William Liu, Ph.D. Associate Professor, College of Education, Psychological & Quantitative Foundations, University of Iowa

Transcription

1 William Liu, Ph.D. Associate Professor, College of Education, Psychological & Quantitative Foundations, University of Iowa Interviewed by Carlos P. Zalaquett, Ph.D., L.M.H.C Department of Psychological & Social Foundations University of South Florida, Tampa CZ: Doctor Liu, what defines you as a person and as a professional? WL: You know, I've grown into this more lately, and I think what defines me as a person and as a professional is my role as a teacher (college professor), which I enjoy very much. I enjoy the mentoring process and the teaching process, as well as the research process. All of that allows me to be involved in the lives of students whom I know will be going out and will be doing good things, positive things for their communities. My particular role in it is, of course, to help them become much more tuned to themselves as multicultural individuals so they can then expand their practice to work better with different communities in diversity issues. CZ: Thus, your role as a teacher is central to your self-definition. WL: It is. However, for me being a professional and an individual, a member of my family and my community... all of those things constitute a whole in some way. In other words, I don't really see a distinction between personal and professional; I sort of see them very much together as one aspect of my life. CZ: You see all of them as defining who you are. Of course, there is always a process behind this; what led you to become the person you are? WL: It was a combination of family factors and mentors. First, growing up in a family that valued education and the learning process in itself; and, then, meeting a number of different mentors throughout my undergraduate and my doctoral career, and as well as my professional career. They really have been very encouraging and just wonderful role models. I look to them in many ways to see how I would want to be as a professional. Really, for me is a combination of all those different pieces that have come together: my family, my relationship with my wife, and my wonderful mentors. CZ: You mentioned the mentors you had, were they diverse in terms of their backgrounds?

2 WL: I had mentors that were from different diverse backgrounds and were very important at particular developmental points in my career, as well as in my life. In college, for instance, my very first mentors, who really helped me orient myself to become much more student oriented were a White woman as well as an Asian American woman, one of which was in student affairs, the other one was an Asian psychology professor, and the other one was a Black man. And when I was an undergraduate student those particular individuals served a great function, a great role in my life. Then, when I got into my master's program, the major mentors for me were White women. They were very culturally aware; they modeled openness, empathy, and cultural sensitivity so I thought that was terrific and I think it was a good challenge for me as well. Then, in my doctoral program I started off with a White male mentor but the one that really made the most impact was the person I eventually graduated with, Dr. Donald Pope Davis. I would say that he was the one that really shaped my professional career and my professional life, and my orientation. CZ: What are your major contributions to our field? WL: The major piece for me would be my work around social class and classism. Also, my interest in broadening our understanding of multiculturalism, social justice, and advocacy include a more coherent understanding of how class, social economic status, and classism operate in people's lives. It is one of those omnipresent but often invisible types of diversity that people have a difficult time understanding. We talked about social class a lot but we just didn't have a theory, so I would say my major contribution in terms of multicultural competencies and multiculturalism in general is around the issue of social class, classism, and poverty. CZ: I'm sure you faced some challenges as you become the person you are, which challenges were the most distinctive and what helped you made it through these challenges? WL: The biggest challenge for me was in terms of this particular issue with the contribution to multiculturalism. This has been the biggest issue. When I brought the issue up of social class and classism to various faculty when I was in graduate school, people generally liked the idea but they didn't know what to do with it. And they didn't know how to mentor me. They didn't really know how to direct me and help me develop the idea. The biggest challenge for me was rather than to look to them to be the mentor and the guidance to develop this idea, I had to deal with the frustration that there was really nobody that I could turn to; and I had to go find it on my own and become my own expert in that area. So I think the biggest challenge was to essentially start from zero and just start reading the literature. I spent years and years before I could even do any writing at all. I'd just read and read, and read until I got a better understanding of where social class was in terms of the field of counseling and psychology. And the realization I came to, you know, was that it was nowhere, we just didn't have any of it at all. CZ: A big challenge indeed for a graduate student. WL: Yes. I think it's hard for anybody as a graduate student to just get a sense of what you want to do and where you want to go, and then to find the mentors that can help you. Imagine when

3 there is nobody that knows how to help you in this process. I think this is one of the biggest challenges. CZ: Sometimes, when I interview colleagues they share that they didn't have a mentor or somebody who really understood their personal views. Did you experience anything like that? WL: I think I've been fortunate in the sense that when Dr. Pope Davis was around I really had somebody I could turn to and talk to. I think he and I communicated well; he was a very good support, emotional and also professional support. Also, I think I had a lot of people around that I could turn to for that support. Just the intellectual challenge itself was the most difficult because there was just nowhere to go with it. I think that was the biggest challenge for me. It wasn't that they didn't want to or it wasn't that they didn't have any idea, I don't think so... I think they understood the importance of it, but maybe this was... CZ: Not at the forefront of their thinking... WL: Exactly, thank you. It just wasn't right there. But once you put the theory out there and you put the ideas out there, you can cluster them together so people could understand better; then, it becomes a very exciting topic for people to be able to talk about. I think that my feeling at the time was their knowledge reflected the general consensus about social class issues, it's all over the place, but they didn't know where to start with something like this. CZ: That's one of your major contributions to the multicultural field. What led you to an awareness of the multicultural and social justice movement? WL: I don't know if there was a particular one issue. I think in general my energies were mostly spend, actually not even dealing with specifically social class and poverty issues, but they were mostly focused around the developing identity of the Asian American community. So I spent the latter part of my undergraduate as well as my graduate career essentially focused on Asian American issues. And, in some ways, it was a developmental sort of process for me as well. CZ: In which way? WL: In the beginning, when I took that on it was very much focused on issues of race. I really thought race was everything, in terms of Asian Americans. Then, as things went on, as time went on, and as I got more into the issues, it just broadened. It was race and gender, and then race and social class, and then I started looking at the social class issues and they became much more important. But I don't know if there was any particular one person or situation that led me to the multicultural movement. I've always been drawn to something like that. I can't point to any racist incident because there are many, but not any one that was the tipping point. I always found myself very much interested in issues of race and gender. CZ: I get the sense that at least with regards to classism and social class, the major challenge was that these issues were not under the field's radar at that time? Thus, the

4 challenge was of bring into the field a multicultural dimensions that needed to be considered. WL: Right, exactly. Also, part of it was something that I wanted to become. I saw myself early in my doctoral career reflecting on what I wanted. I wanted to see myself as a professor and I wanted to try to understand a particular area that I wanted to make my own, because that's what we do as faculty, right? CZ: That is a well established part of what we do as professors. WL: Yes. We create these niches for ourselves that we become experts in. And I thought for me it was going to be around issues of Asian Americans, and then I thought it was going to be around masculinity, but the more I went into it I really found myself developing this area of social class and classism. When I think back about it that really drove me as well as, you know, this is an area that's undeveloped. I thought no one knows how to talk about it; here's a place where I can at least start the discussion about it. I don't necessarily need to be the expert in how I conceptualize it but at least we can start the dialogue about social class, classism, and inequality. CZ: I will come back to this in a moment. Before, let me ask you, what are your reflections about the status of multiculturalism and social justice in our field today, and where do you think these areas should go in the future? WL: I'm of two minds about this. In one hand, I really do feel that the psychologists and counselors become much more aware of the need for multiculturalism, and I think the training has reflected that as well. Many students also understand the need that they have to be culturally competent. On the other hand, I also understand that there's some resistance to the whole field of multiculturalism in general. So I'm optimistic, but I'm cautiously optimistic about where we are. CZ: Can you explain this more? WL: Here is the reason that drives my cautious optimism. I do think students understand the need for multiculturalism, I also think that students have also taken it on as something that's... I hate to use this term... they like to think of it as sort of a "sexy topic" for them to be associated with. But just because they can talk about multiculturalism doesn't mean that they've really integrated or internalized multiculturalism and social justice. I think the words are out there and they like to talk about it, and they like to use it, but it doesn't necessarily mean that it reflects an internal, deep process that's really transformative for them. So I'm a little cautiously optimistic about it. I don't know if that makes sense. CZ: I think I understand. What would you like to see happening in the future in terms of multiculturalism and social justice? WL: I think that multiculturalism really has to get out into the other fields before it starts to really take stronger roots. I really do think it has to make its way into, for instance, areas of medicine and how we practice health related issues. The more it starts to get integrated into that

5 kind of dialogue, the better. I think psychology in some ways can affect the medical approach to caregiving. If medicine starts to really take it on and the practitioners really start to see the importance of multiculturalism in how they see their practice; that will be a tipping point for multiculturalism. Also, we really need to take a stand beyond psychology. You know, we work with a lot of psychologists right now, and many of our doctoral students who end up in health sciences, health psychology, and medicine can start talking about multiculturalism to get them interested in changing their approach. Many of our students work in hospitals and I think doctors just aren't interested in it. It's easy just to dismiss it and I think we really need to make that push into these health care areas. CZ: Going back into your area of expertise, please share with us your thoughts about social class and classism. WL: The way I started to look at social class was I started to review the literature in psychology and counseling, and I found that a lot of what we used, a lot of our conceptualizations of social class is based upon how sociologists and professionals in other fields have identified and understood social class. Psychologists hadn't really developed their own unique understanding of it. For instance, when psychologists had written about social class and even when they talk about it, they focus on major indices of social class such as income, education level, and occupation. Using those three indicators we create a social class stratification of lower class, middle class, upper middle class, and upper class. So we assume that education, income, and occupation, or some level of those fit very well into these different classes. And what I found the research saying is that for one, there's no coherent theory around social class the psychologists have developed. There's not even a coherent theory of social class in general. Two, the objective indices of income, education, and occupation, have little relevance or little correlation with lower class, middle class, and upper class. They don't fit very well. As Brown has talked about it, it doesn't affect the class, it doesn't create any particular class, so it has a very low correlation. And the other two pieces that I found are, first, if you use income, education, and occupation, it really relegates social class and classism issues to be only an adult issue, when in fact we know that kids and adolescents don't have their own income, they're all in the same educational level, they don't have an occupation, but they still experience social class, and they even perpetrate classism. And, then, the last piece is that even though we talk about social class we rarely even talked about classism as a co-construct to social class. We talk about classism as one thing and social class as another thing, but we rarely talk about them together. It would be similar to talking about race and never mentioning racism at all in your writing. And it'd be impossible because race is a construct as well as a variable of racism. You can't talk about one without the other because they're both related to each other. My research and my writing looked at developing a theory around social class and classism. So I've developed the theory that talks about social classes different aspects but also links it to different levels of classism. I choose social class instead of socioeconomic status in part because literature shows that there's no coherent theory that says social class is one thing and socioeconomic status is another thing. In fact, people use those two terms synonymously. Also,

6 it's operationalized in so many different ways there's no coherence between the two terms. So I teach social class because it's my belief that people do classify people into different groups, and it's easier for them to talk about social class and classism instead of socioeconomic status and classism. Also, I talk about social class worldview. My particular point of view is that the worldview is a lens through which people see the world and how they operate, and how they relate to other people and so my whole theory is around the notion of the lenses through which people see the world in terms of social class. In my writing I say that other psychologists can talk about social class in lots of different ways, it doesn't have to be the worldview model. They can talk about social class identity, social class acculturation, social class dissonance, but the important thing is that social class in and of itself is not a descriptor of a psychological phenomenon. Social class in psychology it has to be a descriptor of some other psychological phenomenon. So for instance, as psychologists we don't really talk about racism specifically; we talk about racial identity. We talk about acculturation as psychological phenomenon related to race. Does that make sense? CZ: Yes, it does. WL: We don't really talk about social class, we have to talk about social class in its relationship to another psychological phenomenon, such as worldview, identity, or acculturation. For me what made sense was to talk about social class worldview, so that's what my theory is predicated about. And right now our research is looking at developing a further theory, measurement development, examining the relationship between subjective approaches to social class versus using income, education, and occupation; and we're also conducting some research looking at the differences between a social class approach to therapy versus a neutral approach to therapy, and seeing if there's a difference, where people prefer or notice a difference between the two. That's it in a nutshell. CZ: Let me ask you this in relationship to therapy. How do social class and classism impact the therapeutic relationship, and how do they affect therapeutic effectiveness? To give you an example, most counselors and psychologists come from middle class. And I'm assuming that in certain sections of the country some of them may sit down and work with persons who are from lower social classes or higher social classes. How those differences may impact the therapeutic relationship? WL: Well, I think that in terms of therapy process the major over piece is of course the bias that counselors and psychologists bring in to the therapy process in terms of either over pathologizing or underpathologizing, based on a particular person's social class. It doesn't necessarily mean that we underpathologize people who are rich and over pathologize people who are poor, although that's generally how it operates. But I think in terms of the multicultural competencies, if we're not aware of our own biases, we certainly can be patronizing to people who are in poor condition, and underpathologize when we adequately need to make a more proper diagnosis. So I think it can operate in any fashion. I think there's a bias in terms of how we approach diagnosis and how we approach treatment. I think there's also...and the research bears this out... the bias in terms of the type of treatment that

7 the poor and the rich receive. The poor generally receive shorter treatment, they receive less follow up care, and the rich on the other hand, get all the other benefits of it. But I think the more important and the more subtle aspect of how social class operates in therapy is the different ways that individuals talk about social class and classism in their lives, but it's not going to be related to how they talk about money, their job, or their education level. It's not going to come in those fashions. They may talk about the pressure they feel from their friends to go on a trip, and/or the subtle ways the first generation college student feels inadequate if they don't have something that all the other college students have in their dorm. It's those feelings of inadequacy, the feelings of pressure, that I call lateral classism; it's the negative reactions they get that I perceive as downward classism, it's the feelings of inadequacy when they can't maintain what they perceive as their status that I would conceptualize as internalized classism. All these represent the different ways that people talk about social class but it's not going to be overt, it's not going to be generated around their income, education, or occupation. Psychologists, counselors, and other mental health care providers need to be much more sensitized to the very subtle ways that people talk about social class. It's the subtle classism that they experience, it's all different things that we need to be much more sensitive to. In many ways it's the same as before we start talking about race and racism, or racial identity, counselors and psychologists would generally be waiting for the client to talk about overt experiences of racism. And that's not necessarily how clients are going to talk about racism. They might talk about racism in terms of how they see themselves in relation to conformities status; they might talk about confusion around race issues; when it comes to business they might talk about ethnocentrism. There's a lot of different ways, but once you put that racial identity lens on you're able to conceptualize and see the different ways that people talk about race that isn't just predicated on... I had a racist experience. People on conformity status when they experience something that's racist aren't likely even to conceptualize that it is racist. I mean as a multicultural competent psychologist, I think we have to be really sensitive to the very subtle ways that people talk about culture in their lives. Social class is that kind of culture that people talk about. Then, we can provide the client a theory or framework from where they can understand their own social class experiences. This gives them a language and a rudimentary form of understanding of how this particular piece of culture is operating in their life. So if a client were to talk about feelings of inadequacy because they can't have an ipod when everybody else has a ipod, we can talk about internalized classism and we can give that kind of language to them so that they can understand their own internal processes so it doesn't feel so foreign and alien to them. It helps them connect what's going on in their lives to some understanding of these social processes, so they can have some sense of control over these. That's how I think it can operate in therapy. CZ: You emphasize the need for psychologists, counselors, and other mental health professionals to develop multicultural competences in this area. What advice do you have for professionals who want to increase their multicultural social justice competencies? WL: Around social class?

8 CZ: Social class. WL: They have to find a particular issue that's relevant to them in their community and then become involved in that particular issue; become exposed and have some involvement in it. Have some personal contact with it. I can offer a lot of readings and articles; that's one way to approach it and I think it's an important way to approach it, but the other aspect is contact, exposure, and personal experience in some meaningful way. It is always a good way for them to become aware of their own experiences and how they might relate to that process. And then related to that, there has to be some community that they can go to have dialogue about what's going on for them in that experience. For instance we have a practicum site that I created, at our homeless shelter, where our advanced practicum students go to do therapy with people who are homeless. And the students can go there and do the practice, and have the exposure. The other beneficial piece about it is that afterwards they have supervision with me, and I would say half of our supervision time is spent on uncovering and understanding their own process when it comes to being at the shelter and seeing this poverty, seeing the inequality, seeing and dealing with the frustration of these individuals having no access to the healthcare system, and all these other things that they need to dialogue with somebody who can help them understand the process a little bit. The supervision piece is important because they can have a dialogue about their experience. Thus, it's the exposure piece, it's the educational piece through the articles which people have ready access to, and the last component which I think is often missing is the discourse piece, the dialogue piece. You need that kind of interchange to really fully understand and appreciate the experience, and to develop a social justice orientation about those things. CZ: What changes do you observe in your students as they go through this dialogue? WL: Working at the homeless shelter? CZ: Working there and processing their experiences with you during supervision. WL: In general their professional practice in this particular setting increases exponentially in lots of different ways. To begin, there's only the social work staff that runs that the shelter administratively. Because there is no psychologist in the shelter, before the students even go there they come and interview with me. I'll tell them about the shelter and I tell them that there's nobody else from their professional field. You're going to be flying by the seat of your pants, you're going to have to make some quick clinical judgments, and you're going to have to understand boundaries and appropriate boundaries. You're going to have to practice ethically and you have to have all those three things operating all the time no matter who you're talking to, and there's just no way around it. If you can't handle that you shouldn't go there because you're going to be doing therapy, not just in one room, but you might be walking around and talking to people, and that's a particular form of therapy as well. So you've got to rethink what therapy is going to look like. So this is related to the multicultural piece, you've got to rethink how therapy is going to look. It's not going to be this just you and this other client sitting in a room talking for 50 minutes. It's likely going to be you and a client, the modal experience of course is you've known the client for about 20 minutes, you may see the client two or three times and then the client will be gone, they'll disappear. And you have to be able to do therapy very quickly; you have to assess, you have to find the most critical issues, and really help them problem solve in

9 some way. You have to assess for crisis issues. Also, asses if it is an emotional support that you can provide? Then, the last piece about it is you're not doing just straight psychotherapy, you're really doing psychological/social work in some ways. You can do therapy, you can also provide assessments, but the advocacy piece is sometimes you're going to have to get on the phone, call the hospital and make an appointment for this individual. Sometimes you're going to have to write a letter or call the hospital again, or call psychiatry and tell them who you are and explain to them in some fashion what's going on because you're the only one that has that knowledge, and so in that sense you have a power, a privilege that you can use positively and judiciously, but you have to use it, that's why you're going to the shelter. You can say you can't use it because you're going to create dependency, if you have that hang up you've got to get over it, because you have that power and privilege, and you've got to use it. You can resist from it. So it's a lot of that kind of training, to see I do have the power, I do have some privilege, and I have to be able to use it. But the other piece, the internal piece is to be there and understanding to the crisis that families are in, individuals are in. Those kinds of pieces are very sad for the students, and I want them to understand those pieces but also want them to see the resilience in a lot of these individuals. I want them to see not just the negative pieces that they have to help them develop and increase, but I also want them to see the potential resilience and positiveness that's operating in peoples' lives as well. And how do you build on those as well as increasing peoples' self efficacy and build on their strengths as well. So that's in a nut shell what I tell the students before they go there. And I think in some ways they've become much more comfortable with the fact that they can assert themselves and talk about themselves as paraprofessionals and psychologists, as young psychologists, and really assert and get in that role cause if not now, at some point they're going to be interacting with psychiatrists and nurse practitioners in a hospital setting, and other mental health care settings; and I really encourage them, kind of get used to pushing because no one else is going to do it for them. If you don't learn how to do it now, you're going to have to learn to do it later. You might as well do it now while you have supervision, so that's sort of a change process that I see a lot of the students go through. CZ: Why are you so passionate about this? WL: Why am I so passionate about it? CZ: Yes, you have done major contributions educating all of us about social class. So why are you so passionate about this issue? WL: I hate to sound so simplistic, but it's just everywhere. It's such an issue that's just so pertinent in our lives and in other people's lives, as well as in our clients and our families. People don't know how to talk about it, but I think they want to talk about it. They just don't know how to, and I'm really passionate about giving people a framework and also words to be able to talk about internal experiences and external experiences that they're having around social class. And when I talk to people about it, I get excited because they get excited. This gives me energy to keep going on. I you've probably been in situations thinking "man, I don't know that anybody is going to buy this." And you pitch it out there and when people think they can buy certain pieces of it, I'm like all right, good, and this really gives me some energy to keep going with it. To be

10 honest, in part this is sort of a cultural piece of me coming out; I really look to a lot of our elders to give us guidance as well as encouragement, and they have been. Just keeps me going when somebody like Alan and Mary Ivey tell me, "oh this is really interesting." I say, oh thank goodness they find some value in it. For me it's a very communal process still and it goes back to the original question, which is this is really how I want to be when I get more established and I get older. I want to be able to encourage younger scholars, younger professionals if they have an idea they want to be able to help and develop it, and be very encouraging because for a lot of us we're developing ideas that no one else has come up with, and even though they may not fully understand it, the guidance and support that they provide can really carry a long way so that's part of my excitement about it, as well as the intellectual process, the clinical process, but also just having that support and encouragement from a lot of these very established individuals in our field. CZ: What would you like to see happening in the future in psychology, counseling and related fields? WL: I really hope that in terms the scholarship piece other students and other professionals will develop alternative theories around social class or economic status or classism. It can be a growing field and I do think that it's something that as more people get involved on the scholarly level it will become a much more salient aspect of multicultural competencies and practice. It will start to bleed into the practice a lot faster once the scholarship and the theories are developed. The more we see it in the research literature and the writings people will start to integrate it more holistically and more intentionally into their training practice. Right now it still sort of, okay somebody is writing about it, but I think it takes time to become much more integrated. I remember back in some ways how racial identity, even multiculturalism, a lot of people didn't want to go with it. They just found it's a diluting practice, diluting our assessment, why do we need these classes? You know I think and I can probably sort of remember that happening still now. CZ: I believe it is. WL: It's happening now, right; ten, fifteen years ago, at the graduate school I had a faculty say why include multiculturalism into everything that you write, even though I don't even ask you to write it? I had that comment made to me, ask Dr. Pope-Davis, he'll remember that, and I go, because it's a part of everything. To me that was the most ridiculous claim to ask me, because I was thinking how can it not be in everything? And now the same individuals advocate for it, and part of me thinks it may not be necessarily they fully believe it, but they can't deny it now because it's such a part of our discourse as psychologists. No way they can be seen as credible and dismiss multiculturalism. I think they have to talk about it. And for me as long as they talk about it, that's fine. That's one step for them, I don't need to convince those individuals, but I think it's important that at least they buy into it at that level. CZ: What advice do you have for professionals as they face the next 15 to 20 years of counseling and psychotherapy practice or teaching? WL: At a personal level it's really very important that you have to have the mentality of

11 perseverance. That's going to be extremely important, because a lot of people are going to criticize, and deny, and reject, and you just have to keep going at it, over and over again. You have to be very tenacious; not in the sense that you have to be narrow-minded in scope, but you do have to be tenacious in getting your idea out there. The other piece is that you have to look at almost every opportunity that comes across and take it in terms of getting your idea out there, no matter how small this is at the beginning. You just have to take it and keep going with it, and talking about it. And it's important that you find one or two people at a senior level that really will buy into your ideas that can give you that leg up. You know, that foot in the door. That will get you a long way in terms of developing your own scholarship. When I think back on it, I had all of those things and that really got me a long way. Just the relationships that you create in terms of getting your foot in the door and getting your ideas in the door can be very important. CZ: Thank you.