This is Susan Montgomery’s true story of trauma, abuse, an abduction, an affair and suicide. It is also a love story.
At age eleven, she suffered sexual abuse at the hands of her father. With virtually no resources available, she buried the memory, which seemed moderately successful in that she finished college, as been married to her childhood sweetheart for over 60 years, and had three wonderful children.
But as a young adult, her behavior began exhibiting self-destructive tendencies, the first being a life-threatening loss of weigh as an anorexic. If queried, she would have been unable to explain this or her other aberrant behaviors.
Devastated by the suicide of her 16-year old son, she sought psychotherapy, where she began to better understand the underpinnings of her bizarre behavior.
This quest became the basis of Demons Hidden Within. A memoir written as an academic of her life, Susan Montgomery cites 85 references from psychological literature to clearly link her strange behavior to the underlying but unrecognized effect of sexual abuse.