“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?
“I didn’t think he would actually kill me, but I was afraid of him because the fact is that I didn’t call,” she said.
For years, Zohara said, she learned to distrust her own instincts. “I grew up constantly wondering, ‘What’s wrong with me?’ even though my instincts were sound. Whenever I questioned what was happening, I was told, ‘You’re too sensitive,’ ‘You’re exaggerating,’ ‘It’s not what you think,’ or, ‘Every family is like this. Do you think things are any better in other homes?’”
“When there were confrontations at home and I fought with my parents, they constantly told me I was violent and needed treatment, and I believed them.”
That confusion followed her into adulthood and into relationships. “I dated messed-up guys and somehow I was attracted to them,” she said. “It affected my entire romantic life.”
How?
"I married at 30, relatively late for someone raised in a religious household. Before then, I struggled to form relationships at all. Already in my 20s, I understood that I had a problem and that I was blocked. I had a very suspicious outlook. I didn’t trust men and felt stuck. I experienced real emotional detachment and couldn’t understand why relationships didn’t work for me.”
"Men would show interest and then lose it because I remained closed off. Why? Because I was carrying a secret inside me.”
She threw herself into her studies instead. “Studies were my whole life, and my connection with the outside world was limited.”
Even after meeting the man who would become her husband, she slowly discovered that what she considered normal family behavior was not universal.
She recalled spending an entire Shabbat with his family. As they left, she told him that his parents would now criticize them, curse them and complain that they had spent too much time in their room.
“He told me they wouldn’t,” she said. “It took me time to understand that what happened in my house was not necessarily what happened in other homes.”
Before meeting her husband, Zohara had already sought therapy once, following what she described as a major personal crisis. She was 24 when her younger sister married before her.
“I didn’t see it coming, and I couldn’t understand how she had managed to find a relationship and I hadn’t,” she said. “I was a very goal-oriented person, so I saw it as a failure and once again believed there was something wrong with me.”
She secretly arranged therapy, hiding it from everyone because, at the time, she regarded seeing a professional as deeply shameful.
But that treatment did not yet lead her to recognize how the violence she had experienced was being recreated in her own behavior.
At 30, she met her future husband online. “I created a profile under a fake name and without a photo because I was terribly embarrassed,” she said. “I didn’t want people to see me and know I was there. Even though there was no photo, he contacted me. It really felt like a miracle, although let’s say it wasn’t falling in love but more like a roller coaster.”
On their first date, she warned him that she was “messed up and came from a completely messed-up home,” she said.
Despite the difficulties, he was gentle with her. “He didn’t judge me and didn’t push me into corners, and the fact that he stayed became his best quality.”
After they married, Zohara initially felt safer because marriage itself seemed permanent. “I understood that we were ‘bound to each other,’ just as my parents were bound to each other and never separated even though they were miserable.”
But marriage did not erase the trauma. “Nothing fundamental in me changed,” she said. “I was still closed off and distrustful, and the trauma I experienced at home followed me into married life.”
It came through most clearly during their arguments. “I was verbally abusive, and I would reduce him to tears,” she said. “He couldn’t understand me, and I couldn’t understand him.
“We had seven very bad years of marriage because my childhood entered our relationship. I had post-traumatic explosions. I would react completely out of proportion to the situation because I was actually fighting a different war, the war over my childhood, and he became the enemy in front of me.”
She said she would erupt as though she were fighting for her life, only to forget the next day what the argument had even been about. Her husband interpreted that forgetting as another way of belittling him.
At other times, she would call her father in front of her husband, crying and complaining about him. “A normal parent wants you to go back to your partner and work on your problems,” Zohara said. “But my father would say things like, ‘Only I can understand you.’ What message does that send to a girl who is dependent on her father and trying to build a marriage? You become convinced that the only person who can save you is your father, not your partner.”
Her husband tried to explain what was happening. “He told me, ‘When we fight, you have to give me the benefit of the doubt, because when you explode like this you assume the worst about me, that I did it deliberately, and I didn’t.’”
She could scream at him even for forgetting something she had asked him to do. “All the pain and frustration I had experienced came out on him.”
When did you realize you had to seek therapy?
"After the birth of our twin daughters. One day, we had a serious fight in front of them, and I suddenly saw the fear in their eyes. When I saw their faces, I saw myself as a child, and suddenly I understood that inside my own home I was creating the terror I had witnessed, and they were afraid of me. I was creating the same fear that I had experienced as a child.
She decided to contact a domestic violence prevention center. “Not for myself, but for them,” she said. At that point, she still did not understand the concept of intergenerational transmission, that behavior learned or experienced in one generation can reappear in the next. I only thought of myself as violent.”
What happened at the center?
"I arrived at the center deeply distressed. The first thing they asked was why I had come, and I said, ‘I’m violent. I have a filthy mouth.’” Then the center’s director began asking about Zohara’s own childhood, including whether she had experienced physical violence. She said yes.
The director then asked about sexual abuse. “I said, ‘Define sexual abuse,’” Zohara recalled. “I started squirming and said that my father would sometimes touch me under my clothes, nothing specific that I remember, and that he would peek.” The director told her firmly that this constituted sexual violence.
“My world was shaken,” Zohara said. At first she resisted. She entered the therapist’s office angry, accusing the director of being unprofessional and insensitive for reaching such a conclusion so quickly.
“But while I was accusing her and screaming, I understood that yes, I had been sexually harmed,” she said. “I suddenly realized that if it weren’t true, I wouldn’t be screaming like that. I understood that I was falling apart.
“She just stared at me until something suddenly broke open and I started crying harder than I ever had before. For the first time, I was able to look directly and unflinchingly at the severe, systematic violence I had endured, instead of seeing myself as the source of everything wrong in my life. That was when the change I had longed for finally began.”
You saved your own life.
“It’s a process, and the wound is still open. I’ve only been seeing things clearly for the past four years, and I still have a lifetime ahead of me to understand what happened and how it affects me. I was fortunate; I had luck, resourcefulness and the determination to act. It’s difficult to maintain a relationship while carrying this kind of baggage, but thank God my husband stayed, and that I woke up to what was happening in my life just before I destroyed it.”
The fact that she remains in a relationship, and now describes it as a healthy one, feels extraordinary to her. “Our relationship started off on the wrong foot,” she said. “I entered it without the ability to trust or rely on someone. I was vulnerable and dependent, and it was destructive.”
“We managed to survive together largely thanks to the treatment I received, and also because my husband went through his own parallel process of growth. Even so, the road was difficult
“Let’s put it this way: relationships are complicated, and having one partner who is also a survivor of violence doesn’t make things any easier. But looking at the glass half full, we faced difficult challenges and made it through them.
"Above all, we were fortunate to love each other and be there for one another. It turned out that only after seven years of damaging my marriage, and after we had children, did I understand that if I didn’t get treatment, I would destroy my life and theirs. I had become the one causing harm, repeating the story my father had passed down to me.”
How can the cycle of intergenerational violence be broken?
“The clearest and most basic answer is the slogan, ‘It won’t end if you don’t tell,’ and I don’t think anything could be more accurate. I believe that women living with violence understand, on some level, that she is experiencing abuse. She knows things are not right; she knows she is afraid, but she may not know that there is a way out or believe she has the strength to leave.
"I think the first step is to seek treatment, and through treatment, the strength to make changes can follow. The domestic violence prevention centers located across the country provide completely confidential treatment at a very modest cost.”
“The decision to go to therapy is meaningful and life-changing, but it is only the starting point.” When she entered treatment, she believed she was simply an abusive person with problems regulating herself and controlling anger.
As therapy progressed, she said, she came to understand that she was likely dealing with complex post-traumatic stress resulting from prolonged violence, particularly emotional and psychological abuse.
That understanding, she stressed, did not erase responsibility for her behavior. “I am still a person who was hurt and who has patterns of behavior that are difficult to change, so the goal is to remain very aware of how I behave. Protecting my daughters from those patterns is my life’s work. I’m afraid to think about what kind of partners they will choose and how this will affect them.
“I completed three years of treatment at the domestic violence prevention center in my city, but I now understand that dealing with the trauma will be a lifelong process. Trauma cannot simply be erased, and neither can its effects on the people closest to you, in my case, my husband and daughters.
“At the same time, I believe that with the right work, it is possible to reduce the impact of trauma and build resilience. That requires awareness, a willingness to work hard, compassion and self-acceptance, the ability to cope with setbacks along the way, and support and love from those closest to you.”
Tell me about your decision to turn your experiences into a book.
“The book I wrote is entirely autobiographical. As far as I’m concerned, everything in it is factual. Nothing is invented. That’s why I couldn’t publish it under my real name. There’s a reason books like this are so rarely written, and that, in my view, is what makes this one important. It offers a kind of firsthand testimony about invisible abuse, which can cause profound harm while remaining extremely difficult to recognize as it is happening.”
“I felt this story had to be told because what happened in my home is happening in many other homes all the time. My mission with this book is to break the silence and, in some way, set things right. ‘Story Time’ is a deeply symbolic title in that sense: It’s time to tell the story.”
“Even while I was writing it, long before I realized a book was taking shape, I was already using the pen name ‘Zohara.’ I needed to create some distance between myself and the manuscript because confronting what was coming out of me was so difficult. I knew I needed a pseudonym, even in my own mind, to be able to write.”
“Many times, I cried as I wrote. I would recite the Traveler’s Prayer and ask God to give me the strength to keep writing, and not to fail this time as I had so many times before. Somehow, I felt that this time a miracle was happening. The story seemed to write itself, as though the words weren’t coming from me and I was simply a conduit allowing them to come out.”