Can We Grow Without Betraying Ourselves?
The ghosts of the selves we used to be
I was listening the other day to Dans quel monde on vit, a talk programme on RTBF, the Belgian public broadcaster, broadcast on 4 April 2026 with the novelist Leïla Slimani as guest. She was talking about her latest text, Assaut contre la frontière, about her relationship to languages, to identity, to cultural mixing. And then, at one point, she asked a question that stopped me short: Can we evolve without betraying ourselves?
The phrase caught me because it put words to a discomfort I had felt a few days earlier watching Xavier Giannoli’s film Les Rayons et les Ombres. The film traces the slow drift of Jean Luchaire, a pacifist journalist of the 1920s, into collaboration with the Nazi occupier. A drift with no decision, no rupture, almost no awareness. On the surface, nothing connects the two stories: a Franco-Moroccan novelist reflecting on the melancholy of belonging to several worlds, and a man sliding into the abyss without noticing. But the same mechanism is at work in both. Our identifications shift over time, and we do not always know what we are in the process of becoming.
Slimani: the melancholy of the one who has changed
Born in Rabat into a French-speaking family of the Moroccan elite, living in France since she was eighteen, winner of the Goncourt, Slimani embodies a trajectory many would call exemplary. And yet, in her interviews as in her books, one note keeps returning, something like melancholy, a quiet disquiet. She names it clearly: Can we evolve without betraying ourselves? Can we become middle-class without betraying ourselves? Can we become an adult without betraying ourselves?
That question does not belong only to a writer navigating between two cultures. As she says herself, it is the story of every life. It is the story of those who leave the village they were born in for a career in the city and who, sitting in front of a dish their mother has cooked, feel a version of themselves rising back up, one they thought they had left behind. It is the story of those who grew up in a working-class neighborhood and who, settled into a comfortable life, sometimes feel a vague unease — not because they miss their old life, but because part of them is murmuring that they are no longer quite who they were.
Slimani names the feeling precisely: she is glad to have integrated, to have found her place. But something remains, something like melancholy, something like the disquiet of no longer being who she was.
Stay with that sentence, because it holds a paradox worth sitting with. How can you be satisfied with your present life and, at the same time, grieve a version of yourself that no longer exists? How can you move forward and simultaneously feel that every step takes you further from something essential?
The standard answer from developmental psychology would be: this is normal, this is growth, you have to let go of the past. But that answer misses something fundamental. It treats identity as content you could update like an app on your phone. Delete the old version, install the new one, move on. Lived experience tells a different story entirely.
The wake left by everything we have lived
To understand what is happening here, the Experience Matrix offers a useful conceptual tool: the temporal dimension of identity.
Picture your life as an axis crossed by every experience you have lived. Each moment, each encounter, each choice, each renunciation. At each of those stages you had a particular configuration: active identifications (who you identified with), your own singularity (what you could do, what you believed, how you acted), emotions, a context you were immersed in. At five, one configuration. At fifteen, another. At thirty, another still.
Your past experiences have not vanished. They left their traces in who you are now. Yesterday’s identifications — the little girl in Rabat, the student in a Paris preparatory class, the journalist at Jeune Afrique — did not simply switch off the day the next configuration took over. They transformed. Some went dormant. Others dissolved into new configurations. But their imprint persists, the way a ship’s wake persists long after it has passed.
This is what the Experience Matrix calls narrative identity: “I am the only person in the world and in the universe who has lived the sequence of experiences I have lived, and lived it in this particular way.”
That definition changes everything. Identity is not a fixed point, an “I am this or that.” It is a narrative thread, a story in motion connecting what I have been, what I am now and what I am becoming. And like any story, it cannot erase its opening chapters on the grounds that the later ones tell something different. A novel cannot delete its first act and keep its coherence.
The loyalty dilemma
Back to Slimani. What she describes — that tension between being content with her life and grieving the person she no longer is — becomes considerably clearer read through identifications.
In the Experience Matrix we do not speak of identity in the singular but of identifications in the plural. We do not say “I am Moroccan” or “I am French” as if these were our essence. We say “I identify as Moroccan” and “I identify as French”: two dynamic, contextual relationships coexisting within us at varying intensities.
That linguistic shift, from “I am” to “I identify as,” is not word play. It opens considerable mental room. When Slimani says “I am Moroccan” and “I am French,” the two statements stand as competing essences, and their coexistence produces a logical short circuit. You cannot be two things that appear to exclude each other. But when she says “I identify with my Moroccan culture” and “I identify with my Parisian life,” the two propositions become complementary. They describe two relationships, two belongings, two facets of one person who holds them both within her own singularity.
Each of those identifications carries a set of behaviors, skills and beliefs that define what “people like us” do, know and think. Identifying with the little girl from Rabat comes with a sensory world: the smells, the sounds, the ways of speaking, of eating, of laughing. Identifying with the Parisian intellectual, the Goncourt winner, comes with an entirely different repertoire. Other conversations, other codes, other expectations.
And the problem is not that the two coexist. The problem is that as we move toward new identifications, we sometimes feel our old ones judging us. As though the little girl from Rabat were watching the Parisian woman of letters and murmuring: You’ve changed. You’re not one of us anymore.
This is what Slimani calls the question of corruption — not in the moral sense, but in the sense of an alteration. The more we grow, the more groups we belong to, the more we find ourselves caught in an impossible choice between denying ourselves and denying others. Between staying faithful to what we were and welcoming what we are becoming.
The Experience Matrix lets us name that mechanism precisely. It is what we call an identifications-singularity gap: a person’s singularity has evolved, their skills have developed, their map of the world has widened, but they remain deeply attached to earlier identifications operating in another register. The more they develop individually, the more out of step they feel with certain original belongings, which produces this painful dilemma between loyalty to old identifications and authenticity to a transformed singularity.
The invisible drift: when identifications change without a decision
With Slimani, the tension between old and new identifications is lived consciously, reflectively, almost as literature. She names it, explores it, makes something of it. But there is another kind of identity drift, far more insidious: the one that happens without our seeing it coming, without our ever making a single explicit decision to change. The frog dropped into tepid water, heated so gradually that it never registers the moment the water turns scalding.
Xavier Giannoli’s film Les Rayons et les Ombres (2026) gives that mechanism a concrete illustration through the fate of Jean Luchaire, played by Jean Dujardin. The film tells the story of a pacifist’s gradual slide into collaboration.
In the 1920s, in the aftermath of the Great War and its millions of dead, Luchaire is a young idealistic journalist. His identifications are unambiguous: he identifies as a pacifist, as a man of the left, as an advocate of reconciliation between peoples. His map of the world says France and Germany must never go to war again. His behavior matches: he founds a newspaper, Notre Temps, campaigning for Franco-German dialogue. He befriends a young German teacher, Otto Abetz, who holds exactly the same convictions. Two sincere pacifists, convinced that the brotherhood of peoples is the only possible future.
At that stage, Luchaire’s identifications, his singularity and his context line up perfectly. No tension, no conflict. He is who he believes himself to be.
Then the Nazis come to power. The drift begins — not as a break, not as a deliberate choice, but as a series of micro-adjustments, each almost imperceptible, each apparently defensible.
First they believed Hitler wanted peace. Then they thought not resisting would spare France destruction. Each step is tiny. Abetz, his oldest friend, has become an official of the Nazi regime, but he is still the same man, isn’t he? You can go on talking to him. Continuing the dialogue is exactly what pacifists do. And then the Germans offer opportunities: a paper to launch, receptions to attend, money to be made. Because Luchaire, a sincere pacifist before the war, is also a dandy permanently short of the money he needs to live beyond his means.
But it would be too easy to reduce Luchaire to a venal man, an opportunist drawn to luxury and cash. That explanation is not enough. Thousands of people love money and parties without becoming collaborators. And there is something else the film treats as essential: Luchaire is ill. He has tuberculosis, often fatal at the time. Jean Dujardin understood this in preparing the role — illness was his way into the character. Giannoli insists on it with recurring shots of Luchaire coughing blood, as though his body were rejecting what he was becoming. And when you are ill and possibly condemned, the present moment takes over. Long-range planning, the capacity to project forward and watch yourself evolve, weakens. You live day to day. And living day to day is precisely losing the distance you need to notice the accumulation of small compromises that are transforming you.
Look at what happens through the Experience Matrix. His original identifications — pacifist, man of dialogue — do not vanish overnight. They stay on the surface, a comfortable alibi. But his singularity shifts imperceptibly. His behaviors change: he attends receptions at the German embassy, he accepts questionable funding, he launches a paper under the occupier’s patronage. His skills change: he learns to navigate the murky waters of propaganda. His map of the world deforms step by step: what was unacceptable yesterday becomes tolerable today, then normal tomorrow.
One thing leading to another, through a mix of careerism, venality, favors returned and a hunger to belong to the highest circles, Luchaire drifts into complicity with the enemy.
The mechanism is exactly that of the frog in hot water. If you had told the pacifist Luchaire of 1928, “In fifteen years you will run the collaborationist press and declare that you have become an antisemite,” he would have been horrified. That destination would have seemed inconceivable, wholly incompatible with everything he was. But he never faced that choice as a whole. He faced only micro-choices, each apparently reasonable: accept a dinner, publish an article, take a payment, look away from a law. Each micro-choice altered his configuration so slightly that he never registered the change. And yet the sum of those adjustments turned him into someone his earlier self would not have recognized.
The Experience Matrix throws that into sharp relief. At every point along his path, Luchaire’s identifications and his singularity were slightly out of step — but so slightly that no alarm went off. He still called himself a pacifist while his behavior had ceased to be pacifist. He still believed himself a man of dialogue while dialogue had become a pretext. The gap between his declared identifications and his actual singularity widened at every stage, but so slowly that his awareness, his Meta space, never detected it.
Here is what the story teaches. Contrary to what we like to believe, great drifts do not necessarily begin with a great decision. They can begin with a succession of tiny arrangements with ourselves, each too small to register as a betrayal, whose accumulation produces a radical transformation of who we are.
Two versions of the same mechanism
Slimani and Luchaire illustrate two faces of one phenomenon: our identifications evolve over time, our identity narrative is permanently rewritten, and that rewriting can be a source of richness as easily as a source of ruin.
With Slimani, the mechanism is conscious and she remains its author. She knows her old and new identifications coexist in tension. She names the tension, explores it, refuses to resolve it too quickly. Her melancholy is not a failure. It is the mark of a rich awareness carrying the whole sequence of its past experiences without disowning any of it. Her Meta space is running at full capacity: she watches herself evolve, she registers the gaps, she folds them into a coherent narrative.
With Luchaire, the mechanism is unconscious and he becomes its plaything. His declared identifications — pacifist, man of dialogue — hold as a façade while his singularity drifts unnoticed. The Meta space, that reflexive capacity to see ourselves acting, is dormant. Or perhaps actively lulled to sleep by the material and social comfort that compromise provides. He does not watch himself change. He does not hold his micro-choices up against his deeper values. He never asks: “Is the person doing this compatible with the person I believe myself to be?”
The difference between these two paths is not one of kind but of awareness. The same mechanism — identifications evolving over time, a widening gap between what we believe ourselves to be and what we are becoming — can produce either an enriching integration, when active reflexive observation accompanies it, or a destructive drift, when it operates in the dark.
The false alternative: loyalty or betrayal
The Experience Matrix has something important to offer this universal question.
When we reason in terms of identity — “I am a daughter of Morocco” or “I am a Parisian” — we end up trapped in all-or-nothing logic. Either I am one or I am the other. If I am both, I must be incoherent, inauthentic, corrupted.
But when we reason in terms of identifications, the landscape changes entirely. I identify both with my inheritance and with the path I have taken. The two do not exclude each other; they complete each other. Each enriches my singularity in a different way. One gave me directness, a sense of roots, the memory of another world. The other gave me openness, intellectual rigor, access to new territory. Together they make me a richer, fuller, more nuanced person than either alone would have.
As for the risk of unconscious drift that Luchaire illustrates, the Matrix points to the remedy precisely: keep the Meta space active. Watch yourself evolve. Ask regularly: “Are the things I am doing today consistent with the identifications I claim?” Not in order to freeze into an unchanging identity, but to remain the author of your own narrative rather than its passive character.
Paul Ricœur, the French philosopher who thought most deeply about this, distinguished two dimensions of identity: idem, permanence, what stays the same, and ipse, self-constancy, what persists through change. We can change radically — country, occupation, social milieu, language — and remain faithful to ourselves, not because we stay the same but because we maintain the narrative coherence of our path. That is the difference between loyalty to what we have been, which freezes us, and loyalty to what we are becoming, which frees us.
Slimani’s melancholy is not, then, a sign of betrayal. It is a sign that the narrative thread is intact, that she carries the whole sequence of her experiences within her — the little girl from Rabat, the Paris student, the prize-winning novelist, the mother, the woman between two worlds — and that she refuses to simplify that complexity. Luchaire’s blindness is the opposite sign: the narrative thread broke, he stopped telling himself his own path with any lucidity, and the small betrayals piled up in the silence of a sleeping awareness.
Because in the end, identity is not a place you arrive at. It is a path you trace, and it betrays no one as long as you walk it with your eyes open, carrying the whole journey with you.
The Experience Matrix is a new model for reading human experience that rethinks how we conceive of identity in NLP. A useful tool for coaches, therapists and practitioners. For the full model: La Matrice de l’Expérience by Christian Vanhenten, Éditions de la Bienveillance, available on Amazon or through the Atelier PNL website (https://atelierpnl.eu).