About Susan Bilheimer
| Author & lecturer on women’s midlife issues and sexual pain |  |
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In 2002, Susan developed the website www.PerimenopauseSupport.com to give women a central location to learn about the symptoms and changes that happen in their bodies up to fifteen years before menopause. Through her own personal difficulties, frustrations, and hard-won solutions as she went through perimenopause, Susan Bilheimer became an expert in issues surrounding women in midlife, and realized the vital need to provide a place for other women to find information, answers and support, so that they don’t have to stumble around in the dark as she did … feeling alone and crazy in their suffering.
One of the symptoms that worsened over time was chronic sexual pain. Over the past five years, Susan’s experience with painful sex strained her marriage and devastated her self-worth. Little to no help was available. Determined to find answers, she engaged in extensive research and sought help from six doctors. Her growing frustration with a dismissive, disinterested medical community combined with the stunning realization that there were legions of women who were suffering as she was, fueled her passion to write about these issues to help other women who suffer. Further, the supportive efforts of her husband to work with her to maintain intimacy despite the pain, led to the specific focus of her work – how women’s pain during sex impacts relationships.
Susan began the Secret Suffering project by developing an online survey and interviewing women and their partners (which ended up primarily with men) on this subject. She quickly discovered there were hundreds of like-minded women who were pleading for a public forum to address these issues and begging for the medical community to hear them and take their suffering seriously. She has received well over a dozen letters thanking her for the work she is doing on this subject.
Susan Bilheimer has been a freelance writer and author for over seventeen years. Her articles and personality profiles have appeared in such regional and national magazines as Lehigh Valley magazine, Boca Life magazine, AMI Auto World, and Sh’Ma. For over six years, she wrote “That’s Life,” a weekly column for East Penn Publishing’s series of newspapers in PA, winning awards from the PA Press Club, an affiliate of the National Federation of Press Women.
Susan is also an expert in technical writing and self-publishing. Her successful e book, “How to Become a Technical Writer,” generated feature interviews in such newspapers as the Dallas Morning News and Palm Beach Post newspapers. Wired Magazine Online and Writer’s Digest Publishing Success magazine have interviewed Susan for her expertise in self-publishing.
Currently, Susan works with Advanced Public Safety, Inc. as the sole technical writer responding to government Requests for Proposals for the company. In addition, she maintains a resource site for women in perimenopause and has written a meditation book for women in midlife. Susan was interviewed in the Sun-Sentinel newspaper and appeared on the local Fox station’s “Eye on South Florida” program for her expertise on perimenopause and meditation.
It is Susan’s heartfelt desire that Secret Suffering, both the website and the book, will provide hope and support to women who suffer, and encourage the medical community to take notice and help the millions of women who suffer from chronic sexual pain.
Susan lives in Boca Raton with her husband Jay, teenage son Sam, and her youngest, Sidney, the cocker spaniel.