of me.

I can't control what mom says to Aunt Minnie and Uncle Joe.

I cannot control what comes out of this woman's mouth.

I cannot control this idea that my mother wants to live vicariously through me and that she sees me as an extension of herself and she sees in me that I owe her for giving birth to me even though I didn't knock on her womb and say,

I'd like to be born now,

Please.

Narcissistic mothers,

They have this attitude and so do narcissistic dads.

Their kids owe them.

It's like you owe them because they did what they did,

Conceived you,

And now you owe them.

No you don't.

If you're living under their roof,

You've got to abide by their laws.

They do.

Otherwise you've got to find a way to support yourself and move out.

That's the only way it's going to work in that situation.

Unfortunately,

When you have a narcissistic mother and you're young,

You don't have many choices.

That's a very sad thing.

But when you're in an adult situation and you have a narcissistic mother who is now turning flying monkeys,

Turning family members into flying monkeys,

It's really important that you recognize what you can control versus what you can't control.

In life,

That is one of the lessons we all have to walk away with because until we recognize where we're losing our power,

Where our ego is struggling,

None of us like it when the tribe turns against us.

It's not natural.

It is so horrible when your tribe turns against you because there's a narcissistic leader or a grandiose narcissist who has methodically turned your tribe against you,

Your family members against you because you refuse to be controlled by the narcissist.

It's so important that you realize that when it comes to a relationship,

It's like a chess game and a narcissist has to win and everybody else in the narcissist world,

They're pawns.

These are the most toxic,

Unhealthy relationships.

That's why so many of us,

If you're a target of narcissism,

In your relationship,

You're the one who hires a life coach or you're the one who's reading all the self-help books.

You're the one who's on YouTube and listening to podcasts about relationships and how to communicate.

Right?

It's only when you hear,

I think this person might be a narcissist,

That your ears perk up and you go,

Narcissist?

And you start to hear about a lack of empathy,

A sense of entitlement,

Grandiosity,

The need to dominate,

They're always right,

Lack of accountability,

The need to put you down,

The need to have you subjugate your feelings for their feelings.

It's only when you hear the word,

Oh,

Narcissist,

Baby,

That's what's wrong in my reality.

And then you hear a keyword like smear campaign,

Or you hear keywords like flying monkey.

Then the pieces of the puzzle start to come together.

You can't get out of a toxic relationship until you recognize that it's a toxic relationship.

Would you swim in a pool that you knew was toxic?

No,

But you might jump head first into a 11 foot pool if you thought that the pool was safe and you might swim in this pool continuously day after day and year after year until the moment you realized the pool was toxic.

And that's what happens with so many of us because typically with the narcissistic relationship,

It starts off great.

You might have some uneasy feeling,

But the narcissist is so attuned to you and so clever about manipulating your perception of them that those doubts fade away.

You develop a cognitive bias that this person is awesome.

You believe that this person is amazing.

And when you discover that there's conflicting information or data that goes against this,

I think this person's great,

You deal with confirmation bias.

So just emotionally,

Psychologically,

You're automatically squashing the data or the information that is in conflict to this perception that you have of this narcissist who has manipulated your perception of them.

And now you think that they're amazing.

And in time,

Anything that goes wrong,

You're going to believe it's your fault.

And over time,

What a narcissist will do will triangulate people against you.

Even if there's nothing wrong in your relationship,

Because a narcissist is hedging their bets.

A narcissist needs to get out ahead of the relationship.

If and when it sours,

They have an insurance policy.

Triangulation is that insurance policy.

So a narcissist steps out of the experience and begins to talk poorly about you to your coworkers,

To your mother,

To your father,

To your sister,

To your brother,

To the PTA moms.

A narcissist will talk to your children's teachers about you and will come off like,

I care so much about him and I care so much about her.

And if this person isn't trained in narcissism,

They might not realize that they're being manipulated,

That their perception against you or their target is being manipulated.

So they're hedging their bets.

So now when and if you decide to share how you feel with a member of your family or with your mutual friends,

They have already set the stage.

So they've already broken the stage and now the stage is broken.

It's flimsy.

You don't have a stage to stand on because they've already infested it with termites through a triangulation.

So now when you go to your mother,

You go,

Oh my,

I'm struggling with my relationship with my wife.

Your mother immediately starts thinking about what's been said by your spouse about you.

You haven't been acting right.

You haven't been eating right.

You're not getting enough sleep.

You've been irritable.

You've been really snappy.

Your spouse thinks maybe you're having an affair.

Maybe you had a relationship at that class reunion with an old fling from back in the day.

All of these doubts are being placed inside your mother's head.

So when you go and you share honestly about how you feel about your relationship,

You've already been sabotaged.

When you discover that a narcissist has been using triangulation and oftentimes you find out too late that the narcissist has been going behind our back,

Talking to our friends and family and coworkers,

Sometimes it's too late.

You're going to feel like you want to implode and collapse and fall apart.

And that's a very natural feeling.

But it's really important that you prepare yourself because there are going to be a lot of people that you need to go no contact with perhaps or go gray rock with or just remember sha-ti-sha-ti,

Say nothing around certain people.

Because it's going to be important for you to save your sanity and for you to hold onto your energy because all of these people now are just want to leak your.

.

.

They want to leech your energy out of you.

They have been convinced by the narcissist that you're the one that's wrong and you don't want to take your amazing mojo spiritual energy and waste it trying to convince people that they're wrong in their perception about you.

A quick story,

When I was going through a really tough time in my marriage or my separation and I was really for many years,

My attention was trying to convince my ex-husband that we were sick and that we needed therapy.

And I heard over and over and over again,

I don't,

I'm not unhappy.

You're the one that's unhappy.

You're the one that's crazy.

You are the one who needs therapy.

It took me years to understand that when you're in a codependent narcissistic relationship,

It's two people who worry about one person.

So of course he was happy.

His meals were made,

His bed was made,

His socks were clean,

Food in the refrigerator,

His shaving cream was always in the bathroom.

The kids were always taken care of.

I was giving them the baths.

I was taking them to school back and forth and doing their homework with them,

Doing parent-teacher stuff.

Of course,

What did.

.

.

Taking care of our business,

What did he have to worry about?

And he wasn't really worried about us having an emotional commitment.

It was a very,

You know,

It felt very contractual,

Our relationship,

But I was the one that wanted a deeper emotional and spiritual connection.

And so when our marriage really began to dissolve,

I was losing it.

I was,

I was at a loss and I wanted my family there and they were not there.

And it was so terrible that made everything worse.

And it took me a while to recognize what was going on,

That he was turning people against me.

And the love that I loved,

It was exasperating.

And this one fateful day,

He had lunch with my brother and he said something so horrible to my brother that absolutely broke me.

And I remember panicking because I was so afraid that my brother was going to repeat what was said to him to my father.

My father just passed away actually from COVID two days ago,

As a matter of fact.

It's funny I bring him up in this video.

But I was so afraid that I was going,

That he was going to tell my father,

My brother was going to tell my father what my ex said to him,

That I began to lose it.

I was shaking.

I was terrified.

I went into complete panic mode and I reached for the phone to call my therapist.

And I had this moment like,

What am I going to tell him?

Essentially this is a lie.

And my therapist is going to say,

Lisa,

This is a lie.

And what would I do then?

And so I never made the phone call.

And I remember slithering to my kitchen floor and I was heaving.

I was crying so much.

The pain was so intense.

And I don't know if I fell asleep or if I passed out.

I don't know.

My anxiety was through the roof.

But I had this vision,

If you will,

And my perception and my understanding of God,

I felt like I was looking up at my understanding of God and it was shaking his head.

And he said to me,

You know you didn't say it and I know you didn't say it.

And that's all that matters.

What are you going to do?

Are you going to spend your life knocking on every door in this community and say,

That's not what happened.

That's not true.

And I remember sitting up on my kitchen floor like a rag doll.

And that is when I think it was a very profound moment for me for sure.

But I think that is the moment that I realized I had a choice to make in life.

And as long as I focused on things I couldn't control,

I was going to be a train wreck.

I was going to be an absolute basket case.

And I was going to suffer.

But if I could somehow teach myself to release my egoic attachments to things in the 3D world I could not control,

My life had to improve.

Because it meant I was going to care less and less and less about what people thought.

I was going to care less and less and less about approval.

I was going to care less and less and less about trying to be loved by people who found it difficult to love me.

And that was the lesson I took away from that.

So if you are someone who is dealing with a narcissist who is turning your family against you,

Your friends against you,

And other people against you,

My heart goes out to you.

Lived it,

Done that,

Lived through it.

And I can tell you that when you develop these life skills,

When you stop defending yourself,

When you focus on what you can control versus what you can't control,

When you allow the reality of the situation to hit you,

When you identify who you can trust and who you can't trust,

When you go no contact or gray rock or you just stop talking to people,

When you develop these life skills,

Your life must improve because you stop leaking energy and you stop giving the narcissist what they want,

Which is your energy.

That is the only way to win with a narcissist in this situation.

Reviews

Just what I needed to hear right now. Thank you ❤️🙏

Dear Lisa, I am most grateful, every day 🙏🦋

That was amazing. So Helpful during my exact experience in life right now. Thank you. Thank you

You're the best. Thank you. Looking for a program about an ex husband turning the 8-9 year old daughter against her mom. The daughter has him wrapped around her finger.

Thank you Lisa. You’ve helped spare me from another dip in the toxic pool.

Thank you so much for this talk. I really needed to hear this today. Everything rings true and your words validate the choices I have made!