'Hardest Time of My Life': Joy-Anna Duggar Forsyth Recalls 'Super Hard' Postpartum Period as Family Was 'Falling Apart'

Joy-Anna Duggar Forsyth still gets emotional when she looks back at the challenges she endured over the last few years.

While appearing alongside her husband Austin Forsyth on The Unplanned Podcast, the former 19 Kids and Counting star opened up about navigating her postpartum period amid hard family trials following the birth of her third child Gunner in May 2023.

A year prior on May 25, 2022, her eldest brother, Josh Duggar, was sentencedto 13 years in prison for receiving and possessing child sexual abuse materials. The disgraced reality star was initially arrested on April 29, 2021 ,and previouslymolested multiple young girls, including sistersJill (Duggar) DillardandJessa (Duggar) Seewald, as a teenager.

In September 2023, Jill released her memoir Counting the Cost detailing her experiences. Last January, sister Jinger Duggar Vuolo published her own memoir, Becoming Free Indeed: My Story of Disentangling Faith from Fear.

"With Gunner, I had a super hard postpartum," Joy-Anna emotionally recalled on the podcast. "It was like the darkest time of my life. Anyway, but it was really good, but it was super hard. And so I feel like I just went through this with the hormone change."

The mother of three said dealing with the changes in her hormones were "super, super hard" and at the same time, "I felt like my family was just falling apart."

"Just my siblings and my parents and all this stuff was super hard at that time," she continued through tears. "And so I came to a point where I was just like, 'What is even real? What do I believe? Li -

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ke this stuff.' "

Joy-Anna said she eventually came to a point her life where she entered a "rebellion" phase and began questioning her faith.

"I was like, 'Okay ... what am I going to believe for myself?' " she recalled. "But I feel like it was good, and I can see now looking back how much God grew me in that season."

When she read Jinger's book, she thought about her own relationship with her spirituality and shared how the Duggar family "grew up with so many standards." Her parents, Jim Bob and Michelle Duggar, "never preached" that she needed to practice "all these things, and then God will accept you. But that's how I took it personally," she said.

"My whole Christianity was always a checklist," she explained. "I gotta read my Bible, check. I gotta pray, check... And so I feel like it all came just crumbling down during my postpartum. My family had a lot of struggles at that time, and then these books come out, and I had to work through these things that I had."

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Joy-Anna shared how she never believed she was going to "question" her faith until she reached a point where she realized she wasn't "perfect, and you don't have it all together, and your world's falling apart."

"That was a super hard time for us, just because I was out of it mentally. I just couldn't handle a lot," she added.

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