5 Questions for Larry Shulman

As many of you know, Larry Shulman has made numerous contributions to the field of Social Work for more than 40 years. He has made significant contributions through teaching, research, theory building, and the profession's literature. The author of the popular text, The Skills of Helping Individuals, Families, Groups and Communities is now in its fifth edition. Along with Alex Gitterman, Larry is also the co-editor of the popular book, Mutual Aid Groups, Vulnerable Populations and the Life Cycle. For those of us who employ a mutual aid based approach to group work we are likely to have encountered Larry Shulman's work. I am pleased that Larry agreed to this interview for Mutual Aid Based Group Work. com. I enjoyed the exchange and I hope you will too. For more about Larry Shulman's extensive and illustrious career please check the on-line final program for the 2007 AASWG Symposium which includes a discussion about Larry, who is a 2007 International Honoree, written by his long time colloborator and friend, Alex Gitterman.

Q. Larry, I imagine that William Schwartz, Bill, served as a significant influence on you professionally and personally. I see that you, along with Alex Gitterman, have furthered the conceptualization of the mutual aid model of group work and that you embrace the integrative approach to social work education, as exemplified in your popular text, The Skills of Helping, now in its 5th edition. Can you tell us a little bit about your relationship with Bill? How did you meet? What impact personally and professionally do you feel he has had on you?

A. I was a new field instructor for the Columbia University School of Social Work running a teen program at the Mt. Vernon YM&YWHA. We were required to take a six session workshop on field instruction and it was Bill's turn to provide one. At the first session I proudly volunteered to describe my student's assignment working with a group of white, Jewish teenagers on a project with an equivalent African-American group at a local church. The project was to provide a tutorial program for students at the church. I said: "Although that's the announced purpose of the program, our real goal is to enhance white and black relationships in the town". This was consistent with the"social goals" model of group work. Bill responded: "Do the members of the group know the real goal?" I was insulted as he pointed out, to my humiliation, that I had a "hidden agenda". I told my wife that night I would not return to the workshop but after some "healing" and reflection I realized he was right. I did have a hidden agenda. Bill had painfully and permanently "shifted my paradigm" of practice. I went back the next week and from that point on he became an important mentor as I had to re-learn much of my group work training and start to develop my elaboration of the mutual aid (or Interactional) model of practice.

Bill could be very tough and very demanding but also on a deeper level very caring. He was one of the most intelligent social work educators I ever met and was a scholar in the true sense of the word. Not only did Bill begin to describe a new paradigm of practice, rejecting the "medical model" study, diagnosis and treatment framework, he helped me and others to focus on method. What we knew about people (knowledge) was important but that had to be translated into specific interventions in order to qualify as a practice theory.

What was so striking about Bill's framework was that it was easily adapted to fit classroom teaching as well as supervision. The concept of the parallel process was another of his important contributions to our field. I only had a few opportunities to watch him present or teach however in each one I was struck by how he practiced what he was preaching. At times, I felt a bit more support and a bit less confrontation would be a better fit but for Bill, this was him. I would need to develop my own integration of support and demand. The really nice part of his framework was the fact that we could integrate our personal and our professional selves.



Q. When I read Schwartz’s work on what we call the Mutual Aid Model of Group Work, I see that he presented a fairly comprehensive and sophisticated model. I know that you expanded the elaboration of mutual aid processes and that you incorporate some of Bion’s thinking into the approach to practice. Can you talk about that and tell us how else you (with or without Alex) have expanded, added to or modified the model from it’s earlier incarnations.

A. Bill published many scholarly articles and had a number of unpublished works. For example, he tape recorded and then had transcribed the content of a series of continuing education classes he presented at Columbia which are a treasure trove of his original thinking about practice. (This interview is reminding me that I need to send copies of all of this original material and correspondence to the group work archives). Bill built on the work of pioneers such as Jessie Taft and Virginia Robinson who taught at the University at Pennsylvania School of Social Work. They were the founders of the "functional school" of social work. The debate between the functional school and the "diagnostic" school (the medical model consisting of three phases - study, diagnosis and treatment) has long been forgotten but it really was important. The functional school folks were isolated from the profession, turned inward and lost influence. Bill's work brought it back to life.

His original conceptualizations of the importance of mutual aid, the interactional nature of practice, the importance of contracting and the "two client" idea formed the foundation of my work and the work of others. I consider my contribution to be built on this foundation. I worked to translate his ideas into a practice text (The Skills of Helping Individuals, Families, Groups and Communities, 5th edition) that has been widely used since the first edition in the 1970s. Bill never completed his own text book (stopped after the first three chapters) however Alex Gitterman and I co-edited a volume consisting of these three chapters (updated by Toby Berman-Rossi) and all of his collected writing. It was published by Peacock Press but I don't think it is still in print.

In addition to making his work more widely available through publications and video tapes I elaborated on his model in a number of ways. I did the earliest research on the helping skills he described through a number of studies of child welfare individual and group practice, doctor-patient relationship and supervision. These studies began to provide evidence of the importance of process, the use of skills and the development and impact of the "working relationship". The research was focused on the interactional process rather than just on the outcomes. I am continuing this work in other areas of research such as school violence, substance abuse counselling and work with young people "aging out" of foster care.

On the model itself, I developed an early framework to operationalize a number of mutual aid processes such as the "all-in-the-same-boat" phenomenon. This framework has been used by others in research on the mutual aid process. I also wrote an early publication on the scapegoat phenomenon that illustrated the importance of the two client idea and the practice concept that required the group leader to be with both the individual and the group at the same time. While Bill used the functional model to discuss the four phases of work (preliminary, beginning - contracting, middle and ending/transitions) I extended that model to the description of an individual session (i.e., sessional tuning in, sessional contracting, elaborating skills).

My development of a category observation system for video taping sessions and then analyzing them using trained raters scoring the behaviors every three seconds allowed me to more closely understand how the dynamic interaction between client (individual or group) proceeded. For example, with over 100,000 entries analyzed through a "FORTRAN" program developed by a friend we were able to determine if sessional contracting had taken place (the worker and the client were on the same issues) or what worker behaviors followed three seconds of silence. To give some idea of how long ago this was we had to key punch cards with the data and then submit them to a main frame computer picking up our print outs a few hours later. If my current NIH application is funded I am returning to this research in the area of supervision and group work practice in the substance abuse field but with more sophisticated equipment and procedures.

I also tried to build on his work by using my own practice (I tried to lead at least one group a year) as illustrations of the power of mutual aid. For example, a short-term single parents group and a group for persons with AIDS in early substance abuse led to publications that included significant process recording excerpts demonstrating the incredible power of mutual aid as members helped each other and as I and my co-leaders encouraged this process. Perhaps the most widely used video tapes I made and distributed (Insight Media now carries them) were of the 1st and then the 19th session of a married couples group I led back in the late seventies. Whenever I use them in a class I have to pause after the first five minutes and tell the class "OK, get it out of your system" which leads to some loud laughter as they comment on how I have changed from that young guy in his 30s.

I also built on Bill's concept of supervision and elaborated it in my NASW published book "Interactional Supervision". With updated examples and chapters dealing with issues including supervision of staff in response to various traumas (i.e., the death of a child on a caseload or the physical attack on a worker) I feel I was able to communicate the core of his practice comments to a wider audience.



Q. From reading your text and chapters or articles I see that you share an interest of mine in working with groups of people who both have HIV/AIDS and a substance use disorder. How did you get involved with that? How were you received by the group? What stands out for you about that experience?

A. I was teaching at Boston University when we obtained a grant from an NIH agency designed to encourage social work faculty to find out more about substance abuse and to infuse this knowledge into their teaching and scholarship. I signed up with some other colleagues and for a year participated in a structured biweekly seminar. We were also required to do a project and I chose leading the group for persons with AIDS in early substance abuse recovery. This was, in effect, my field work assignment. I had been involved doing some volunteer training for the Boston AIDS Action Committee and decided to develop a group for clients living in a structured living environment (single room occupancy) with built-in support services. I partnered with a staff member who was an addictions counsellor and after doing our "system's work" we started a once a week group in the residence. I reported on this group in a key-note presentation at the AASWG conference in Quebec and later published it in the Haworth Press Social Work With Groups Journal. My reception by the group is detailed in the first session process recording in the article (and the detailed process in the Skills of Helping...) when at the end of the session I reached for the indirect cues from one member wondering about whether the co-leaders were in recovery. My co-leader was, but I was not. I reached for the underlying question and answered as honestly as I could about my teaching and my involvement in the NIH project. After which, my member who had raised the issue laughed and said: "Oh, I thought you were a narc!" We had begun to address the "authority theme". I learned a great deal during the year I co-led the group and not just about substance abuse, recovery and the impact of AIDS. This was early in the development of the triple drug therapies so some of the members were hoping for a cure, others hoping to be able to live with AIDS and my trans-gendered member whose use of hormone treatment had excluded her from the trials, saying she was just hoping to "Die with dignity instead of hustling old men on street corners for money to buy drugs". What I learned was the incredible strength these group members who had survived the most horrible of childhood experiences, including emotional, physical and sexual abuse, could bring to the task of tackling the dual issues of recovery and AIDS. I also saw first hand how powerful mutual aid could be for people who had been in the drug culture so long they had forgot how to care for others and be cared for by others. I also learned how strong our feelings can be for our clients, and how long the can persist, as even as I write this I still feel strong emotions associated with the death of my trans-gendered member soon after the group ended. I believe that the group did help her die with dignity.



Q. Ok. So you are Shulman! Tell us about group work mistakes you have made in your practice. What did you do with those ‘mistakes’?

A. As I tell my students, you take risks, make mistakes, learn from those mistakes and then make more sophisticated mistakes. I like to think that in my practice and teaching I am now making more sophisticated mistakes. Bill Schwartz had an expression: "You are only as good as your last session" by which he meant you have to keep working on your practice or you will find yourself making mistakes. I have found that to be true in that when my own life experiences or stresses have interfered I have had to look closely at how they were impacting my ability to hear and respond to what was going on in my class or my practice. An early mistake, from which I learned a lot, was when I began a group for widows with the canned line that said "The purpose of this group is for you to learn how to work through your grief." One member looked this thirty year-old group leader in the eye and said: "You don't learn to work through your grief, sonny, you learn to live with your grief". Never having lost someone close to me that was the start of my education about loss and grief. More recently, in an incident I documented in another article in the Journal of Social Work With Groups, I was leading a large (150 participant) two-day workshop on issues of diversity (inter-ethnic and intra-ethnic) in leading mutual aid support groups. After complaining about the lack of enough air conditioning the first day (it was a centrally controlled system) I started the second day (a Saturday) in the same room when 45 minutes after we began a young African-American man in jeans, a tee shirt and a baseball cap entered from the back of the room and was looking around the room. I said: "I'm glad you are here and the thermostat is over there". He replied: "I'm not the maintenance man, I'm a participant". Instantly feeling embarrassed by my mistake I quickly apologized and went right into my presentation. I was sweating profusely, and it wasn't from the heat, as I put my had down and tried to tough it out. After 15 minutes I stopped and went back to the incident and pointed out how I had felt about my response which reflected an internalized stereotype and how I tried to avoid dealing with it. Three African-American women in the first row laughed and one said: "We wondered if you were ever to get back to it." This started the best discussion of the workshop with both white participants and persons of color discussing how taboo the issue was and how hard it was to face it openly. For me, it was an important illustration, once again, of how one can go back and catch a mistake. As I have often reassured students, we all make mistakes the only question is if we have the skill and courage to go back to them and how quickly to we do so. I caught it in the same morning which I felt very good about.


Q. Finally, congratulations on your recent retirement from teaching and recognition by the Association for the Advancement of Social Work with Groups as an International Honoree. What is on the horizon for you now? What are you working on or are you simply spending more time with family and friends in New Hampshire.

A. I won't be formally teaching anymore, about which I have mixed feelings but mostly relief. I will be missing attending all of those wonderful faculty meetings and committee work (OK, maybe not so much). I will be moving over to the Research Foundation side of the University to do part-time research on my areas of interest - school violence, supervision and group work. I am now stationed in New Hampshire and commuting back to Buffalo as needed. As I write this our two grand children (11 and 5) are visiting with us for two weeks as their parents are off in Europe attending academic conferences, so yes, I will be spending more time with friends and family. I still travel and present workshops on practice, group work and supervision so that will keep my hands in the teaching process. I am also working on a 6th editon of Skills of Helping which should be available in 2008. I have a contract with the same publisher (Wadsworth) to do a group counselling book that will be aimed at all counselling professions -- not just social work. As I have worked with a great inter-disciplinary committee on a five-year NIH funded conference on clincial supervision (I co-chair the conference with Andy Safyer) I have realized that the concept of mutual aid has not really penetrated the literature of psychology, counselling psychology, nursing, school counselling, marriage and family therapy, etc. As I have been reviewing their central group work publications it becomes clear that this is fertile ground for continuing to dissmeninate the central ideas of the model. When my book proposal was circulated by the press for comments three of the six reviewers commented on what an interesting and novel idea this "mutual aid" was. Oh yes, I am playing tennis three times a week, year around, and enjoying more holidays. The full implications of no longer teaching hit when my wife Sheila decided to give me a present for my 70th birthday of a one-week trip to Paris and she scheduled it for the beginning of October. I guess that will go a long way to resolving my ambivalence about retiring.

Finally Larry warmly had this to say about the interview, "Thank you for this opportunity to respond to these questions. It brought back many nice memories. I hope this is what you are looking for.". Yes, that was exactly what I was looking for.