Family Resilience Counseling

Program Overview

The Doctor of Christian Counseling in Family Resilience Counseling turns the counselor's attention from what is wrong with a family to what helps families endure. Every family faces adversity — illness, unemployment, migration, deployment, disability, disaster, and death — and research consistently finds that many families not only survive these crises but grow stronger through them. Resilience counseling studies how that happens and helps more families get there. Froma Walsh's family resilience framework provides the core: the belief systems that make meaning of adversity and sustain hope, the organizational patterns of flexibility, connectedness, and resources, and the communication processes of clarity, open emotional sharing, and collaborative problem-solving. Students set it beside the family stress tradition, from Reuben Hill's ABC-X model to the Double ABC-X of Hamilton McCubbin and Joan Patterson, Ann Masten's account of resilience as ordinary magic, the research on strong families, John Rolland's model of families facing chronic illness, and the protective factors used in prevention programs. Counseling methods are strengths-based and solution-focused: exception and scaling questions, family meetings, psychoeducation, and resilience-building groups. Faith is one of the resources resilient families name most consistently, and congregations are among the most important networks around them; the program treats both as assets to be strengthened rather than assumed. The doctoral project builds or evaluates a resilience program for families in the student's setting — military, refugee, medical, or congregational. Graduates direct family support ministries, prevention programs, and community partnerships. The degree is formation for counseling ministry and does not confer a license.

Core Courses

• FRC 801 — Family Resilience: Theory and Research (6 credits)
• FRC 812 — Family Stress, Crisis, and Adaptation (6 credits)
• FRC 824 — Strengths-Based and Solution-Focused Counseling (6 credits)
• FRC 836 — Families Facing Illness, Disability, and Loss (6 credits)
• FRC 848 — Faith, Congregations, and Family Strength (5 credits)
• FRC 860 — Research Methods in Family Resilience (4 credits)
• FRC 899 — Doctoral Project in Family Resilience Counseling (24 credits)

Admission Requirements

• Master's degree in counseling, pastoral care, ministry, psychology, or a related field
• Experience in counseling, pastoral care, chaplaincy, or lay care ministry
• Statement of purpose describing the people you care for and the question you want to pursue
• Current resume or ministry profile
• Official transcripts from prior institutions when available
• Signed acknowledgment that the degree does not by itself confer a license to practise counseling in any jurisdiction