Allison Holker recently reflected on her childhood struggles, detailing her experiences in her memoir.
Allison Holker is reflecting on a painful past experience.
The widow of Stephen “tWitch” Boss—who died by suicide in December 2022—is opening up about her personal life in her upcoming memoir This Far.
In addition to detailing her late husband’s private struggles with addiction, Allison also shared an experience she had with an older man during her younger years.
“I had experienced my first time really feeling like I’d been taken advantage of from the other gender,” Allison told Jamie Kern Lima on a Jan. 27 episode of the Jamie Kern Lima Show. “Someone taking advantage of my vulnerability and my joy of life and my energy of wanting to constantly learn.”
The So You Think You Can Dance alum went on to detail what she endured as a teenager at the hands of someone she encountered during dance.
“I had some older man really take advantage of the vulnerability that women go through, especially in the dance community,” she continued. “Where we look up to our teachers and we just trust them—and dance can be very physical. It can be very sexual, even at a young age. And that was taken advantage of.”
And the 36-year-old expressed that, at the time, she wasn’t well-equipped to handle the situation, admitting that she would go back and change her response if she could.
“It tore me apart for a lot of years because I felt like it was my fault,” she explained. “’How could it have gotten to that place? I must have done something wrong,’ and I felt so much shame in who I was, and I was so embarrassed.”
“To this day, it’s one of those things—man, if I would have just spoke out for myself, maybe I could’ve built myself back up and helped other young girls to not let that happen,” she continued, “but I felt a lot of shame in myself and it was really hard for me to work through that for so many years.”
But as the years went on, Allison realized that what she went through was what made her “so independent and strong,” vowing that she would never “let someone take anything else from me ever again.”
Now, the dancer—who shares kids Weslie, 16, Maddox, 8, and Zaia, 5, with her late husband—uses her tragedies to empower her eldest daughter to stand up for herself in compromising situations.
“When I had my daughter,” she noted, “I realized that I need to build her up to, like, if anything ever happened to her, come to someone—come to me, come to someone you feel safe with and say, ‘this was wrong.’”
Ultimately, Allison prides herself on how far she’s come, determined to not let the past loom over her. And while she hopes to use her story to prevent others from finding themselves in similar situations, she expressed how disappointing that necessity is in the first place.
“I’m proud of myself now to be able to kind of own that it wasn’t me,” she said. “I was taken advantage of. But I wish it did not happen to anyone. I don’t know why people do things like that.”
Source: www.eonline.com