Julianne Hough found herself in an extremely vulnerable position as she spoke about a traumatic childhood experience and the personal problems it caused her for years.

The 36-year-old professional dancer and actress appeared on Thursday’s episode of “The Jamie Kern Lima Show,” where she publicly revealed for the first time that she was “about 4 years old” when she was sexually abused at preschool.

Hough said her attacker was a neighbor who lived on the same dead-end street in Utah as her family.

“I’ve actually never said that out loud to anyone in an interview before,” Hough admitted. “But it was a very, very confusing time because growing up in Mormon culture, of course everything has to be perfect, everyone has to make themselves beautiful, we have our stuff together. And there wasn’t a lot of repercussions for what had happened.

“And by the way, I’m not the only one in my family who went through something similar. And it was a very difficult thing to deal with,” she continued. “Nobody did anything.”

Hough further explained that she kept what happened to her from her parents until she was older because she “forgot” about the incident. However, she revealed that she shared her experience with her family when “other things happened” around the age of 15.

“I had forgotten about the neighbor thing at age four until I really started doing this work in the last few years,” the “Dancing with the Stars” co-host recalled. “So I basically repressed it from birth to age 10 because I was completely distanced from the idea that it would ever happen.”

Later in the episode, she told Lima that her parents no longer had contact with the abuser and that her mother moved away from the neighborhood with them as soon as she learned about the incident.

The “Steam Engines of Oz” star even recalled the moment she told her mother about the incident after coming home with her clothes inside out as a child.

“She said, ‘Tell me what happened,'” Hough recalled. “And I said — that was my only way of describing it because we weren’t allowed to drink carbonated drinks as kids, soda or anything like that, but I remember tasting it and it burned and my lungs hurt — and I remember saying I felt like I had a Sprite bottle between my legs.”

Hough revealed that her mother “freaked out” when she heard this and the family subsequently moved.

“I guess my mom did what she could,” Hough said, visibly moved as she tried to hold back her tears. “She just wanted to pull away and leave. She didn’t want to deal with it. She didn’t want to talk about it, but she wanted to get us out.”

The “Safe Haven” actress mentioned that other family members experienced similar abuse during her childhood. In a 2013 interview with Cosmopolitan, Hough also mentioned that she was “abused mentally, physically and in every way” at the age of 10 while attending a dance academy in London with her older brother, “Dancing” star Derek Hough.

This experience led the actress and dancer to “not trust anyone.”

“The people who abused my sisters or my brother or me were never reprimanded for it because we didn’t say anything,” Hough Lima told me. “Instead, we just pivoted and moved on – which is a good way to get out of a situation – but that’s another thing that to me means just pivot, pivot, pivot.”

“I’ve never told you this before, but I actually had a kind of profound revelation during that time that my mother really did try her best,” she added.

At another point in the conversation, Hough admitted that her parents felt “guilt” when they learned about the abuse she suffered as a teenager.

“I think back then, when I was younger, they didn’t know what to do either. And we didn’t feel capable or helpless either,” she explained. “And now that we’ve had these conversations, I think they’ve said those things too.”

Hough and her parents were able to reconnect despite her divorce from Brooks Laich in 2020. The couple was married between 2017 and 2022.

“They were there for me like my parents and I needed that,” she said of that time in her life. “I restored my parental relationship with them and was able to be the child and they could take care of me. That was the most healing time for us.”

“I was in a vulnerable situation where I thought, ‘I can’t do anything to protect myself, I’m completely shaken up, so maybe I can listen to you better now, and even though I didn’t think you were understanding at the time, maybe you are, and I can actually receive it now because my defensiveness is down and my heart is open.’ And that’s when we really went through more of our healing and communication as adults,” she continued.