Emily B. Visher, 83; Helped Found Support Group for Stepfamilies

Emily B. Visher, a psychologist whose co-founding of a national advocacy and support group for stepfamilies was driven in part by her own “Brady Bunch”-style remarriage, died of cancer Oct. 5 at her Walnut Creek home. She was 83.

Visher and her husband, John, founded the Stepfamily Assn. of America in 1979 after 20 years of experience, not always successful, combining eight children from previous marriages into their family.

“We really do feel [stepfamilies] don’t have a warm fuzzy place in our society,” she once said.

Visher and her husband wrote seven books on stepfamilies. The national nonprofit organization they started has 1,000 members in 28 states and Canada, including 18 chapters in California.

The Vishers each had four children when they married in 1959. Three of John’s children remained with their mother, giving the Vishers a household of five children, ages 5 to 15.

Because she was a clinical psychologist and he was a psychiatrist, they thought they could easily manage the challenge of creating a harmonious stepfamily.

“We were mental health professionals. We knew all about feelings,” she said in 1984.

What they thought would be a piece of cake turned out to be, John Visher said, “a piece of dry toast.”

It took them about two weeks to find out that two families do not instantly make one big happy family, even if the parents are professionals trained in smoothing out the bumps in relationships.

They pushed togetherness, overlooking the fact that they needed to build new one-on-one relationships with each child. And they thought their children would automatically share their own happiness.

“We did not see it from the children’s point of view,” she said.

As they struggled to resolve conflicts in their new family, they realized how little was known about how stepfamilies operate and cope. A teacher once called them in for a conference because their son had a different last name and she assumed he was not receiving enough love. The ignorance was so basic that an attorney they met insisted that John could not be a stepfather unless the biological father was dead.

At the same time, the number of stepfamilies began to burgeon in the 1970s as divorce rates rose. Friends with stepchildren began to seek the Vishers’ advice.

In 1977 they formed the nucleus of what was to become the Stepfamily Assn. of California. Two years later, they organized the Stepfamily Assn. of America.

The purpose of the group is to provide educational programs and to lobby for what has become a sizable chunk of the U.S. population: An estimated 1 in 3 Americans today is a stepparent, stepchild, step-sibling or other member of a stepfamily, according to the association’s Web site.

The group also encourages therapists to recognize that stepfamilies are different from intact families and require different approaches.

Visher said she once heard of a therapist who told a troubled stepmother to assert herself in disciplinary matters as if she were the biological mother. Visher believed that was poor advice.

“From our perspective, that’s diametrically opposite to what would have been helpful,” she said in a 1993 interview. “What [the stepmother] needed to do was back off. The father was the one that should take responsibility.”

The daughter of a mining engineer and a psychological counselor, Emily Visher was born in Norwich, Conn., and grew up in Britannia Beach, British Columbia. She earned a bachelor’s degree in chemistry at Wellesley College in 1940 and was a research chemist for a clinic in Birmingham, Ala, before her first marriage, in 1941. The couple divorced a year after she earned a doctorate in psychology from UC Berkeley in 1958.

In 1993, the Vishers were honored by the American Assn. for Marriage and Family Therapy with an award for Distinguished Professional Contribution to Marriage and Family Therapy.

In addition to her husband, Visher is survived by seven children and stepchildren: Sharon Gross, Wendy Smith, Bill Visher, David Philbrick, Mary Visher, Larry Philbrick and David Visher. She also leaves 11 grandchildren, four step-grandchildren, and a brother, Jackson Browning.

The family requests that memorial contributions be made to the Stepfamily Assn. of America, 650 J St., Suite 205, Lincoln, NE 68508.