Julianne Hough has expressed that her ex-husband, Brooks Laich, healed his childhood trauma during their five-year marriage.
The Dancing With The Stars pro, 36, who revealed she suffered sexual abuse when she was four years old, spoke out about how the ice hockey player, 41, gave her the chance to “reconnect” with her younger self.
During a recent appearance on the Jamie Kern Lima Show, The beauty said: “What did I need at 10?”
“I really needed security and something like a father figure to come in and be that stabilizing force.”
Her relationship with Laich had provided her with a “little girl feeling” as well as “stability and a stable man at her side.”
Julianne Hough, 36, said her ex-husband, Brooks Laich, healed her childhood trauma during their five-year marriage.
Julianne explained that she was able to “start that healing” because Brooks “gave me a beautiful foundation to be a girl.”
“When I started to walk that path, I started to become more of a woman, and when that happened, I started to listen to my voice more. Not the voice of a 10-year-old girl who was making decisions unconsciously.”
She continued: “And as that happened, things started to change and my mindset started to change. What I believe in, not just what I’ve been taught, what I’ve been told or what I had to do to get to where I am today.”
Hough added that during her healing journey from age 10 onwards, she also began to “change, transform and question what she believed.”
The Footloose actress and Laich tied the knot in 2017 after getting engaged in 2015.
However, the former couple announced their separation in 2020 and the divorce would be officially formalized in 2022.
During an interview at the Armchair Expert Podcast with Dax Shepherd Earlier this month, Julianna further reflected on the “falling apart” of her marriage to Brooks.
“He had a rough last few years of his career. He got hurt and then he got traded before the team he was with for almost 12 years won the Stanley Cup. It makes me want to cry because I feel so sorry for him.”
Her relationship with Laich had given her a “little girl feeling” as well as “stability and a stable man by her side”; seen in 2019 in Los Angeles.
Julianne explained that she was “able to start that healing” because Brooks “gave me a beautiful foundation to be a girl.”
On the subject of 2017, Hough revealed: “That was the year we got married and the year everything started to fall apart.”
She said: “It wasn’t right. It can be hard to fully accept it. I feel like our relationship and our marriage was perfect and the ending was perfect too.”
“We both regret that it didn’t work out, because I don’t think we had the maturity to come together. He was contracting while I was expanding. We just couldn’t find each other in that regard.”
While Hough and Laich have “accepted” the split, the couple is “sad it didn’t work out. He has the biggest heart I could ever have the privilege of being with.”
The two split in 2019 before announcing their separation the following year. Just 10 days after the initial split, Julianne’s two dogs were tragically killed by coyotes.
“It was a crumbling. Everything I had known, everything I had established for my control and my protection…”
“I was married to a man who was more of a father figure to me, and as he changed, so did I. Everything fell apart.”
However, Julianna tried to stay positive after the marriage ended. “I can actually start intentionally, designing and creating a life that really comes from my soul.”
During an interview on the Armchair Expert podcast with Dax Shepherd earlier this month, Julianna further reflected on the “falling apart” of her marriage to Brooks.
In a previous episode of the Jamie Kern Lima Show, Hough revealed that she was sexually abused by a neighbor when she was four years old.
“My first experience was when I was about four years old. A neighbor in our neighborhood, on our dead-end street,” he said.
“I’d never said that out loud to anyone in an interview before. It was a very, very confusing time, because obviously growing up in Mormon culture, everything has to be perfect.”
“There weren’t many repercussions for what had happened and I’m certainly not the only one in my family who had gone through similar things. So it was very difficult to accept it as no one did anything,” she said.
She didn’t tell her parents about the abuse until “later” because she “had forgotten about it.”
‘Other things happened later in my childhood, and around age 15, I came home and started sharing those things, but I had forgotten about the neighbor thing at age 4 until I started really doing this work in the last few years,’ he said.
“That’s why I think I blocked myself from birth until I was 10, basically because I had completely dissociated myself from that happening,” she said.
Speaking about telling her parents about the abuse, she said: “When two people have an experience, especially a child and a parent, we’re both experiencing different things, even though we’re going through the same circumstance.”
The couple split in 2019 before announcing their separation the following year. Just 10 days after the initial split, Julianne’s two dogs were tragically killed by coyotes.
‘In my case, this is all what happened to me and my parents, who have their own guilt and shame about other things and what they were trying to do at the time. So they can’t necessarily connect the two things and hear what was going on because they were also living their own experience.’
‘At the time, they felt guilty for not being able to do it, but we’ve definitely had conversations after conversations like, ‘But we understand now, right? And we’re on the same page? I’m not blaming you now, but I definitely needed more at the time.’
“At 15, I said those things and shared them, definitely, in the way I knew how to express it back then, too, which was like, ‘This just happened, but let’s move on,’ because I didn’t want to deal with it either,” she said, adding that she now wants to talk more about the experience after undergoing healing.
She also shared during the interview: “Being so young and having those be your first experiences, whether physical, mental, sexual, those abuses of power towards someone who is vulnerable to them, immediately sets a precedent of: other people have the power.”
Hough previously revealed that she suffered abuse as a child.
During a 2013 interview with Cosmopolitan, she revealed that she had been abused at the age of 10 after moving to London to begin studying dance at the Italia Conti Academy of Arts with her brother Derek.
The new revelation came as Hough was promoting her newly released novel, Everything We Never Knew.
Hough’s debut novel, co-written with Ellen Goodlett, “is about a woman who seemingly has everything under control: a perfect life, a perfect husband, a perfect marriage, a perfect job,” she explained during a recent appearance on Good morning America.
In a previous episode of the Jamie Kern Lima Show, Hough revealed that she was sexually abused by a neighbor when she was four years old.
The new revelation came as Hough was promoting her newly released novel, Everything We Never Knew.
The main character, Lexi Cole, suddenly “has these supernatural experiences that threaten the relationships around her,” the author said.
‘She goes on this healing journey thinking she’s going to heal other people, but of course, you can’t heal anyone else… unless you go and heal yourself first.’
Asked about the dedication to ‘young Julianne who did what she had to do to survive and protect herself to get to where she is today,’ Hough, who was raised Mormon and came out as bisexual in 2019, responded: ‘This book is also about trusting yourself.
“I think we’re so inundated with noise and fitting in and feeling like we don’t belong, that we change and adapt to fit in, and I think trusting yourself and looking inward is what this is all about and that’s definitely what I experienced dedicating this to my younger self.”
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