
Len SperryFlorida Atlantic University | FAU · Mental Health Counseling Program
Len Sperry
M.D., Ph.D.
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777
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Introduction
Additional affiliations
June 1971 - August 1974
July 2000 - July 2003
January 1986 - June 2000
Publications
Publications (777)
The experience of being sexual abused by clergy is most often conceptualized as a psychological condition requiring psychotherapy. Recent research and developments have provided more compelling conceptualizations with recovery plans that are broader than psychotherapy alone. This article describes four conceptualizations: posttraumatic stress disor...
This chapter examines a brief case conceptualization strategy that is summarized in five steps. It reviews how pattern is formulated throughout the five-step process. Pattern links the client’s presenting symptoms to the precipitating event and is driven by the predisposing factors and perpetuants. Pattern also informs the second-order treatment go...
This chapter examines a full-scale case conceptualization strategy that is summarized in eight steps. It reviews how pattern is formulated throughout the eight-step process. Pattern links the client’s presenting symptoms to the precipitating event and is driven by the predisposing factors and perpetuants. Pattern also informs the second-order treat...
Clinicians who work primarily with individual clients and have developed competency with case conceptualizations can provide effective treatment. However, when they work with clients for whom couple and family dynamics are prominent, having an individual case conceptualization can be useful but limited. This chapter discusses the value of adding co...
Once understood as useful but optional, case conceptualization is now considered essential and one of the most important of all clinical skills and competencies. As clinicians look for resources to assist in learning and mastering this competency, they must choose among different case conceptualization approaches. They would do well to give serious...
In this era of accountability, therapists and other mental health professionals are expected to employ evidence-based interventions to achieve therapeutic change. Case conceptualization is an intervention that many consider one of the most essential clinical competencies. A useful case conceptualization approach, at a minimum, should explain the pr...
Achieving some level of mastery in case conceptualization is essential to be effective in clinical practice. This chapter will be useful to both trainees and practicing clinicians who need to increase their level of mastery in the pattern-focused approach to case conceptualization. First, the chapter describes the development of the pattern-focused...
Pattern is central in the pattern-focused case conceptualization approach. This chapter highlights the five basic treatment challenges for each of the eight common patterns in everyday clinical practice. It first defines pattern and provides a clinical strategy for quickly identifying and differentiating the basic patterns. Then, it describes eight...
This chapter demonstrates the eight-step full-scale case conceptualization strategy using two case vignettes. The chapter summarizes the following eight-step strategy: Step 1: Specify presenting problem and precipitants; Step 2: Identify maladaptive pattern; Step 3: Identify predisposing factors and perpetuants; Step 4: Specify a cultural formulati...
This chapter provides tools for increasing mastery of case conceptualization with three evidence-based interventions: standardized case conceptualization training, deliberate practice, and mindfulness. It is based on experience in teaching and supervising this approach with master’s students in clinical mental health counseling programs. It also in...
This chapter defines the behavioral markers that are included in a pattern-focused case conceptualization. Pattern-focused case conceptualization is a therapeutic strategy that can help clinicians conceptualize client issues, tailoring highly effective treatment, as well as guide them through moment-to-moment decisions made during a session. The ch...
Brief case conceptualizations are useful in various clinical contexts. This type of conceptualization can be completed quickly after the first session because there are only six behavioral markers for the practitioner to formulate. In this chapter, the five-step brief case conceptualization strategy is demonstrated with two case vignettes. The stra...
Avoidant personality disorder (AVPD) is one of most prevalent personality disorders, with upwards of 55 percent of patients in clinical settings. It is characterized by shyness and sensitivity to rejection. The chapter provides an overview of the disorder: basic descriptors; differentiation from avoidant personality style and social anxiety disorde...
Sexual abuse of children by ministry personnel in Christian organizations has been reported by the media as the result of individual psychopathology of these personnel, as systemic failure, or a combination of both. Could it be the result of moral injury? Since the basic failure in Christian organizations in which sexual abuse occurs is a “betrayal...
The ongoing clergy sexual abuse crisis in the Catholic Church has led to calls for major changes in the psychological evaluation of seminary applicants. Unfortunately, there is increasing agreement that current, standard psychological testing is not effective in ferreting out sexual difficulties in the general population, much less in seminary cand...
This new edition of Couples Therapy tackles four challenges currently facing the field: (1) Accountability and the increasing demands for demonstrating effectiveness as a condition for reimbursement, (2) the need for practitioners to reconfigure their practice patterns in an ever-involving health-care system, (3) training mental health practitioner...