Jill Duggar is opening up about where she stands with her family. Following the release of Jill’s memoir, Counting the Cost, ET’s Deidre Behar spoke to the former reality star about growing up on TV, carving out her own path, and how doing so impacted her relationship with her parents, Jim Bob Duggar and Michelle Duggar, and her many siblings.
Growing up, Jill said she “never thought” her role in the family would shift “from the people pleasing, sweet Jilly Muffin to finding my voice, and standing up for myself and other people.” In doing so, Jill said, she went “from the golden child to the black sheep.”
“Looking back, I would have never imagined that I would be where I am now. That is not where I wanted to be,” she said. “… But you have to make a decision at some point: Are you going to cower to that or are you going to rise above it and just keep just pressing on?”
With the “great support” of her husband, Derick Dillard, Jill stepped away from her famous family’s teachings, even appearing in the Prime Video docuseries, Shiny Happy People: Duggar Family Secrets, to speak out about her “cult-like” upbringing.
That decision greatly impacted her relationship with her family, no one more so than her dad, Jim Bob.
“My relationship with my father, there were very hurtful things that happened and I’ve chosen to forgive him and to hopefully move on with better boundaries and better rules in place… so that hopefully that level of control and hurt won’t be allowed to happen again,” she said. “I feel like I didn’t have very good boundaries. I didn’t know what that could look like.”
While “things have not changed entirely” with her dad, Jill said he now understands that she and Derick are “serious about boundaries” and respects that.
“My relationship with my dad on a daily basis, we don’t have a whole lot of one-on-one contact at all right now, but we see each other at weddings or funerals or occasionally if there’s a family function that we might choose to go to,” she said. “That’s what we’ve kind of had to put in place just to keep things healthier.”
As for where she stands with her mom, Michelle, Jill said she tries “to keep my mom out of the middle of it.”
“As we’ve processed and really lived our story, the more I felt like… [she doesn’t] have to be the go-between between me, my dad, whatever. She can just be Mom or be Grandma,” Jill said. “… It is very separate. I try to keep it that way, because I think it’s healthier right now. I think it’s happier. It makes us be able to actually see each other.”
Jill noted that she last saw her parents several months ago, admitting that the interaction was “hard” and “not comfortable.”
“I don’t think it’s comfortable for them either. It’s sad,” she said. “You want everything to be perfect. You can hang out sometimes and have surface-level conversations, which is what I am actually wanting right now… because that’s easier. That is where we need to be right now.”
While Jill said she’s not “resentful” about the situation with her parents, she noted, “I would say that I’m sad about the way that the relationship is and that I’m sad about certain aspects of my relationship with my parents, but I’m hopeful moving forward. Not naive, but hopeful.”
Then there’s her siblings, some of whom she communicates with via a group text. Ahead of the release of her book, she sent her adult siblings a letter, in which she explained her reasons for speaking out, and was “pleasantly surprised that most of my siblings were saying, ‘I would love to read your book.'”
“I love all my siblings,” Jill said. “I hope that they know that I love them.”
Even so, Jill said she “didn’t write the book to try and change my parents” or her siblings, but rather as “our story to help other people who I had talked to, who felt validated, who came away saying, ‘I felt the same feelings of isolation and I felt like it bred this control aspect that’s not healthy and I feel validated in that.'”
“I think it could be helpful for some of my siblings to read and to hear our perspective on our story that may have been filtered. I think that it could be helpful for them to hear our story, but then also I think it could be freeing for some of my siblings,” she said. “… I think if that helps them, and frees them, and gives them their voice, and it empowers them, then I think that’s amazing. I would love for all of them to read it.”
No matter the challenging topics discussed in her book, Jill said that “one theme that I really wanted to come across in the book is I do love my family.”
“I’m not always going to agree, and I think that’s healthy to be able to agree to disagree on things… I talk about in the book where it’s OK to have positive and negative experiences… Those roses and thorns experiences, everybody is gonna have them,” she said. “… While it may be triggering at times to remember or to look back, I think part of that healthy healing is to still be able to recognize both experiences.”
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