Most women wouldn't expect a man to be cynically assessing their "usefulness" on a first date but that's how a psychopath thinks. Psychopaths are ruthless human predators. The man across the restaurant table is calculating, "Does she have what I need?" What is he after? It could be anything. A sexual partner, money he hopes to live off, access to a particular group of friends or colleagues, a willingness to help him climb the career ladder...or it could be something more basic: to provide a cover of respectability that will blind others to his predatory nature. A psychopath seduces his target by love-bombing her. Once he has figured out the kind of man who will appeal to her, this shape-shifter turns himself into the man of her dreams. He will pursue her ardently and obsessively. And once he has won the woman's heart, he will manipulate the relationship so that he extracts as much as he can while giving as little as possible. When the psychopath has exhausted what psychologists call "narcissistic supply", his true nature will be revealed. He will become cold, cruel and abusive to his partner. He will clean out the bank accounts and abandon her. In his lifetime a psychopath leaves behind a trail of emotional and financial wreckage. But, as the world-famous security expert Gavin de Becker observes, while "we cannot change or eliminate all the dangerous people in the world, we can change our ability to deal with them." In A Girls Guide to Predators: The Games Psychopaths and Narcissists Play, readers get advice from criminal experts and leading psychologists on how to recognize a typical psychopath before he gets the chance to play his mind games. Dr. George K. Simon, author of the international bestseller In Sheep's Clothing: Understanding and Dealing with Manipulative People writes: "Clearly, concisely written, and packed with useful information, Alison Summers lays out in very understandable terms exactly what the unsuspecting soul needs to know about the predators and other unsavory sorts among us."
