Dilts on Identity, Reread Through the Experience Matrix
Some seminars stay with you long afterward. The one Robert Dilts gave in Montreux in December 1998, under the title Identity and Evolutionary Change, is one of those. It takes seriously the level NLP had long brushed against without daring to settle into: identity. You almost certainly know the logical levels already; you may have made them your working map. What I propose here is not to file that map away, but to reread it — first on its own terms, then in the light of the Experience Matrix, and finally to see how the Matrix extends it.
The reading goes in three movements. The first sets out faithfully what Dilts means by identity and by evolutionary change. That is the heart of the article, and I take my time with it, because his thinking deserves careful restitution rather than a hasty summary. The second rereads the same material with the categories of the Matrix, not to correct anything, but to see what a different set of divisions brings into view. The third, shorter, places the relation between the two models: it is not one of opposition but of extension, in the precise sense in which Einstein’s relativity extends Newton’s mechanics without contradicting it.
First movement: identity in Dilts
Dilts starts from an observation that sets the tone of the whole seminar: the identity level is one of the least explored domains of change in NLP, and yet the deepest one its tools can reach. He makes it the foundation of the other levels. Working there, he suggests, involves more than adjusting a behavior, a capability or a belief. It is the level on which the possibility of what he calls evolutionary change depends: not repairing what is broken, not amplifying what already works, but transforming the ground itself on which our ways of being grow. His garden metaphor distinguishes the three regimes — pulling weeds, sowing new seeds, changing the nature of the soil — and identity belongs to the third, the most encompassing.
To situate identity, Dilts places it in his model of levels — what we at Atelier PNL call the intervention levels, and what he calls sometimes logical levels, sometimes neuro-logical levels; it is his levels I am describing here. The stack runs from environment to behavior, to capabilities, to beliefs and values, to identity, then to the spiritual level. Each floor organizes the one below; acting high up resonates downward, while the reverse is not guaranteed. Identity holds a hinge position: above beliefs and values, which it consolidates “into a sense of Self,” and below the spiritual, which opens it toward something larger. Dilts attaches a question to each level. Identity answers “Who?”; the spiritual answers a “Who else?” that connects the person to the larger systems they belong to. He doubles this reading with a neurological correspondence: each level would mobilize progressively deeper circuits, and identity would reach down to the immune and endocrine systems, that silent function of maintaining life.
The word “identity” holds Dilts’s attention. He notes that it comes from the Latin idem, “the same,” and takes up the classical definition of a uniformity of character across different instances. Identity, in that sense, is what does not change, what runs like a thread through contexts and expresses itself in everything you do. You will recognize a direct point of contact with Paul Ricœur’s distinction between identity-as-idem and identity-as-ipse, which we will come back to. Dilts even pushes the definition to something close to a philosophical formula: identity would be reality at its deepest level, where subject and object merge.
One point deserves emphasis, because Dilts is sometimes caricatured as holding an identity closed in on itself. The opposite is true. For him identity is never a destination: it articulates upward toward a mission, “my mission is to…,” then toward the vision of a larger system that mission serves. The “I am” calls for a “what for” and a “for whom.” Identity, in Dilts, is structurally open: it stands at the threshold of something that exceeds it.
The tree metaphor gathers all of this. Identity is the trunk, the essential center of the being, and from that trunk two sets of things extend. Downward, inner roots: the network of values, beliefs, capabilities and body, sinking into the soil and drawing up strength and nourishment. Upward, branches and leaves: participation in wider systems — family, profession, community. The image says precisely what the model means. Identity is the hinge between an inside (the roots, where neurology and the body mix with beliefs, values and capabilities) and an outside (participation in wider systems). The “Who” stands at the junction. And that outside needs naming accurately, because this is where the whole distance from the Matrix quietly prepares itself: what Dilts opens identity toward is not belonging to categories of people, but connection to a whole larger than oneself — a system, a community, a web of the living. Where Dilts thinks participation in the larger, the Matrix will think belongings: those identifications by which we range ourselves among our own kind. And it is through this opening, Dilts adds, that what he calls the fruits of the Spirit appear: healing, joy, compassion, commitment, love.
From that tree, Dilts carefully distinguishes identity from what he calls the self-concept. Identity would be the territory; the self-concept, a map of that territory, built from the beliefs we hold about our own potential and our own limits. The distinction is fertile: it explains why we can be wrong about ourselves, why the picture we hold of our own identity can be narrower than what we are. The self-concept, in Dilts, can be worked on and corrected, precisely because it is only a map.
The seminar finally sets out a precise vocabulary for thinking about the relation between identity and everything else. Dilts calls attachment the fact of taking something to be part of oneself; dependence, the belief that one needs it in order to survive or to be who one is; independence, the belief in a closed and complete identity; and co-independence, that more mature position in which one holds an identity and a source of existence of one’s own while choosing a relationship of interdependence that enlarges who one is. Alongside this he sets a process of de-identification and then re-identification, run as a guided meditation that works through the levels one by one — environment, body, thoughts, beliefs, self-perceptions — repeating at each stage that this is not yet “you,” that you are something deeper. At the end of the stripping away, what remains Dilts names without hedging: an essence, a soul, an energy, which in turn opens toward a field larger than oneself.
He never erases that spiritual and transpersonal dimension. It runs through the seminar from end to end, from the spiritual “Who else?” level to the fruits of the Spirit, from de-identification toward the soul to the archetypes of transformation borrowed from Jung, those figures of passage, rebirth and metamorphosis. It is a register Dilts inhabits fully and coherently, and it is an integral part of how he thinks identity. One question of his sums up this search for permanence within change: facing the great turning points of a life, how did you know you had become different? And how did you know you had stayed the same?
Second movement: the same material, read through the Matrix
Let us take that material up again with the categories of the Experience Matrix. Not to arbitrate, but to see: a different set of divisions lights up a different relief, and it is that shift of view that is at stake here, not a judgment.
The first shift turns on a word, and it starts exactly where Dilts stopped. Dilts notes that “identity” means idem, “the same.” The Matrix takes that etymology at its word and draws a consequence. If identity names what makes me identical, then it does not mark me out as unique: it attaches me to classes of people I resemble. “Who am I?” turns into “which categories am I identical to?” We move from identity, a noun that suggests a stable thing, to identifications in the plural: social, contextual, reversible processes by which I connect myself to groups, roles, stories. Let me be clear, to avoid any misunderstanding: the Matrix does not correct Dilts, it extends an intuition he already had, since he is the one who supplies the etymological fact. It simply unfolds the structural consequence he does not draw — dissolving the level into a network of identifications.
That shift changes how we work with people. Faced with someone who says “I don’t know who I am anymore,” we no longer try to restore an identity in the singular; we help clarify and reorganize the network of identifications. Take a person built, without knowing it, on the identification with “those who have to earn their place.” Treat it as an essence — I am someone who has to prove himself — and the door stays shut. Treat it as one identification among other possible ones, and alternative classes can emerge, “those who know they already have their place,” opening a choice where there was none. Identification, unlike identity, is agentic: you can work with it.
The second shift touches the place of identity in the model itself. In Dilts, it is a level, a floor of the stack, located, named, intervened upon directly. In the Matrix, it is not a level: it is an emergent property, represented by a point with no surface at the center of the structure — a geometric point on which, by definition, nothing can be placed. The choice is deliberate. Identity is not a content to be handled; it is the result of the orchestration of all the spaces: Singularity (what belongs to the person — their doing, their know-how, their knowing, their emotions), the Identifications, the Meta space where reflexive awareness resides, and the Context that encompasses everything.
The practical consequence is not that we give up working on identity, but that the lever moves. We do not act on the image, we act on what produces it, just as you do not retouch a hologram by scratching its surface but by modifying the device that generates it. Where Dilts’s tree makes identity a real trunk, the substantial center of the being, the Matrix sees an emergent form with no substance of its own, recomposing itself the moment any of the spaces moves. Both images are coherent within their own frame; they simply do not aim at the same cross-section.
That leaves the question Dilts puts so well: how did you know you had stayed the same? This is the question of permanence, what Ricœur called identity-as-idem, and what Dilts installs at the heart of his model as that which does not change. The Matrix does not sweep it aside; it rehouses it. Because a purely emergent identity, caught in the instant, would be too fleeting to ground the durable feeling of being oneself. That central point is in fact only the cross-section of a perpendicular axis: the axis of time, the arrow running from a lived past to a desired future by way of the present. The permanence you feel is not that of an immobile substance; it is that of a narrative that holds — narrative identity, the thread we weave by connecting what we have been to what we are becoming. Where Dilts houses permanence in an essence, the Matrix houses it in the story.
One last feature separates the two readings. Dilts’s stack is vertical and descending: act at the top and it resonates below. That is true, and useful, in many situations. The Matrix organizes the same elements differently. Behavior, capabilities and beliefs are all there, but arranged as a circle that brings out feedback loops in which each space influences the others and is influenced by them in return. A new behavior brings a capability into being, which puts a belief back in play, which reflects onto the relational context, which reconfigures the emotions. The cascade gives way to a system. Neither organization is false; each makes visible what the other leaves in shadow.
There remains the spiritual dimension, which Dilts represents as a level placed at the very top of his pyramid, sometimes drawn as an inverted pyramid. Where the work stops, when the stripping away has removed everything, Dilts names what remains an essence, a soul. The word is his: he does speak of essence, and it is better to say so plainly than to bury it under qualifications. What he sets out is the thought of a permanent core, one the subject can never entirely know and that nonetheless persists. It is an essentialist position, and he owns it as such. That permanent, never directly knowable essence is not unrelated to the unconscious fundamental desire Lacan describes: a real ground, but one you never reach head-on. On one precise point, the self-concept, Dilts refines things: the self-concept is the map we draw of our deep identity, made of the beliefs we hold about who we are or believe ourselves to be, and as such it belongs to the space of beliefs and values.
The Matrix stands elsewhere. By integrating that unconscious fundamental desire, it places itself between the two extremes of essentialism, which posits a given nature, and existentialism, which has that nature entirely constructed. We cannot know what our deep nature is; but we can develop the competence of sensing when we are moving away from it, when we are holding our line and when we are diverging from it. That fundamental desire you can picture as your essence or as something still to be built: the Matrix leaves that choice open, deliberately. It does not arbitrate, because arbitrating is not its business.
There is one last point to look at clearly, without turning it into an indictment. By housing spirituality at the summit of his pyramid, Dilts also tells us something about his own belief system. Nothing makes it obvious that the spiritual belongs “above”: other traditions place it in the depths instead, at the very bottom, as a root rather than a peak. Dilts’s vertical carries, at that precise point, a choice of belief that is his own, and it is worth being aware of it — not to contest it, but because it is exactly what this whole reading has brought into view. The spiritual is not an ontological level given in advance; it is a content of belief, including for the person who places it at the top of the structure. We find it again in the temporal dimension of identity, since the transpersonal illustrates well how such a value system builds itself over the course of a life. It is by moving through time that we can recognize whether we are holding our line or drifting from it, under the effect of outside events or poorly fitting choices. And perhaps that is the essential of what the Matrix retains from the spiritual: what we are moving toward remains a mystery.
Third movement: an extension, not a break
How, then, should we name the relation between the two models? The most accurate comparison comes from physics. Newton and Einstein are not opposed: they work at different degrees of generality. Newton’s mechanics remains perfectly valid, and even preferable, being simpler and faster, for everything in ordinary experience — throwing a ball, building a bridge, calculating a trajectory. Einstein’s relativity does not contradict it; it contains it as a special case and becomes necessary at the boundaries, near very high speeds or extreme masses, where the Newtonian map would accumulate errors. It is an extension of the domain of validity, not a refutation.
The same holds here. Dilts’s intervention levels remain valid, and often preferable, for what we might call classical work: acquiring a behavior, developing a skill, transforming a belief, in a stable context and with a bounded request. On that ground their clarity and speed are assets, and forty years of practice bear witness. Dilts confirms as much when he tells us that “the identity level is one of the least explored domains of change in NLP.” That is where the Matrix becomes useful: when the question turns frankly to identity (“I don’t know who I am anymore,” “I feel plural”), but also when context stops being neutral scenery and reconfigures experience from one room to the next, or when systemic complexity defeats changes that were otherwise well conducted. Around those thresholds, treating identity as a stable level amounts to keeping Newton where Einstein is beginning to impose himself: it still roughly works, at the cost of errors that accumulate.
So this is not a choice of camp but a situated use: each model in its domain, knowing how to recognize the moment you move from one to the other. The Matrix does not replace the levels; it situates them, and takes over when complexity calls for it.
Much remains to be explored on that side: how identifications reorganize, what becomes of somatic or transgenerational work within a circular frame, how narrative identity gets told in session. These are open sites, and you are well placed to work them with us. The Experience Matrix is not a finished doctrine but a map we are still drawing, and one your practice can add relief to.