Julianne Hough says ex-husband Brooks Laich healed her childhood trauma… after sexual abuse aged 4

Julianne Hough revealed that her ex-husband, Brooks Laich, healed her childhood trauma during their five-year marriage.

The 36-year-old Dancing With The Stars pro, who revealed she was sexually abused when she was four years old, opened up 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 when I was 10?’

‘I really needed security and some kind of father figure who could provide stability.’

Her relationship with Laich had given her a ‘little girl feeling’, but also ‘stability and [a] stable man to be there.’

Julianne explained that she was able to “start that healing process” because Brooks “laid such a beautiful foundation for me to be a little girl.”

“So when I started going through that whole journey, I started becoming more of a woman, and when that happened, I started listening to my own voice more. Not the voice of a 10-year-old who was unconsciously making decisions.”

She continued, “And as that happened, things started to change and my mindset. Like, what do I believe in, not just what I’ve been taught or told or, you know, what I’ve had to do to get where I am today.”

Hough added that during her healing process, from age 10 and up, she also “started changing and changing and questioning what she believed in.”

The Footloose actress and Laich married in 2017, after getting engaged in 2015.

However, the former couple announced their separation in 2020, with the divorce reportedly finalized in 2022.

During an interview on the Armchair Expert podcast with Dax Shepherd Earlier this month, Julianna reflected further on the ‘demise’ of her marriage to Brooks.

“He’s had a really tough last few years of his career. He was injured and then he got traded before his team, where he played for almost 12 years, won the Stanley Cup. It almost makes me cry because I feel for him so much.”

Of 2017, Hough said, “That was the year we got married and the year everything started to fall apart a little bit.”

She said, “It wasn’t right. That can be hard to fully accept. I feel like our relationship and our marriage was just right, and the ending is right too.”

“We both regret that it didn’t work out because I don’t think we had the maturity to get together. He was busy contracting while I was expanding. We just couldn’t find each other in that.”

While Hough and Laich have “accepted” the breakup, the two are “sad that it didn’t work out. He has the biggest heart I could ever have to be with.”

The two separated in 2019, before announcing their divorce the following year. Just 10 days after the initial split — Julianne’s two dogs were tragically killed by coyotes.

“It was an unraveling. Everything I had ever known, that I had set up for my control and my protection…”

“I had this marriage to this man who was more of a father figure to me, and as he changed, I changed. Everything was uprooted.”

Julianna, however, tried to maintain a positive mindset after the marriage ended. “I can really start in a conscious way now, so that I can design and create a life that really comes from my soul.”

In a previous episode of The Jamie Kern Lima Show, Hough revealed that she was sexually abused by a neighbor at age four.

“My first experience was when I was about four years old. By a neighbor in our neighborhood, in our cul-de-sac,” she said.

“I’ve never actually said that out loud to anyone in an interview. That was a very, very confusing time, because when you grow up in the Mormon culture, everything has to be perfect.”

“There wasn’t a lot of repercussion for what happened — and by the way, I’m not the only one in my family who’s gone through similar things. And so that was a really hard thing to process, that no one did anything,” she said.

She only told her parents about the abuse ‘later’, because she ‘had already forgotten’.

“There were more things that happened later in my childhood. I came home around 15 and started sharing those things, but I forgot about the neighborhood issue I had when I was 4 until I really started doing this work in the last few years,” she said.

“That’s why I think I blocked myself from birth until I was 10, because I couldn’t distance myself at all from the idea that something like this would ever happen,” she said.

When she told her parents about the abuse, she said, “When two people have the same experience, especially a child and a parent, we both go through different things, even if it’s the same situation.”

“So for me, there were all my experiences of this is what happened to me in my experience, and in my parents’ experience, they 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 and hear what happened because they had their own experience as well.”

‘At the time, they felt guilty that they couldn’t do it, but we definitely had conversation after conversation of, “But now we get it, right? And are we on the same page? I’m not blaming you now, but I definitely needed more at that moment.”‘

“When I was 15 and I was saying those things and sharing those things, that was definitely the way I could express it. It was like, ‘This just happened, but let’s move on,’ because I didn’t want to deal with it either,” she said, adding that now that she’s healed, she wants to share more about the experience.

She also said during the interview: ‘Being so young and these are your first experiences – whether it’s physical, mental, sexual – that abuse of power against someone who is vulnerable to it – it immediately sets a precedent of: other people have the power.’

Hough had previously revealed that she had been abused 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 study dance at the Italia Conti Academy of the Arts with her brother Derek.

The new revelation came as Hough promoted her recently released novel Everything We Never Knew.

Hough’s debut novel, which she co-wrote with Ellen Goodlett, is “about a woman who seemingly has everything together, a perfect life, a perfect husband, a perfect marriage, a perfect job,” she explained during a recent appearance on Good morning America.

The main character, Lexi Cole, suddenly has “supernatural experiences that threaten the relationships around her,” according to the author.

“She goes on a journey to heal others, thinking she can heal others. But of course you can’t heal anyone else… unless you heal yourself first.”

When asked about her dedication to the “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 in the Mormon church and came out as bisexual in 2019, responded, “This book is also about trusting yourself.

“I think we’re inundated with noise, with sense of belonging and with sense of not belonging. We shift and adapt to fit in. I think it’s about trusting yourself and going within. That’s definitely what I experienced when I dedicated this to my younger self.”