Anyone who’s watched 19 Kids & Counting or Counting On already knows that Jim Bob and Michelle Duggar‘s kids have had a far different upbringing than most kids their age. Because the family rarely watched TV and movies, more than one of the adult siblings has admitted to having a lot of catching up to do involving pop culture – and that was just one of the areas in their lives they discovered they were clueless about.
Now, Jinger Duggar is opening up about how it affected how she related to other adults in a new interview with People.
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In her new book, People Pleaser: Breaking Free from the Burden of Imaginary Expectations, which was released in January, Jinger has shared a lot about the ways her people-pleasing tendencies have had a negative impact on her life. While talking to People, Jinger said that once she and Jeremy were married and she was out on her own, she realized that wanting to be the peacemaker and never speaking her mind only led to her “isolating” herself.
“Whenever we were first married, I remember just being afraid of almost everyone. Afraid to trust them,” she told the magazine. “I think some of that is from being in the public eye, right? You have a level of self-protection. But I realized that it went to a very unhealthy place.”
This also made it hard for her to make new friends. Because she and Jeremy were living in Laredo, Texas – a totally different state and far away from her friends and family back in Arkansas – that led to a lot of loneliness at the time.
“I was so afraid to go to coffee or go to lunch with someone because I was protecting myself from other people being able to criticize me or to think wrongly of me or to see that, yeah, maybe I was sheltered and I didn’t have all the knowledge that they did. I was embarrassed about that,” she said.
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Finally, two years into their marriage, Jinger began questioning who she is.
“I’m living in a clone of who people think I am and who they want me to be and I actually want to see, okay, who is Jinger and what things do I enjoy now? What do I believe about certain topics?” she said.
Though she was nervous to bring her feelings and fears to Jeremy at first, she was happy when she finally did.
“I think he really helped me to grow in that area because [he would say] ‘I don’t know who Jinger is. I would hear what you’re thinking about, what things do you like, what things [do] you not like. Please tell me if I do anything that annoys you. Tell me,'” she said. “And I was like, ‘No, heck no. I’m not doing the perfect wife.’ But, he really challenged me just to be myself.”
As she told People, she’s now in a much better place.
“That gave me so much freedom to be able to open up and be vulnerable and then, to be able to build genuine relationships where now I have a core group of friends and us moms go out and do fun things,” she said.
Good for Jinger for taking that step, even though it couldn’t have been easy. Judging by her social media posts, it really does seem as if she’s found a great group of friends, all thanks to learning how to be herself.
