Jill Dillard Duggar has opened up about her difficult relationship with her older sister, Jana, and other siblings who remain under the control of her family’s cult-like religion.
The 19 Kids And Counting star, 32, was responding during a Q&A with fans last week when she opened up about her current situation with her 33-year-old sister.
“Are you worried about Jana and her inability to leave your father’s grasp or follow the teachings of Bill Gothard?” » asked for a quote.
“I try not to get too involved in my siblings’ lives,” Jill responded during the livestream to publicize her recently released memoir, Counting The Cost.
Jill Dillard Duggar, 32, and her husband Derick, 34, addressed the status of her relationship with older sister Jana, 33, during a live-streamed fan Q&A last week .
Jill and Derick hosted the live stream to raise awareness of their new memoir Counting The Cost, which documents her upbringing in the Duggar family.
“I don’t know where they all are. I don’t want to talk about their stories and stuff. I let them tell their story or discover it themselves.
“But I think for anyone who grew up in the IBLP, it’s definitely a process and it’s a process that’s very difficult to walk away from and sort through,” she continued.
“I love how my sister, Jinger, talks in her book about untangling your faith and what a process it is and how difficult it is,” Jill added of her sister’s memoir, entitled Becoming Free Indeed, published in January.
“You really have to have support around you to do this.”
Jill, along with her siblings, were raised by their parents, Jim Bob, 58, and Michelle, 57, under the hyper-strict rules of the fundamentalist Christian sect Institute of Basic Life Principles (IBLP).
Their upbringing was documented on the hit reality show 19 Kids And Counting, which aired from 2008 to 2015.
Sitting alongside her throughout last week’s Q&A session, Jill’s husband Derick, 34, chimed in to express his agreement.
“It is difficult, whenever you are in something, to see something from the outside. So the book begins by talking about the perplexity that people felt looking at a family in that culture,” he said.
Older Duggar daughters include, from left: Joy-Anna, 25; Jinger, 29 years old; Jessa, 30 years old; Jill, 32; and Jana, 33 years old
Jana and Jill entered the national spotlight as the eldest and second eldest Duggar daughters, respectively, on the hit reality television series 19 Kids And Counting.
Jim Bob, 58, and Michelle Duggar, 57, raised their 19 children within the strict tenets of the cult-like Christian fundamentalist organization IBLP.
“After a while, as you establish your own identity, you kind of realize what it is, as you move away from something. Kind of like you’re leaving the Earth, and the Earth looks very different, when you’re not right on top of it.
Among Jim Bob and Michelle Duggar’s 19 children, Jill is the second eldest of nine daughters.
As seen on the show, Michelle and Jim-Bob relied heavily on their older daughters — which also includes Jessa, 30, and Jinger, 29 — to help them care for the younger generation of Duggar siblings .
While Jill was the first of the girls to get married in 2014 at the age of 23, Jana is the only Duggar daughter to remain single into adulthood.
Jill recalled how Jana helped her through the tumultuous time leading up to her marriage to Derick on Counting The Cost.
“If my sister Jana hadn’t offered to pick up my phone and take care of the whole wedding for me in the final days, I would have completely given up,” she wrote.
Jill and Derick share Israel, eight, Samuel, six, and Frederick, 14 months. The couple are pictured here with their two eldest sons
Beyond coordinating the wedding and filming logistics for 19 Kids And Counting, Jill and Derick were also grappling with the reality that her mother was apparently losing her battle with stage 4 cancer (even if she would come out of it miraculously later).
The couple have since welcomed three children: Israel, eight, Samuel, six, and Frederick, 14 months.
Elsewhere in her memoir, Jill told the horrific story around Samuel’s birth, in which both mother and son almost lost their lives after suffering a ruptured uterus and the then-newborn hemorrhaging cerebral.
Meanwhile, the Duggar’s fifth-oldest daughter, Joy-Anna, 25, spoke with her husband this month on their family vlog about how the couple has “never” been involved in IBLP since their encounter.
Back IIn her late teens, Jana had been the only Duggar child to be invited by Bill Gothard, the since-disgraced IBLP founder, to work at the organization’s Chicago headquarters.
Gothard, 88, resigned as head of the IBLP in 2014 after dozens of women spoke out, accusing him of sexual abuse – much of which allegedly happened to young women he had screened. the component to work for him in the IBLP offices.
It is unclear whether Jana accepted Gothard’s job offer.
Earlier this year, the explosive Duggar docuseries Shiny Happy People launched on Amazon Prime Video.
On the show, Jill and Derick explained that the couple’s relationship with the rest of the core Duggar family had become deeply strained.
Jill said her relationship with her father, Jim-Bob, had become “pretty toxic,” adding that “everything about the family dynamic has changed — and not for the better.”
“We’re really out there with the family,” Derick echoed.