‘I realized I was abusing my husband, repeating what I endured as a child’

Writing under the pseudonym Zohara, a 43-year-old family lawyer and mediator describes how childhood violence resurfaced in her marriage, the moment she saw her daughters’ fear and the treatment that helped her begin breaking the cycle“I had a terrible fight with Alon during a period when we were arguing almost every day. I paced around the house in a frenzy, moving toward him and away from him, never stopping screaming or hurling cruel and poisonous words at him, in front of the girls. I saw the fear in my daughters’ eyes when they looked at me. I frightened them. It broke my heart. The house was not a safe place. Because of me.“I called the domestic violence prevention center. I knew that, more than anything, my story was about violence, and this time I decided not to run from it.”Those words appear in “Story Time,” a new memoir by Zohara, the pseudonym of a 43-year-old family lawyer and mediator, wife and mother of three, who wanted to show what invisible violence looks like.Wanted to show what invisible violence looks like(Photo: Shutterstock)For the first time, she is telling publicly how violence that shaped her childhood later entered her own marriage, eventually forcing her to confront the fact that she had become abusive toward her husband. Stories of domestic violence often focus on violent men. Zohara’s account is different. She openly acknowledges, albeit under a pseudonym, that she was the one inflicting emotional and verbal abuse on her spouse, at times so severely that she was left with no choice but to seek help.“In my early 20s, I studied law, and I had a very destabilizing experience during a class about domestic violence from a legal perspective,” she recalled. “I sat there holding my stomach because it was turning. For every example the lecturer gave, I could give one of my own.”At the time, she was still living with her parents. Armed with terminology she had learned in class, she began challenging them about what happened at home. “There was one very serious fight between my parents, and I gave this whole speech about everything I knew. For the first time, I said I was calling the police. My father responded by saying he would kill me.”Did you feel threatened?