I can relate to Jinger Duggar's religious trauma. I grew up in a white, mostly male evangelical church.

• Jinger Duggar Vuolo's memoir detailing her upbringing was released on Tuesday.
• I grew up in an evangelical church and was told boys' feelings and actions were my responsibility.

Jinger Duggar Vuolo's memoir has just been released — she's promised in recent interviews that in it she'd disclose what it was like to grow up in a cultlike religious environment. She left the Institute in Basic Life Principles, a nondenominational Christian organization, in 2017. Her book is appropriately titled "Becoming Free Indeed: My Story of Disentangling Faith from Fear."

Maybe you're a longtime fan of the Duggars' reality-TV show "19 Kids and Counting," or perhaps you've followed the horrifying story of Jim Bob and Michelle Duggar's oldest child, Josh, who's serving a 12-year prison sentence for possessing child pornography. Or maybe, like me, you've always had an affinity for cousin Amy, the family's original rebel.

The Duggars appealed to me as a viewer because I can relate to the religious trauma that Vuolo divulges in her new book and has hinted at in interviews. If you've spent any time on TikTok lately, you've probably seen videos about religious deconstruction, exvangelicals, and religious trauma. In essence, those of us who grew up "in the faith" or "in the church" have something to say about what we were taught — and a lot about what we've had to unlearn.

I felt like everything was my fault

The white, male, Republican evangelical church I grew up in felt to me like one of the most toxic spaces in America, especially for teenage girls.

We were taught that we were in charge of boys' feelings and actions. We needed to analyze every outfit we wore, making sure we didn't give any of our youth-group members any reason to be tempted — nothing too short, too tight, too transparent, or too suggestive. At church camp, boys could swim topless in trunks, while girls had to wear nonwhite T-shirts over our swimsuits. Our bodies were extreme sources of shame.

Being in charge of boys' thoughts was not only exhausting but directly tied to how God felt about us. We didn't want to let God down and lead a brother in Christ astray. We had to make sure the guys didn't experience any lustful thoughts, and how we dressed (including how much makeup we wore) affected their spiritual well-being.

Girls had a big burden to bear. Boys got a free pass — even though they were expected to one day be strong leaders of their heteronormative households.

Divorce, sex before marriage, homosexuality, cursing, and so much more were sins — and it was on us, teenagers, to ensure we didn't "go down the wrong path." We were not taught how our bodies actually worked; we were commanded to "stay on the straight and narrow." We were expected to be actively and vocally pro-life, yet we were clueless about sex, aside from knowing that having it was sinful.

It all changed for me when I became a mom

I can't even begin to describe to you the damage that some religious teachings do to a person, especially a vulnerable child. I admit I didn't even realize how troublesome my evangelical-church-culture upbringing was until I became a parent. I was suddenly in charge of my children, including their spiritual teaching and wellness. Now what?

Like many evangelicals who grew up in a patriarchal, white church, I've done lots of deconstructing. I've had to tear apart my faith, dividing it into what was truly God and what was from selfish men who ultimately wanted power, not freedom for their congregants, especially the teen girls. If we would have had true salvation, we would have been dangerous to the men in charge.

Like Vuolo, I am still a Christian. But I'm a very different Christian than I was as a teenager. I pray that the work I've done to overcome wrong teachings transfers to my children understanding true Christianity and living a life of freedom through their faith.