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Both Jinger Duggar and Joy-Anna Duggar are struggling to find happiness in this dark time for their family.
Josh is in prison where he belongs after receiving and possessing child sex-abuse material (CSAM).
Joseph has been arrested and is awaiting trial for allegedly molesting a 9-year-old girl.
The sisters never expected to see these family scandals be so dark and twisted.
‘Just sickening, horrible things’
On the Wednesday, September 2 episode of The Jinger & Jeremy Podcast, Jinger and Joy-Anna Duggar spoke about dark times in their family.
“Family stuff has probably been the other thing,” Joy said of the hardest periods of her life.
The first thing, she said, was losing her pregnancy 20 weeks in back in 2019. Joy is currently pregnant with Baby #4.
“Like, we’ve had wave after wave of just sickening, horrible things happening,” Joy acknowledged.
In addition to family ties to their disgraced brothers, Joy was also particularly close with Kendra Caldwell, Joseph’s wife.
Despite everything that the entire world knows about Josh, it sounds like Joy felt surprised by the arrests of both brothers — but especially Joseph.
“And it really just sends me into a spiral,” she admitted.
“Those have been really hard seasons,” Joy expressed.
As we have previously explained, fringe evangelical and especially fundamentalist communities in America sometimes use “seasons” to refer to experiences or chapters of their lives. This is in-group language designed to set them apart from the rest of humanity.
“And I feel like I’m coming out of that finally with this last run we went through of family stuff,” Joy assessed.
Joy-Anna and Jinger Duggar never imagined this growing up
“It just feels like, you know, sin is so dark and so heavy,” Joy-Anna explained to her sister, Jinger Duggar.
Christianity holds a belief in sin, a concept of spiritual wrongdoing that distances adherents from their god.
Sin can cover a wide range of activities, including events with no victim — though not in the case of Josh’s crimes or the charges against Joseph.
“It’s hard to find true joy… it’s like, happiness is circumstantial,” Joy lamented.
She added: “It is really hard to find joy in those hard, hard moments.”
Something that we should all keep in mind as Joy and Jinger process this is that they were raised to believe that they were set apart and special.
Crimes — particularly depraved acts of sexual predation — were the result of spiritual corruption, and something that happened in the outside world and not within their cult.
That was obviously never true. In fact, the founder of IBLP resigned in disgrace for … exactly the reasons that you’d guess.
But when you grow up believing that your life of isolation in an abusive cult somehow protects you from wrongdoing only to find out that it often does the opposite, that can be hard to process.
And anyone would struggle if not one but two of their brothers were (alleged) monsters who prey upon little girls. That’s true no matter how many brothers one has.