I. INTRODUCTION Coherent control of atomic and molecular processes is a subject of considerable ongoing interest[1, 2]. Specifically, a number of successful control scenarios have been theoretically proposed and experimentally implemented. The vast majority of well characterized scenarios are, however, based upon molecules treated in isolation, with the understanding that systems in an external environment are subject to decoherence effects[3, 4] that can be deleterious to control[5]. Decoherence effects of this kind are also detrimental to “quantum technologies”, such as quantum information processing and quantum computing[6] insofar as they cause the loss of the essential quantum characteristics that make these research areas interesting. As a consequence, efforts are ongoing to find suitable mechanisms to reduce or compensate for decoherence effects. For example, several techniques, such as quantum dynamical de- coupling (QDD) [7] and the use of decoherence free subspace (DFS) [8], have been proposed in the quantum information community. However, the QDD method is quite challenging to implement using the present technology, and the DFS requires explicit symmetries in the Hamiltonian, which are not generic. Hence, methods for identifying conditions for states that are resistant to decoherence is of great interest. Indeed, considerable effort has gone into identifying characteristic features of particular system states, interacting with different environments, that lead to stability against deco- herence. Sample approaches include the general predictability sieve approach of Zurek e t al. [9], and predictions of the unusual stability of coherent matter states, low lying eigenstates, and localized states [10, 11] for typical environmental coupling. In this paper we introduce a new perspective, based on overlapping resonances, to under- standing and optimize the resistance of system superposition states to decoherence. The ap- proach applies in the important regime where system-environment coupling is large. Specifi- cally, we show that interference between the overlapping resonances that exist in this regime can be used to build system superposition states that are relatively resistant to decoherence. The extent to which such states are stable against decoherence is shown to directly correlate with the degree to which the system-environment Hamiltonian displays overlapping reso- nances. Thus, even if the system does not possess symmetry properties such as decoherence free subspaces (DFS), states can be constructed which are more resistant to decoherence than are others. 2