Editorial: Family Resilience

• Date: 01 December 2016
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/famp.12268
• Published date: 01 December 2016
• Author: Jay L. Lebow

DECEMBER 2016 VOLUME 55 NUMBER 4

Editorial: Family Resilience

JAY L. LEBOW*

Fam Proc 55:613–615, 2016

In 1982, Froma Walsh had a remarkable idea. Although almost the entirety of the early

family therapy movement had been focused on pathology in families, she published a

book called Normal Family Processes (Walsh, 1982). This book launched a sea change in

the field of family therapy, moving from a largely deficit centered viewpoint to a primary

foundation in family strengths and resilience. That frame has been emphasized further as

Normal Family Processes has evolved throughout several editions (Walsh, 1993, 2003b,

2012) and as Walsh has published further articles and a landmark book focused on family

resilience (Walsh, 1996, 2003a, 2006, 2016).

This issue features a special section edited by Dr. Walsh, which extends the work

focused on family resilience. As Walsh highlights (2016), family resilience is more than

simply the sum of the resilience of individual family members in the wake of difficulties

and crisis. Resilience represents a shared process in which the family collectively serves

as an agent promoting coping, growth, evolution, and change. In contrast to the view in

the broader culture and professional community that often emphasizes the individuals

and their decontextualized coping, the collective shared processes of the family are often

the reliable foundation for how life’s challenges are negotiated.

Today, considerable attention in our theories, science, and methods of clinical practice

focuses on such collective family processes of resilience. It is remarkable, even with in our

own recent articles, how many emphasize the process of family resilience across diverse

foci such as gender variance (Gray, Sweeney, Randazzo, & Levitt, 2016), Latino families

(Killoren, Wheeler, Updegraff, Rodr

ıguez de J

esus, & McHale, 2015; Updegraff & Uma~

na-

Taylor, 2015), having family members with schizophrenia (Olson, 2015), unmarried

fathers (Marczak, Becher, Hardman, Galos, & Ruhland, 2015), living in nations at war

(Charl

es, 2015), preventing externalizing in teenagers (Holtrop, McNeil Smith, & Scott,

2015), and cardiac risk reduction (Sher et al., 2014). Most recent family treatm ent models

typically also center on engaging family resilience (Dickerson, 2014; Imber-Black, 2014;

Liddle, 2014; Madsen, 2014; Roberts et al., 2014; Sexton & Datchi, 2014), in contrast to

*Editor, Family Process, and Family Institute at Northwestern.

Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Jay Lebow, Family Institute at North-

western, 618 Library Place, Evanston, IL 60201. E-mail: j-lebow@northwestern.edu.

613

Family Process, Vol. 55, No. 4, 2016 ©2016 Family Process Institute

doi: 10.1111/famp.12268