Jinger Duggar Suffered ‘Identity Crisis’ After Leaving Duggar Home and Moving In With Jeremy Vuolo

Jinger Vuolo (née Duggar) suffered an “identity crisis” after moving out of the Duggar family home and revealed how her upbringing led to her having “the hardest” first year of marriage to Jeremy Vuolo.

“I’m looking back 8 years in [and] going, ‘That year was a breeze.’ … But then you [said] last night, ‘No, I think it was the hardest,’’’ Jeremy, 37, on the Wednesday, September 18 episode of their “Jinger & Jeremy” podcast. “And I think I agree with you. We faced so much adjustment and so much change.”

Jinger, 30, clarified it had “nothing to do” with her relationship with the former professional athlete, but was instead more connected to her ties to the Duggar family. Jinger is one of Jim Bob Duggar and Michelle Duggar’s 19 children and cameras began capturing her strict Fundamentalist Christian upbringing on TLC’s series 17 Kids and Counting in 2008. The show was later renamed to 18 Kids and Counting and finally 19 Kids and Counting as the Duggar family continued to grow. However, the show was canceled in 2015.

Jeremy and Jinger got married in November 2016. After the wedding, they moved into their Laredo, Texas, home — which was Jinger’s first time living without her large family.

“I realized in that time [that] I was afraid to go to coffee with a friend,” Jinger revealed to her husband. “I was petrified in fear of having to do things by myself because I had a security blanket of having people around me all the time, whether that was siblings or even a close friend.”

The reality TV alum said she was “used to that setting” until “something shifted” after leaving her “comfort zone” for the first time.

“It was really hard. I had to figure out who I was as a person,” Jinger said. “I had the identity crisis of, ‘OK. I know who I was in my family, but who am I as an individual now?’”

This led Jinger down a long path of untangling the fundamentalist teachings she’d grown up learning. “I was realizing that some of these things that I thought I really held dear, like the teachings of [Institute in Basic Life Principles founder] Bill Gothard, I’m realizing I’m not believing that anymore,” the mom of two explained. “And that was a huge shift.”

Jinger detailed her reexamination of her youthful beliefs in her 2023 memoir, Becoming Free: Indeed. In the pages, the 19 Kids and Counting alum shared that her views on religion began to change in 2017 and called the teachings she grew up under “harmful.” IBLP teaches followers to not participate in activities such as dancing and dating. Meanwhile, women are expected to be submissive and obedient to their husbands.

Jinger would later admit she would feel “terrified” going against God and said the religion had “a lot of cult-like tendencies.”

“Fear was a huge part of my childhood,” the TLC personality told People in a January 2023 interview. “[Bill’s] teachings, in a nutshell, are based on fear and superstition and leave you in a place where you feel like, ‘I don’t know what God expects of me. The fear kept me crippled with anxiety. I was terrified of the outside world.”