The Psychopath: A True Story(6)
As a single mother with an optimistic outlook, most addictive for me was the promise of a better future for me and my one-year-old daughter Robyn. Will Jordan spent time at the beginning of the relationship finding out about my desires and goals, making sure to reflect those back to me, to show that being with him would far exceed my expectations. He encouraged me to think bigger and further outside my comfort zone, thereby putting me off balance whilst also encouraging me to believe that this new partner only had my best interests at heart. This all sounds delightful and indeed would have been had it not all been done to suck me under his control. It is a conscious and deliberate act on the part of a psychopath. ‘Love-bombing’ has nothing to do with love. It is a calculating, unemotional tactic designed to hook you in and keep you there. I was not being put on a pedestal, I was being glued to it.
Love-bombing doesn’t last forever though. Once the target is addicted to the relationship, the toxic partner will gradually switch to ‘gaslighting’ – a term that was coined after the 1944 film Gaslight, in which the husband purposefully makes his wife think she is going mad in order to hide his criminal activity. The person who had been affectionate and attentive now becomes controlling and little by little makes their partner question their own reality. Anyone is susceptible to gaslighting, and it’s a common technique of abusers, dictators, and cult leaders. Gaslighting is done slowly and involves brainwashing the victim to the point that they feel they are losing their mind.
Will Jordan did this from the very beginning – before I had even met him. When we started talking online he sent me long flowing emails about his past and about the person he was. We wrote back and forth and I told him my dreams and aspirations as well as other very personal things. We wrote three, four, five times a day and never ran out of things to say. It became intoxicating and even though I tried to keep myself grounded, I was being swept away by the romance of it. Then we agreed to talk on the phone for the first time. He asked for my number and I gave it to him, and he said he would call within half an hour. I waited for the phone to ring. As the time stretched on, I went through a kaleidoscope of emotions – nervous about talking to him for the first time, anticipating the potential relationship, then confusion as to why he hadn’t called. I got angry, then felt foolish thinking maybe I had misunderstood what he meant. I checked his email to see what he had said about calling, and checked mine in case I had given him the wrong number. It had all been crystal clear. The number had been correct and the time agreed. What’s more, he had been incredibly enthusiastic about calling. I emailed him to ask what had happened but there was nothing back – when he would normally respond almost immediately. I worried that he had had an accident, wondered whether it had all been a joke to him, and even if I had imagined it all!
The truth was he had set the whole thing up just so I would go through that array of emotions. It was gaslighting. When he got in touch two days later with an excuse about his work taking him away to Spain, I told him to get lost. Then the love-bombing started again and gradually I was sucked back in.
Even as I was learning all this, I was finding it hard to comprehend. Could I really have been in the clutches of a psychopath? My understanding of the condition was purely from cold-blooded murderers like Ted Bundy, Jeffrey Dahmer and John Wayne Gacy, or movies such as Silence of the Lambs. Surely such people were exceedingly rare.
Through my research I came across Dr Robert Hare, a Canadian psychologist known for his work in the field of criminal psychology and considered to be one of the world’s leading experts on psychopathy. I read his book Without Conscience: The Disturbing World of the Psychopaths Among Us, which contained this description:
Individuals with this personality disorder are fully aware of the consequences of their actions and know the difference between right and wrong, yet they are terrifyingly self-centered, remorseless, and unable to care about the feelings of others. Perhaps most frightening, they often seem completely normal to unsuspecting targets – and they do not always ply their trade by killing.
I started to read everything I could about psychopaths and the more I read, the more familiar the diagnosis became, but I still couldn’t accept that the man who had stroked my hair so tenderly and gazed into my eyes as he declared his undying devotion could indeed be so cold. This was the father of my two youngest children, the man I had believed to be my soulmate, my lover, my friend and my husband. It was a huge shift to accept that none of it had been real.
Then I discovered Dr Hare’s ‘Psychopathy Checklist – Revised’ (PCL-R) – a test that is recognised worldwide, and used in psychiatric facilities to define whether or not someone is indeed a ‘psychopath’. It is also used to determine predicted risk for criminal reoffending and probability of rehabilitation. It was the piece of information that changed everything for me.
Dr Hare initially developed the test in the 1970s developing previous research work done by Hervey Cleckley (author of The Mask of Sanity) in the 1940s.
The PCL-R test is a psychological assessment tool and should only really be administered by a qualified professional clinician under scientifically controlled and licensed standardised conditions. However, reading through the test was like looking through a checklist of the last six years of my life and another piece of the puzzle snapped resoundingly into place.
THE PSYCHOPATH TEST
The questions in the PCL-R are scored on a three-point structure: either as 0 (for not at all), 1 (for somewhat) and 2 (for definitely). A maximum score of 40 is possible from the 20 statements. Anything above 25 in the UK and 30 in the USA classes the person tested as a ‘psychopath’ (although this benchmark changes depending on the source). Anyone getting towards 40 would be classed as ‘highly psychopathic’; this is quite rare as they have to show all of the main qualities across 20 areas of functioning. Had I asked any of these questions about Will Jordan when I first met him he would have got zero points because I didn’t know the truth. But by now, I had a much better understanding of the bigger picture, so I went through the checklist point by point and this is what I found.