Josh — apologizing for your sexual molestation scandal is a critical first step for you, but you can’t stop with this public move. Now, you and your parents, wife and any other family members affected by the situation must get serious professional counseling!

Josh Duggar, you probably worried for years that the deep, dark secret that you had been accused of sexually molesting five young girls — would go public.

Josh Duggar Sex Scandal: Whole Family Needs Counseling

It’s very hard to keep such a huge secret buried, and especially when your very large family has been the subject of an enormously popular show — 19 Kids and Counting — about the supposedly blissful life you all have.

Well, sure enough, the police report about you allegedly molesting five minor girls when you were 14 went public this week when InTouch magazine released the documents. Now, you’re a 27-year-old married father of three with a fourth baby on the way, and you’ve just resigned from your job as the Executive Director of the Family Research Council, an organization which says its mission is ‘to advance faith, family and freedom in public policy and the culture from a Christian worldview!’

Josh — your self-confessed inexcusable behavior which “hurt others, including my family and close friends”, has now profoundly affected both your personal and professional life. But the thing is, it will continue to haunt and undermine you and possible eat away at you emotionally if you don’t get real therapeutic counseling from a trained and experienced psychologist or psychiatrist.

According to the official police report, you’ve never had professional counseling. Instead, you were sent to a “program that consisted of hard physical work and counseling”. It was a “Christian program”, and your mother Michelle later admitted to the police that you didn’t actually receive counseling as part of that program.

You were also given a “very stern talk” by family friend and Arkansas State Trooper Jim Hutchens. Ironically, Hutchens is now in prison serving a 56-year sentence for child pornography! Clearly, he was absolutely the wrong person to have been counseling you!

As far as we know, this is all the help that you’ve had, aside from prayer. Now, there’s nothing wrong with prayer, but prayer needs to be done in conjunction with therapy that helps you understand why you acted “inexcusably”!

Josh Duggar: You Can’t Move Forward Without Professional Help

You can never really move forward if you don’t “get” why you did it. And then, once you do understand why it happened, you need to deal with those issues in order to get past them. You may need to ultimately forgive yourself as well as having asked forgiveness from your victims.

Now, Josh, one of the biggest reasons that children and teenagers sexually molest other children is because they were molested themselves, says LA psychiatrist Carole Lieberman, who has treated victims of sexual abuse. I’m not saying that that happened, but if it did, then you need help to get over that!

“When a teen is molested, they try to regain power by doing it to other children,” explains Dr. Lieberman.

Another explanation is that there could have been some kind of dysfunction in your family. “There may have been no clear lines of communication, and a teen could feel ignored or there could have been discipline that made a child despondent, so there is acting out,” explains psychologist Jeff Gardere, who is also an assistant professor at Touro College of Osteopathic Medicine.

These are possible explanations for the behavior which you so deeply regret now. In any case, “it’s never too late to get counseling,” asserts Dr. Gardere. The point is that you want to resolve the issues that you had as a teenager, so that they don’t resurface. “I don’t think he’s fine. He’s had to live with this secret, which is a burden,” Dr. Lieberman believes about you.

Josh Duggar & Family — Everyone Needs To See A Shrink!

And I have to agree. How can you be fine when these molestation allegations are in your past and neither you nor your family have had trained professional help, to truly confront and understand what happened.

As Dr. Lieberman says, “Kids just don’t do this out of the clear blue sky.” Something happened to you. Now, since your whole family went through “one of the most difficult times of [y]our lives”, they really all should have therapy, too. Everyone in your family was affected by this ‘inexcusable’ situation. You all need professional help.

I hope that as an adult, you realize this. If you ever want to truly put your dark past behind you, you need a shrink, as well as prayer.

Do you agree, HollywoodLifers? Let me know.

— Bonnie Fuller