Julianne Hough is getting weak in regards to the trauma and abuse she endured as a baby and the way she’s labored to heal her ache through the years.
The skilled dancer and actress opened up throughout an emotional dialog on Thursday’s episode of The Jamie Kern Lima Present, the place she revealed that she was “about 4 years old” when she was sexually abused for the primary time. Hough stated her abuser was a neighbor who lived in the identical Utah cul-de-sac as her household.
“I’ve actually never said that out loud to anybody in an interview before,” Hough admitted. “But that was a very, very confusing time because, obviously, growing up in the Mormon culture, everything needs to be perfect, everybody needs to put on the shiny, we’ve got our stuff together. And there was not a lot of repercussion for what had happened.”
“And by the way, I’m not the only one in my family that had gone through similar things. And so that was a very challenging thing to come to terms with,” she continued. “Nobody did anything.”
The Dancing with the Stars co-host defined that she didn’t inform her dad and mom about what particularly occurred to her till later in life, as she “forgot” in regards to the incident. Nevertheless, she did inform them about “other things [that] happened later in my childhood” when she was in her teenagers.
“I had forgot about the neighbor thing at 4 years old until I started really doing this work in the last few years,” Hough stated. “That’s why I think I blocked out from birth to 10, basically, because I had completely disassociated from that ever happening.”
Later within the episode, the Protected Haven star famous to host Jamie Kern Lima that her dad and mom are now not in touch together with her abuser and that her mom moved them out of the neighborhood as quickly as she discovered one thing occurred.
Hough recounted the second she advised her mom in regards to the incident after she got here house together with her garments inside out as a baby. “She said, ‘Tell me what happened,’” Hough recalled. “And I said — this was my only way of describing it because we weren’t allowed carbonation as kids, we weren’t allowed pop or anything like that, but I remember tasting it and it burned and it hurt my lungs — and I remember saying I felt like I had a Sprite bottle between my legs.”
Afterward, she stated her mother “freaked out” and that’s when her household moved. “I guess my mom did do what she could,” Hough confessed as she tried to carry again tears. “She just wanted to move and leave. She didn’t want to deal with it. She didn’t want to talk about it, but she did want to get us out.”
The Footloose actress famous that different members of the family additionally handled related abuse rising up. She additionally beforehand shared in a 2013 interview with Cosmopolitan that she was “abused mentally, physically, everything” at age 10 whereas attending a dance academy in London together with her brother, Derek Hough. That led her to “not trust anybody.”
“The people that also violated my sisters or my brother or myself, they never got reprimanded for it because we didn’t say something,” Hough defined to Lima. “Instead, we just pivoted and we just moved — which is good, get out of a situation — but also that’s another thing which is for me, just pivot, pivot, pivot.”
She added, “I’ve never shared that before, in fact, I just had a little bit of a profound revelation during that: that my mom did do the best that she could.”
Elsewhere throughout their dialog, Hough stated she is aware of that her dad and mom “felt guilty” as soon as they discovered in regards to the abuse she rendered in her teenagers. “At the time, when I was younger, I think they also didn’t know what to do. And were also in a position of not feeling capable or also feeling helpless,” she defined. “And so, I think now that we’ve had these conversations, they’ve also said those things.”
As Hough continued her therapeutic journey, she ultimately “reconnected” together with her dad and mom amid her divorce from Brooks Laich in 2020.
“I reclaimed my parental relationship with them, and I got to be the kid and they got to take care of me,” she stated. “And that was the most healing time for us.”
