‘Dancing With the Stars’ Pro Says She Might Leave Franchise Soon

Cheryl Burke isn’t sure about her future when it comes to Dancing With the Stars. The longtime pro on the ABC dance competition admitted she’s not sure how many more seasons she has in her during an interview with Allison Kugel on her Allison Interviews podcast Tuesday. 

“Where I’m at right now is I’m not overthinking it right this second. Because, if I do another season of Dancing With the Stars, I just need to do it, when the time comes,” Burke, 38, said. “Whether this will be my last season or not, I don’t know.” She added that if she doesn’t return after this upcoming season, “I can then consume my brain with those thoughts.”

The dancer also opened up about her struggle with body dysmorphia and body image, saying that it’s something she’s been considering when it comes to her plans to adopt a child or get pregnant sometime down the line. “I would prefer not to have to put myself in a dance costume and just let myself gain weight,” Burke said. “I do believe I will start to love my body more when I don’t have to shove my ass into a dance costume.”

Burke has spoken openly about her mental health throughout the years, and also spoke candidly to Kugel about how her childhood trauma of having “no constant father figure” and being sexually molested has led to an unhealthy pattern in her adult romantic relationships. “I unconsciously fell into the pattern of falling for the same type of men which were abusive, non-available, non-committal, infidelity, all of that,” she said on the podcast. “I now, through the years of therapy, I have been able to understand why.”

“My definition of love was not real,” she explained. “To me, love equaled infidelity, love equaled being treated like s-, love equaled physical violence, love equaled mental abuse.” If a “nice man” did come into her life, Burke admitted she felt “so disgusted” with that, which she now knows is “because I didn’t have that as a little girl.” Burke, who split from husband Matthew Lawrence in February, has been trying to work on destroying that connection in her mind between kindness and weakness, but noted, “I’m a work in progress until the day I die.”