The following conversation describes a narrative means of uncovering (or ‘deconstructing’) some of the invisible forces that undermine parents' capacities in caring for their children in preferred ways. In the authors' experience, parents can be hugely resourceful and provide a clear account of what they ‘should’ be doing, yet seem unable to act upon their own good advice – it is as though an external agent, named below as ‘Virus X’, prevents them from being the parents they would like to be. Through naming this external agent, identifying its influences and noticing parents' acts of resistance in the face of these influences, antidotes to Virus X can be developed. This paper describes the development of such an approach within a child behaviour management group. In keeping with the playful approach encouraged by narrative therapy, the authors of this paper join forces to act as investigative journalists in exposing Virus X to the readers.

A community sample of 405 adolescents were given the Youth Self-Report Form (YSR) and the Children's Negative Cognitive Errors Questionnaire (CNCEQ). Both regression and group comparison analyses, using the full sample and a subset of extreme scorers, respectively, indicated that internalising problems were specifically associated with the various forms of cognitive distortions assessed, namely, selective abstraction, personalising, overgeneralisation, and catastrophising. Furthermore, they displayed a curvilinear relationship; as the severity of internalising problems increased, the magnitude of cognitive distortions grew positively at a quadratic rate, displaying a U-shaped upward curve. However, in view of the potential measurement bias of CNCEQ toward internalising problems, the conclusion was qualified. Although our results found some specific event/schema-linked cognitive distortions that distinguished internalising from externalising problems, we could not conclude that the latter were free from any other event/schema-linked cognitive distortions that the CNCEQ might have failed to elicit.

Abbreviations: CNCEQ: Children's Negative Cognitive Errors Questionnaire; YSR: Youth Self-Report Form.