She said one sibling told her that her dad said that if they weren’t against Jill, then they were against him. As the Duggars had been taught by their parents and Bill Gothard’s Institute of Basic Life Principles that they were always under their father’s authority, even when they were adults, Jill says it was excruciatingly hard to stand up to her dad, and she understands why her siblings felt led to defend him and take his side no matter what. Still, she says, it made her feel very alone.
“Now most of (my family was) against me” she writes. “I wasn’t built for this. I’d experienced stress and trauma before — some of it caused by individuals in my family — but I’d always been able to count on the rest for support. They had been my gravity, the force that I never had to question and could always rely upon. But now it felt like they were gone.”
Nearing the end of her book, she doesn’t have much good to say about the IBLP, being on reality TV, or the effect that either had on her father, and it is truly devastating.
“Only now can I look back and see things clearly, like the way IBLP fostered a culture of manipulation and abuse, the fact that Pops eventually put the show above his children, or the toll it took on my own mental health,” she writes. She says her father constantly referred to the show as their “ministry,” but I can’t help but wonder, after all that’s come out, if any of it was really worth it. Jill Duggar Dillard, with the title of her book Counting the Cost, certainly seems to believe it was not.
