Common Drifts
What it looks like when you're doing your claimed orientation poorly — the difference between real CBT and “CBT-flavored supportive therapy.” Each orientation carries its characteristic drifts, what they cost the client, and a supervision lens for the most common question there is: am I doing this wrong, or is this orientation wrong for this client?
Narrative Therapy
Common drifts — what it looks like done poorly
Externalization Without Mapping
The therapist names the problem externally ('it sounds like Anxiety has been showing up a lot') but never systematically maps the problem's influence on the client's life, relationships, or sense of self; externalization becomes a linguistic habit rather than a structured inquiry.
The metaphor of externalization is easy to imitate and feels humanizing, so therapists adopt the language without learning the underlying landscape mapping that gives the intervention its depth and direction.
The client gets a cute reframe but no new relationship to the problem; the dominant story remains intact because its influence has never been named, traced, or contested.
Unique Outcome Tourism
The therapist identifies a glimmer of a unique outcome — a moment when the problem did not dominate — celebrates it briefly, and moves on; the exception is acknowledged but never richly storied, scaffolded, or linked to identity.
Therapists conflate noticing an exception with doing narrative work; the labor-intensive re-authoring conversation that must follow is unfamiliar or feels awkward, so the therapist defaults to positive reinforcement and moves on.
Unique outcomes remain isolated anecdotes rather than the foundation of an alternative identity narrative; the dominant problem story is never genuinely destabilized.
Therapist as Co-Author Who Writes Too Much
The therapist suggests preferred narratives, names the client's strengths on their behalf, or steers the re-authoring conversation toward a particular identity conclusion; questions become leading rather than genuinely curious.
Therapists feel responsible for generating hope and movement; when clients struggle to find their own preferred story, the therapist fills the silence with their own interpretation, mistaking it for collaborative scaffolding.
The re-authored narrative belongs to the therapist, not the client; it does not carry the lived authority needed to compete with the dominant story and will not hold outside the consulting room.
What fidelity looks like
- The therapist maintains a decentered but influential stance — structuring the conversation through carefully crafted, genuinely curious questions while ensuring that every meaning made belongs to the client, not the therapist.
- Externalization is pursued as a sustained, mapped inquiry: the therapist traces the problem's history, tactics, and effects across multiple domains before any re-authoring begins, ensuring the dominant story is fully visible before it is contested.
- Unique outcomes are not merely noted but richly developed through re-authoring and remembering conversations that situate them in history, link them to relationships and witnesses, and thicken an alternative identity story the client experiences as their own.
Drift vs. wrong fit — the supervision lens
A supervisor evaluating narrative work should listen for the ratio of therapist-generated meaning to client-generated meaning: in faithful narrative therapy, almost all meaning — including the name of the problem, the preferred narrative, and the qualities claimed in the re-authoring — originates with the client and is drawn out by the therapist's questions rather than supplied by them. If the supervisor hears a therapist summarizing the client's strengths, suggesting what the alternative story might be, or using externalization language without evidence of systematic influence mapping, that is drift. If the therapist is working with disciplined curiosity and the client still cannot generate an alternative narrative or engage with unique outcomes, that may indicate the client needs a different phase of work — possibly one that addresses the conditions under which the dominant story was formed — before re-authoring is possible.