Jill Duggar and her husband, Derick Dillard, explained how her father, Jim Bob Duggar, and the family’s show 19 Kids and Counting caused a huge strain on their marriage.
“It definitely got between us,” Jill, 32, told PEOPLE one week before her tell-all memoir, Counting the Cost, was released on Tuesday, September 12. “No matter your age, you are to obey your parents’ wishes, and you even have to ask them for their blessing for any major moment in your life. That could be buying a house, moving to a different state, where to go to school. We were dealing with this a lot when we were trying to make decisions for our family, and we were really wrestling back and forth with it.”
The Duggar family followed the practices of the Institute in Basic Life Principles (IBLP), which requires children to honor their parents’ requests. During their interview, Derick, 34, agreed with Jill and went on to explain that “whenever [they] were at odds with what her dad thought [they] should be doing with filming, he would say things that would be very damaging.”
“He would weaponize the relationship and say, ‘Is this you Jill, or is this you, Derek?’” Jill’s husband claimed. “‘Are you leading your wife astray and doing things that are not supportive of marriage?’ And I think that was a red flag.”
In Counting the Cost, Derick wrote that filming 19 Kids and Counting “began to feel like a burden” despite their outward appearances at the time. During their interview with the outlet, Jill doubled down on how the show “caused a lot of frustration in [their] marriage.”
“Especially early on, where [Derick] would feel a certain way about filming something,” she continued. “I’d be like, ‘I hear you, I feel you, I also don’t want to do whatever it is they’re asking us to do either. But we have to.’ … I saw how deeply we were in an argument one time, and I was like, ‘Whoa, this is not okay.’”
The spouses also fought to receive the pay they deserved from working on the show, which lead to tense arguments with Jim Bob, 58.
“When I saw how it was affecting our marriage, I think that was another wake-up call for me,” Jill told the outlet. “It was like, ‘Okay, we need to either fight this battle together, or it’s going to rip us apart.’ So yeah, we had to join forces at that point.”
In response to Jill and Derick’s book and its claims about her parents, Jim Bob and his wife, Michelle Duggar, provided a statement to multiple outlets.
“We love all of our children very much,” the pair insisted. “As with any family, few things are more painful than conflicts or problems among those you love. We do not believe the best way to resolve conflicts, facilitate forgiveness and reconciliation, or to communicate through difficulties is through the media or in a public forum so we will not comment.”