Overcoming Obstacles by Enacting Resilience: How Queer Adolescents Respond to Being Estranged From Their Parents

Abstract

Queer adolescents experience compounding complications especially when they are estranged from their parents. Findings from a sample of 40 estranged queer adolescents revealed four triggers, five resilience processes, and three co-occurring relationships between the triggers and processes. Based on these findings, we advance the communication theory of resilience by (a) illustrating resilience enactments with an adolescent population, (b) introducing a new facet of putting alternative logics to work, and (c) arguing how access to LGBTQ+ vocabulary and embeddedness within the LGBTQ+ community can facilitate more and less resilient enactments. We also extend a new qualitative method, thematic co-occurrence analysis, to illuminate thematic ubiquity and inverse relationships between themes. Practical applications for primary/secondary school curriculum, counselors, and public policy are discussed.