Nikki DeLoach is pulling back the curtain on her traumatic childhood, including her experience with abuse and the toll it took on her mental and physical health as a teen.
“There was physical abuse in my childhood but it was the sexual abuse that really honestly just made me want to disappear,” DeLoach, 46, shared during the Thursday, December 11, episode of “Books That Changed My Life” YouTube series.
The Hallmark actress explained that Glennon Doyle’s Untamed was pivotal in her growth as a woman, partly because it mirrored the harder times she experienced as a child.
“The first chapter in [Untamed] … [Glennon] talks about being 10 years old and at 10 years old that’s when we’re taught what it looks like to be a ‘good girl,’” DeLoach said. “At 10 years old is when this happened to me, and I was silenced, and wasn’t allowed to actually say what happened to me.”
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She recalled, “At 10 years old, I was told that being a ‘good girl’ was letting boys do anything to you and keeping your mouth shut, to letting adults do anything to you and you just keep your mouth shut and you take it.”
The A Grand Ole Opry Christmas star remembered being told that her life was “not worthy of protection” and that something was “so deeply broken and unloveable” about her that she didn’t “deserve” to be cared for.
“That’s when the disordered eating started. Just like Glennon at 10 years old, she became a bullimic. For me, it was anorexia,” DeLoach revealed. “I just began to disappear. … I was being told, ‘Be small, don’t speak, be pretty, no one wants your opinion on anything.’”
She confessed, “Man, did it take me decades to untangle that and learn to love myself, and this book was such a huge part of me being able to do that.”
Scroll down for more revelations from DeLoach’s appearance on the “Books That Changed My Life” YouTube series:
Nikki DeLoach’s Trauma Helped Her Save Her 2nd Son’s Life
DeLoach explained that her “hypervigilant brain” and lack of trust she developed as a child “saved” her youngest son Bennett’s life when he was born with multiple congenital heart defects.
“I was the perfect mother for him because I knew how to do that, I knew how to survive and my brain was wired for that,” she said, admitting that she got into “trouble” when her son was on the mend and healthy but her childhood self was “still in the driver’s seat.”
DeLoach recalled going to trauma therapy in 2023 to get in touch with her broken childself and learned to love all the parts of her.
“I got to know that 10 year old little girl so well and I am so grateful for her,” she continued. “She is the person who has helped me to survive and keep going when I wanted to die at so many points in my life, like, truly, and tried.”
DeLoach added that her younger self being in her head made her confident that “something was wrong” with Bennett during his second surgery. That gut feeling led to doctors finding an aneurysm in his heart and successfully removing it.
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Why Nikki DeLoach Developed Disordered Eating
The Awkward alum said that the lack of control and desire to be “perfect” led to her disordered eating.
“It was the one thing that I could control was the food I was putting in my mouth. When something felt chaotic, or something felt out of my control, my go-to, still to this day, [is] don’t eat. Nope, not doing it. It’s that disordered eating brain, that’s how it tries to get control over your life.”
How Nikki DeLoach Tried to ‘Numb’ Her Pain as a Teenager
“I got into the music business when I was 17, 18 years old and I took a baseball bat to that glass house of perfection. I left it all out on the field,” she remembered. DeLoach said after “a bunch” of crazy nights she woke up at 21, 22 and realized she was in an unhealthy place. (DeLoach was part of the Mickey Mouse Club and later sang in the ’90s girl group Innosense.)
“[I was] trying to numb. At the time, I didn’t know that. I was just beating myself up,” she explained, noting she told herself, “You’re a bad girl,” for her actions.
Looking back, DeLoach said, “It was only with distance that I realized, ‘Oh, I was trying to kill myself.’ I just wanted the feelings to stop. I couldn’t feel the pain of everything so I was numbing it. I wanted it to go away. I wanted myself to go away.”
She added that her childhood insecurities and trauma added to her pain. “It just made sense, if I just disappear then we don’t have a problem anymore,” DeLoach mused.
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Nikki DeLoach Decided to Save Herself at Age 22
The actress recalled waking up in her early 20s and looking at herself in the mirror and thinking she “just did not see God in myself anymore.” As a “big faith” person, DeLoach said, “We are created in the image of likeness and I did not recognize myself.”
She turned to the book Anatomy of a Spirit for guidance and got into “much needed recovery for disordered eating and therapy” to start turning her life around. “That’s where [that thinking] began: ‘I have to save myself because nobody’s coming to save me,’” she added.
“That brain and that thing was the same thing in me, however damaged you want to call it, it was that same little girl at 22 that said, ‘You have to save yourself,’” DeLoach concluded.
Nikki DeLoach Doesn’t Believe in Marriage Before 30
While DeLoach hit rock bottom during her teenage music career, she also met her husband, Ryan Goodell, and together they found their way to happiness. However, it wasn’t overnight and the actress was insistent that they didn’t get married young. (Goodell was part of the boy band Take 5.)
DeLoach confessed that she met her husband at a “not healthy time in my life,” but she told him, “If you can hang on, I’m going to be the best girlfriend you’ve ever had.”
Goodell did hang on and the pair left music behind and moved to Los Angeles together in their late 20s, where DeLoach went to college. “Slowly [we] began to put the pieces of our lives back together, together,” she recalled.
The pair eventually got married in 2009, four days before she turned 30. “I still don’t really believe in marriage before the age of 30,” DeLoach confessed. “People who get married in their 20s, I’m like, how? Maybe they weren’t the mess that I was in my 20s but …”