Kimberly Wyatt reveals how suffering sexual abuse as a child "chipped away" at her soul and security.

The 44-year-old Pussycat Dolls star has been candid about suffering abuse as a toddler and an attempted rape on a cruise ship aged 17, and she has opened up about the impact of surviving such horrific incidents.

She told Davina McCall on the Begin Again podcast: "You know I experienced a lot of sexual abuse and that really chipped away at my confidence, at my soul, at my feeling of being safe and that really was the making of me as a kid. I was very introverted."

She recalled "struggling to look in the mirror", but recalled her upbringing with "brilliant" parents in a small town in Missouri.

She said: "My dad delivered fuel to farmers and he was a fuel guide, delivering oil, driving trucks, was gone a lot. My mum worked for him, so we lived on a farm way out in the country in my smaller years.

"It was idyllic in so many ways because I loved try to be just as tough as the boys and loved going muddying in trucks and doing all this farm life."

She described the quaint life as the "making and the breaking" of her, remembering times with her grandmother living "just around the corner".

She added: "My grandmother was my everything, Grandma Jane. They're the best. She showed me a love and a selflessness that to this day, that's what has made me the mum that I strive to be everyday when I wake up...

"The bad was I had brilliant parents, I think who tried their best but there was a lot of darkness in my very young years, through my formative years to my young teen years."

As she grew up, Kimberly felt like she was "constantly running away from social situations", and she struggled to make friends, until discovering dancing helped transform her life.

She said: "The thing that turned everything around for me was getting into the dance studio.

"When I stepped into the dance studio because I loved the Olympics, I loved the figure skating and the gymnastics and what these people could do with their bodies and the stories they could tell through movement."