Counting the Cost

by Jill Duggar

And by the time I was old enough to balance a baby on my hip while I folded laundry—which I’m guessing was sometime around seven or eight years old—I was hands down the best approval hunter in the whole Duggar family.

Mom had learned how to manage the expectations of the show when it came to giving birth—allowing them access but being firm about what shots they were allowed to take. Josh’s wife, Anna, had had problems with the crew using footage from one of her births that she’d specifically told them she did not authorize. They cut it out for reruns, but with later births, the footage was often added back in as part of flashback sequences.

IBLP had put a lot more energy into teaching me to fear the world beyond its doors than it had put into teaching me to trust God and discern for myself how to reach a good and wise decision on any given issue.

Deep down I knew that I didn’t want to bail on my faith. I was aware that people had used the Bible to manipulate me and press on the nerve of my guilt in order to make me conform to what they felt was acceptable, but I didn’t hold that against God.

Every time I find myself talking with someone who is curious about my family, especially when it’s someone who shares an IBLP background, I ask myself some questions. How much truth can they handle? How much truth do they need? Do they actually seem genuinely interested in knowing more or do they seem combative? Will my conversation be beneficial for them in trying to help them figure things out?

“I’m Muscogee Creek,” he said, midway through our first session, “so I’m going to talk about arrows.” “Um, okay,” we said, not really knowing what else to say. “You’ve been in a battle for a long time. You’ve taken a lot of arrows, and there are more coming. Occasionally, back in the day, when someone would get shot with an arrow, the arrowhead might get lost inside them, and anytime that area got bumped it would be extremely painful. You’ve got a lot of different wounds on you. Some are old, some are new. And I don’t think many of those wounds have healed right.” The room stopped. My breath grew shallow. Cry or run, I didn’t know what I wanted to do. So I just sat and listened. “That’s why it hurts so bad so much of the time, Jill. Even when people do the slightest thing—maybe Derick says or does something dumb—but it bumps one of those arrowheads and triggers all that old pain. So, no, you don’t need a mediation meeting with your parents right now. You don’t need to go back into battle. You need to heal. Really heal.”

I had been identified and re-traumatized, had sought legal recourse, but was now collateral damage in a seemingly unchecked system.

“Sometimes you have to be okay with other people not being okay with you. And you have to be okay with you not being okay too.” I had always struggled in that area. I grew up believing subconsciously that whenever there was any bad feeling, it was up to me to do what I could to fix it.