Standing their ground. Jill Duggar and her husband, Derick Dillard admit they haven’t stepped foot in the Duggar family’s “big house” in a long time.
“We haven’t actually been over there in a while, probably like a couple years,” the reality TV star, 29, said in a YouTube Q&A video posted to her Dillard Family Official channel on Monday, March 21. “Other than once to grab some mail.”
According to Duggar, the pair’s reasoning for staying away from the family home is complicated. Besides COVID-19 forcing them to keep their circle small, the 19 Kids & Counting alum said restrictions are in place to keep them away.
“We [also] feel like in this season of life we have to prioritize our mental and emotional health, and our threshold is a little bit lower. … We’d like for it not to stay that way but that’s where we are now,” she noted in the video.
“There’s a lot of triggers [at the house],” Dillard, 32, added.
The couple, who share sons Israel, 5, and Samuel, 3, tied the knot in June 2014. From 2008 to 2015, the Arkansas native and her family starred on TLC’s 19 Kids and Counting. In 2015, a spin-off show, Counting On, featuring Jill and sisters Jessa, Jinger and Joy-Anna Duggar, premiered. Two years later, the Dillards dropped out of the show.
In October 2020, the reality star claimed in another YouTube video that she and Dillard weren’t paid for their TV work until around the time they decided to quit. In a separate Q&A posted that month, she revealed the duo’s reasoning for leaving the show in the first place, stating that they realized they needed more control over their lives.
“We had to make a decision at that time to kind of put the show aside … to pursue our own goals and everything. That’s when we made that decision,” the mother of two said.
As for how her large family reacted, Duggar noted that “some distancing” had occurred.
“We’re not on the best terms with some of my family. We’ve had some disagreements, but we’re working toward healing,” she said. “We’re having to kind of just take some time and heal.”
The Growing Up Duggar author told Us Weekly exclusively in January that she and Dillard started therapy to work out some of their issues with the family.
“There were just a lot of things that we were working through and then learning to develop boundaries with even just extended family,” she explained. “[There’s] a little bit of drama there. … At that point, we were like, ‘We really need somebody outside the picture to speak into our lives to help us sort things out.’”
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