This Is How To Have A Resilient Family: 13 Secrets From Research

If you’ve never been in a family crisis, congratulations. You are either:

1. an orphan,
2. lying,
3. due.

And by crisis, I mean full-on, real-deal adversity. Divorce, grief, bankruptcy, etc. The life-wrecking, soul-scraping, “somebody go ahead and unplug me because I cannot” kind of crisis. You’re trying to cobble together some kind of Norman Rockwell-with-an-iPad situation while it feels like the world is burning. Just doing anything you can so your therapist doesn’t write “escalating” in the margins of your file.

Life is hard. Family can be harder. Families, we are told, are the backbone of society, an anatomical metaphor that’s always struck me as unfortunate, since backbones are notoriously prone to disc problems and chronic pain.

But resilient families are the vertebral overachievers, flexing heroically through conflict, financial implosions, and tragedy. They face the same parade of misfortunes as the rest of us but instead of collapsing, they come together. They thrive.

So how can your family be like that?

Given my only relevant qualification here is “once watched Dr. Phil on mute” I found an expert. Froma Walsh is a Professor Emerita at the University of Chicago. Her book is “Strengthening Family Resilience.”

Let’s get to it…

 

1) Relational Resilience

Family resilience is not about being a collection of rugged individualists, each gritting their teeth and pretending they’re the main character in a Mad Max film. Strong families understand that resilience is relational. It’s holding each other, even when you’d rather hold a grudge. They know that adversity is something to be tackled together.

 

2) Normalize And Contextualize Distress

Adversity strikes and everyone becomes the exact version of themselves you secretly hoped they’d outgrown. They yell, panic, or shut down.

And that’s okay. It’s a crisis, right? They’re losing it and you’re frustrated? That’s like blaming someone for flinching when you throw a chair at their head. Instead, see these outbursts as what they are: ordinary reactions to an unbearable situation.

To contextualize is not to condone every tantrum. It’s saying, “Of course you’re upset. Look at what we’re living through.”

 

3) Find Coherence

Coherence means looking at a crisis and going, “This is awful, but it makes sense.” You construct a narrative where the chaos has contours, where the pain has purpose. Because once you label the beast, you can start figuring out where to stab it.

Resilient families construct a story not as a collection of accusations and grievances, but as a shared experience that means something: “That was the time we all broke down, but also the time we figured out how to talk about the hard stuff.”

Nothing is more terrifying than pain you don’t understand. A bad thing you can’t explain becomes an apocalypse. A bad thing you can contextualize becomes a chapter.

The truth is that if a family is going to endure anything beyond mild inconvenience, they need to make meaning out of adversity. Not just survive the bad stuff, but alchemize it into something bearable, maybe even useful.

 

4) Facilitative Appraisal

Sounds like something a bank does before foreclosing but it’s an academic term for the radical idea that you can actually do something about your problems. Having agency. Resilient families develop an inner script that says, “Okay, this sucks, but we can work with it.” Not fix it completely. Not erase the damage. Just manage it. Together.

 

5) Explanatory Attributions

I promise, this is the last term that sounds like it came from a doctoral thesis. This one’s about blame. Specifically, resisting it. Resilient families say, “This happened because a lot of things went wrong at once.” Not “because you’re selfish,” or “because you always do this.” They look for the full picture, the network of causes.

 

6) Future Expectations

Families that survive and thrive believe that the future can be influenced, that their choices matter. They teach their kids that effort counts. That we are not stuck. That mistakes aren’t fatal, they’re just feedback. They don’t pretend bad things won’t happen again. They just trust themselves to face them better when they do.

 

7) Have Hope

Hope means “optimistic bias”, a term that sounds like a cognitive disorder but is, in fact, a recommended mindset. It’s not enough to be realistic. No, you have to squint through the burning wreckage of everything around you and think, “We can do it!” like you’re auditioning for the Disney Channel reboot of your own life.

 

8) Encourage Them

But not the cheap Instagram type of encouragement. We’re talking about the strategic recognition of strength in someone who has forgotten they have any. It’s the active disruption of self-defeating narratives.

The act of affirming someone’s strengths in a moment of despair is not just a kindness; it’s a recalibration. It reminds people that they have done hard things before, and they can do them again. It chips away at the corrosive effects of helplessness and redirects the internal narrative from “I’m a burden” to “I am, however improbably, still useful.”

 

9) Initiative And Perseverance

Resilience isn’t magic. Resilience is built, often laboriously, usually with less help than you’d like, and always in the form of doing something when doing nothing would be easier.

We’d rather think resilience comes from some magical wellspring inside of us. We want to be emotionally buoyant, not operationally responsible. But the problem is, the universe doesn’t care about your intentions. They don’t matter unless you take action. In crisis, togetherness takes work. Not sentiment. Work. Resilience isn’t a feeling; it’s a chore list.

 

10) Master The Possible

Resilient families accept reality, however lousy it might be, and then do the only thing that makes sense: they adapt. They take a long, clear-eyed look at the disaster and say, “Okay. What can we actually fix here?” And then they do that.

Want a resilient family? Then stop acting like life owes you closure, justice, or a warm hug from fate. Start maximizing the scraps of sanity you do control. Accept the mess. Embrace the chaos. Master the possible.

 

11) Don’t Return. Rebound.

You want things to go back to the way they were before the crisis?

Then you don’t want resilience. You want time travel.

Here’s the secret no one tells you about resilience: there is no going back. The shape has changed. You can’t bounce back to the Before Times because the Before Times are gone. Your family isn’t what it was. And if we’re being honest, it never was quite what you thought it was anyway.

This is why Froma Walsh’s concept of “bouncing forward” matters. Because it’s the actual process of resilience, which involves adaptation, not restoration. Rebounding means you have to change.

Resilience isn’t about becoming who you were. It’s about becoming who you need to be next.

 

12) Reorganize

In the wake of a crisis, families tend to become feral. Structure is the first thing to die. Routines? Abandoned like New Year’s resolutions on January 3rd. Birthdays are acknowledged retroactively via Venmo. Mealtimes become erratic. Socks are no longer mated but instead exist in a polyamorous heap in the corner.

But the little things matter. The pancakes on Sunday morning, the dumb jokes on the car ride to school, bedtime stories. These things are emotional infrastructure.

Ever wonder why every religion has rituals? Because rituals tell the brain, “This means something.” They create continuity. They give you a narrative thread to follow when the plot falls apart. Rituals and routines are the breadcrumbs out of the forest.

So reorganize. It’s the stiff-upper-lip cousin of coping. Enforce bedtimes. Yes, even in the apocalypse, we still take out the recycling on Wednesdays. It’s a reclamation of identity. Rituals are the lifelines that remind everyone, especially you, that you’re still a family. They say: “This is who we were. This is who we are trying to be.”

“But that feels inauthentic,” you’ll say. So is deodorant. Use it anyway. You do not wait until you feel better. That’s the whole point. You assign chores again, even though everyone groans and tells you you’re being “controlling.” Because yes, you are being controlling. You are reasserting control over entropy, which is what every organism does when it wants to survive.

 

13) Authoritative Leadership

It’s not about being perfect. It’s about looking like you know what you’re doing long enough for the kids to fall asleep.

But you’re waiting to feel ready. You’re waiting to not feel overwhelmed. You think leadership is something you grow into, once you’ve read enough parenting books or gotten enough sleep. It isn’t. Leadership is what you do anyway.

You make decisions. You set boundaries. You say, “This is what we’re doing,” with the conviction of a cult leader trying to keep morale up as the FBI encircles the compound.

That’s the thing about families: we don’t need perfection, we just need someone to say, “Here’s what we do now.” Even if “what we do” is completely made up and changes next week.

Your job isn’t to have all the answers; it’s to embody the belief that answers exist, and that we’ll figure them out. Yes, it’s theater. But it’s necessary theater.

Okay, we’ve covered a heck of a lot. Let’s round it all up and get the final word on family resilience…

 

Sum Up

Here’s how to make your family resilient…

• Relational Resilience: It’s not about being resilient individuals; it’s about being a resilient team.
• Normalize And Contextualize Distress: In a crazy situation the real crazy is not expecting crazy reactions. Accept them.
• Find Coherence: It isn’t about pretending everything happens for a reason. It’s about giving it a reason. The crisis needs to be turned into a story you can eventually laugh about while passing mashed potatoes.
• Facilitative Appraisal: Having agency. “We can do something about this.”
• Explanatory Attributions: Ask, “What’s our pattern here?” instead of, “Who’s the moron this time?”
• Future Expectations: “We can make a difference. We can make things better.”
• Have Hope: Hope is not logical. Hope is not reasonable. Hope is a refusal to do the math. But hope is essential.
• Encouragement: Say something nice. Spot the potential. Acknowledge the strength. Commend the effort. Even if it burns your tongue.
• Initiative And Perseverance: Resilience is a verb. And nobody gets a gold star for hoping things work out while waiting for someone else to make the first move.
• Master the Possible: It’s the cranky, no-BS version of the Serenity Prayer: Grant me the power to shut up about things I can’t fix and do something useful about the stuff I can.
• Rebound: Don’t bounce back. Bounce forward. Or lurch forward. Drag yourself forward if you have to.
• Reorganize: Even in the midst of crisis, someone has to take out the garbage before it develops consciousness and starts paying taxes. Structure matters. Rituals matter. Go make dinner. Leftovers are for quitters.
• Authoritative Leadership: The Noble Lie of the Functional Parent: “I may not know what we’re doing, but I will act like it on your behalf.”

We like to imagine love as something fierce and dramatic — racing through airports, impassioned speeches in the rain. But in families, love is this quieter, weirder thing. It’s being chef, therapist, janitor, motivational speaker, and unpaid Uber driver. It’s picking up someone’s dirty socks again even though you said you wouldn’t. It’s standing in the kitchen, dazed, holding a half-eaten waffle, and realizing, for reasons you can’t always articulate, you would die for these lunatics.

Resilience, in this sense, is not an innate trait. It’s a discipline. And like all disciplines, it requires sacrifice. The boring, unglamorous stuff: setting boundaries, offering forgiveness, enduring tedium, enduring each other. It’s about fighting, yes, but fighting fair. Not drawing blood but drawing closer. It’s knowing exactly how to press each other’s buttons and doing it anyway, but still showing up when someone needs a ride to the airport at 4 a.m. with no questions asked except “Do you want McDonald’s?”

And there’s a comfort, however perverse, in knowing that no matter how bad things get, someone else remembers the exact same fight over Monopoly in 1998. That even when mom’s losing it, you can exchange The Sibling Side-Eye of Solidarity. And even when it seems you can agree on nothing else, there’s the shared hatred of your aunt’s new spouse.

It’s the quiet understanding that we’re all here, doing our best, even when it feels like we’re barely holding on. That’s what resilience means: to keep holding on, even when you’re not sure where the strength is coming from, or how much longer you can do it.

Because the truth is, the most resilient families aren’t the ones that keep everything together. They’re the ones who fall apart… and keep working to reassemble themselves anew.

That’s it. That’s the secret.

Now go. Someone’s crying in the hallway again.