An Identity We Never Owned
A man who has introduced himself by his job all his life and who, the day after he retires, no longer knows what to say when someone asks what he does. A conversation among friends that turns into a fight, because one of them has made an opinion a piece of himself. A teenager who dresses, talks, and laughs exactly like his crowd, and who swears he has finally become himself.
Three situations, one sleight of hand.
Each of them believes he is talking about who he is. In fact he is wearing a garment taken from other people’s wardrobe, and he has forgotten that he borrowed it.
This is the starting point of the Experience Matrix. In building the model, I made a choice that sometimes surprises people: to speak of identifications, in the plural, rather than of identity. The word identity comes from the Latin idem, “the same.” To be identical to someone. What we call identity is therefore a resemblance, taken from others, from groups, from models. It is worn, it wears out, it gets traded.
I have put this shift to the test in sessions for years. I did not expect to find it again, almost word for word, in the writing of a philosopher who has never heard of the Matrix.
The same observation, by another road
Alexander Douglas teaches the history of philosophy at the University of St Andrews, in Scotland. In 2025 he published a book with a blunt title, Against Identity. He does not cite NLP, does not know my work, and has no reason to do me any favors. Yet he arrives at the same place, by way of three authors who have nothing in common: Spinoza, the Chinese philosopher Zhuangzi, and René Girard.
His starting point is that identity, the way we know ourselves, “comes from the observation of others” (p. 9-10). He takes up a line from Girard that I could have written in a training handout: “Our own identity is merely the intersection of all that makes us identical to countless others” (p. 132-133).
Identical. The word is there.
For Douglas, the problem is having too much identity rather than too little. We belong to a multitude of overlapping categories, and none of them is enough to say who we are. The Matrix places exactly this in the Identifications space: the classes of people we attach ourselves to, sometimes without knowing it, often several at once. The father, the engineer, the Belgian, the aikido practitioner. A whole wardrobe.
He also writes that identity is at once what others think of us and what we think of ourselves, the two constantly acting on each other. I identify myself, and I am identified. In the Matrix, identification runs both ways.
A philosopher who thinks as I do proves nothing. But two independent roads, one drawn from philosophy, the other from coaching, that reach the same conclusion give it a little more weight than my experience alone.
The group holds the garment
In the Matrix I replaced the word “environment” with “Context,” because environment suggests a backdrop. Context acts, responds, exerts pressure. Douglas puts it more harshly than I do. We find ourselves, he writes, “under duress from a crowd that demands to know who we are” (p. 16-17). He speaks of an “identity regime” in which everyone monitors everyone else, and he recalls, with Girard, that whoever stands out too much risks becoming the scapegoat.
For a practitioner, this changes something very concrete. When a person cannot let go of an identification that makes them suffer, the resistance may come from the group that lent them the garment and that makes sure they keep it on. Changing an identification can cost a sense of belonging. Better to know that before proposing the change.
When an opinion becomes “who I am”
Douglas observes that an ordinary belief, once it settles into someone’s identity, changes its nature. Disagreement is then experienced as a threat to one’s very existence. He draws on a United Nations report on polarization: people become polarized when they incorporate political opinions into their identities (p. 13-14). If changing your mind means changing who you believe you are, arguments no longer do any good.
In the Matrix, beliefs and values belong to the Singularity space, to Knowing. Douglas describes the moment when a belief leaves this personal, revisable Knowing and goes to lodge in an identification. You no longer have it, you wear it. And you defend it like your own skin.
I recognize here what I meet in coaching when a person “knows” they should change and cannot manage it. I recognize it even more in conflict, on the AïkiCom side: arguing against an opinion that has become an identity means attacking someone. The Matrix helps us see where a belief lives before deciding how to approach it. You do not work the same way with a conviction you have and a conviction you are.
Time undoes what identity freezes
Douglas has a very simple passage on life transitions: “We define ourselves by our work, then a change in circumstances prevents us from working. We define ourselves by our good looks, then we age” (p. 161-162). Identity fixes us in place while the world keeps moving.
The man from the beginning, the one who no longer knows what to answer once he has retired, has lost a garment he did not know he had borrowed. The Matrix places this phenomenon on its temporal axis: we pass through successive identifications, and the crisis comes when we have taken one of them for our essence. To name a transition crisis as a crisis of identification is already to make it workable.
Where Douglas stops
From here on, Douglas and the Matrix part ways.
Douglas does not want us to choose our identifications better. He wants us to stop identifying. He examines the solution of thinkers who propose to broaden identity, to make it more open, and he finds it insufficient: a broad identity is still an identity, and it still ties us to a model. Drawing on Zhuangzi, he writes that “trying to be like yourself is no better than trying to be like someone else” (p. 37). His ideal is a person who moves freely from one role to another without being defined by any of them.
The idea is beautiful, and Douglas himself says where it stops. At the end of the book, he admits that he “cannot claim to understand it in any practical sense” (p. 155). There is no exercise, no procedure. The reader knows where to start and where they ought to arrive, without knowing how to walk there. A philosopher is not a coach, and his book does well what it sets out to do.
This is where the Matrix has something to add.
Douglas writes: “The first step is to see the trick of identity for what it is: your identity was never yours in the first place” (p. 155-156). To see, agreed. But from where? The Matrix answers with the Meta space, the position from which you look at your identifications instead of being caught inside them. Spotting what you wear, and whom you took it from, happens in the Identifications space. Telling what comes from a borrowing apart from what has been built through practice, through Doing and Know-how, belongs to the Singularity space. Undoing an identification that confines and adopting one that opens is the work of de-identification and re-identification.
Douglas points a direction. The Matrix offers a map and the moves to get there, or at least to get closer.
The aim differs too. Douglas would like us to shed every garment. What I look for instead is to give each person back the freedom to know where each piece they wear comes from, to keep it if it suits them, and to change it when it pinches. The two aims do not exclude each other: you cannot take off a garment you do not know you are wearing.
The question he leaves me with
Douglas is not an ally without reservations. He puts at least one serious question to me.
With Girard, he argues that we have no desire that is truly our own: we borrow our desires as we borrow our identities. Yet the Matrix makes room for a fundamental desire, an inner direction recognized by signs of alignment. When someone tells me “this is really what I want,” Douglas whispers a question I have not always asked: whom did you take it from?
I believe this fundamental desire withstands the objection. But it has to be able to answer it, and I do not yet have that answer.
Then there is what we find at the center. Douglas speaks of a part of us that escapes every identity and exists beyond it. In the Matrix, the central point has no surface: nothing can be placed there, because identity is a result, what emerges when all the spaces play together. The same image of an empty center, two different readings. I keep mine, but I now hold it less comfortably.
A wardrobe
A philosopher who does not know me, starting from Spinoza, Zhuangzi, and Girard, arrives at the shift on which the Matrix is built: you do not discover your identity within yourself, you borrow it. He describes precisely what happens when you take a borrowed garment for your own skin. Then he stops just where the work of coaching begins.
The Matrix is my attempt to give that work its tools. A map, a few moves, and now Douglas’s question, which I keep in my pocket.
Reference
Alexander Douglas, Against Identity: The Wisdom of Escaping the Self, London, Allen Lane (Penguin), 2025, 272 pages. ISBN 978-0-241-64821-6. Digital edition: Penguin, 2025, ISBN 978-1-80206-332-5. Quotations from the original English edition.