Couple Resilience

"As our understanding of resilience grows, it is timely that we have a fresh look at the special ways couples create resilient systems that are able to cope with complex adversity. Building on previous work on family resilience, this volume integrates new ways we're understanding couples and their collective capacity to cope with diverse forms of stress. With experts drawn from diverse fields like family therapy, neuroscience, and the broader social and psychological sciences, and with plenty of examples and provocative arguments, this wonderful collection of authors shows that relational resilience among intimate partners is unique from the resilience of each individual alone."(Prof. Michael Ungar, Dalhousie University, Halifax) "In Couple Resilience: Emerging Perspectives, Karen Skerrett and Karen Fergus apply the lens of resilience to a wide array of couple contexts and issues. The distinguished group of chapter authors nicely blend theory, clinical wisdom, and research in focusing on timely topics such as resilience in LGBTQ couples, forgiveness, and couples facing illness, as well as the links between neurobiology in resilience. Throughout, the central role of collaborative coping in couples emerges." (Prof. Jay Lebow, Northwestern University, Evanston)

This distinctive volume expands our understanding of couple resilience by identifying and exploring specific mechanisms unique to intimate relationships that facilitate positive adaptation to life challenges.

This distinctive volume expands our understanding of couple resilience by identifying and exploring specific mechanisms unique to intimate relationships that facilitate positive adaptation to life challenges. Committed partnerships represent a unique form of relational alliance that offers an opportunity and challenge to go beyond the self - to develop as individuals and as a relationship. The contributors to this volume represent a range of perspectives that integrate conventional relationship science and innovative empirical and theoretical work on the importance of meaning-making, narrative construction, intersubjectivity, forgiveness, and positive emotion in couple life. The volume also offers a unique anchor point - ‘We-ness’ as it relates to the intersection between shared, personal identity and well-being. Under-examined relational contexts such as resilience among LGBT partners and sexual resilience during illness adds further refinement of thought and application.