The Secure Self, Read Through the Experience Matrix
Part of my research on the Experience Matrix consists in testing the model against existing ones. The point is to show that the Matrix is an evolution of NLP rather than a break with it, after fifty years of practice and teaching.
An illuminating NLP procedure: the Secure Self
I recently came across a procedure called “the Secure Self” on WikiPNL, the encyclopedic project on Neuro-Linguistic Programming directed by Alain Thiry.1
Alain Thiry put the procedure together during a master practitioner training in 1990 at the Institut Ressources in Belgium, supervised by David Gordon. It works at the identity level, guiding people toward the deeper meaning of their existence by helping them build a self-concept that is both positive and stable.
How the procedure works
It moves through several structured steps.
Belonging to a larger whole is the starting point. The practitioner invites the person to explore their mental representation of the wider world they belong to, whether family, community, country, planet or universe, and how they locate themselves within it.
Eliciting the mission comes next, through three experiences in which the person felt entirely coherent with themselves. Analyzing those experiences reveals recurring criteria, and those criteria gradually sketch the outline of a personal mission.
The meta-map then places that mission inside the representation of the larger whole, producing a unified picture of the person’s contribution to the world.
The procedure continues by identifying the qualities useful to that mission, reframing the past to see the learning it contained, and finally building a bridge to the future to anchor the new understanding.
What it does well
The procedure takes on the question of existential meaning with a structured method. Its temporal shape, past, present and future, respects the narrative dimension of human identity. More striking still, it brings in the collective dimension from the start, by situating the person inside something larger than themselves.
It also avoids rigidity. It states that there is no fixed time frame and that the mission can change, which shows a fine grasp of how identity actually moves.
What the Experience Matrix adds
None of what follows is a criticism of the procedure. The Matrix throws a different light on it, one that brings out its richness and opens some further ground.
The question of mission, revisited
“Mission” raises interesting questions when you look at it through the Matrix.
Who assigns this mission?
The question is not incidental. It reaches the philosophical assumptions underneath our whole approach to identity.
The traditional procedure seems to assume some form of external assignment, cosmic, divine or social. The Experience Matrix proposes something else. Rather than an assigned mission, it recognizes unconscious impulses that emerge from the interaction between all the spaces of our experience, producing inner movements we do not always understand but that orient us with a puzzling accuracy.
That reformulation has several advantages. It preserves personal authenticity by grounding the “mission” in lived experience rather than in an external injunction. It keeps the adaptive fluidity that life changes require. And it avoids making the meaning of one’s existence dependent on outside validation.
This comes close to Lacan’s conception of unconscious desire. Desire cannot be known directly, since it is unconscious, but we notice it immediately when we stray from it. Rather than “finding your mission” as one would solve an equation, the work consists in developing enough perceptual finesse to sense when we are moving toward what matters to us and when we are moving away.
That changes the practice considerably. Instead of trying to define a mission once and for all, we learn to dance along our path, adjusting continuously to an inner direction that reveals itself in touches, through resonance and dissonance, in the movement of living itself.
The “larger whole” and the Identifications space
The idea of a larger whole finds a rich echo in the Matrix’s Identifications space. But where the traditional procedure looks for one encompassing whole, the Matrix recognizes that our belongings are multiple.
We belong at the same time to our family, our profession, our culture, our era, our species, our planet. These identifications do not cancel each other out. They articulate dynamically according to context and to the moment in a life.
That widens the work on belonging. Instead of searching for the “right” larger whole, we can explore the range of our identifications and how they feed one another.
A systemic integration
The strength of the Experience Matrix lies in its systemic view. A sense of mission, or of meaning, does not emerge only from a relation to a larger whole. It emerges from the interaction between all the spaces of our experience.
The emotional space colors how we perceive a mission. Some speak to us more than others because they resonate emotionally.
The behavioral space makes the mission actual in concrete action, producing constant feedback between what we aspire to and what we accomplish.
The Knowing space, our beliefs and our map of the world, filters and interprets our experiences and gives our path its meaning.
The Know-How space develops the skills that expressing the mission requires.
The Context space modulates how the mission gets expressed, depending on settings and periods.
The Meta space, our meta-programs and meta-states, structures how we process everything relating to that mission.
Toward an integrated approach
Spirituality as an emergent quality
A fair question arises. Does the Experience Matrix neglect the spiritual dimension that the Secure Self sets out to address?
The answer exposes an assumption inherited from Dilts’s logical levels: that spirituality sits “at the top”. The Secure Self, like the logical levels, implicitly places the spiritual dimension at the summit of a hierarchy. That looks obvious. It is not obvious at all.
Many spiritual traditions locate spirituality inside, or in depth, instead. In Sufism, the divine dwells in the heart of the human being. In some forms of Buddhism, awakening is found in the deep nature of mind. Christian mystics speak of the “interior castle” of the soul. Native American traditions describe the spirit that animates all things from within.
By introducing the temporal dimension, the Experience Matrix offers a different picture. Rather than creating a separate space for spirituality, it treats spirituality as an emergent quality of the harmonious interaction between all the spaces. It does not sit above the other dimensions. It runs through all of them.
Further down, that temporal dimension reveals spirituality as a kind of meta-identity that encompasses the temporal and dissolves it. This is the thread that, beyond circumstance and change, draws what we call destiny, not as fate but as an emergent coherence that outlasts temporal contingencies.
It shows itself in our identifications (belonging to traditions of meaning), our beliefs (a view of the sacred), our emotions (experiences of transcendence), our behaviors (spiritual practices), our capabilities (the development of wisdom), and our meta-states (widened awareness).
This avoids compartmentalizing while still giving the dimension its full weight.
An enriched process
Taking the Experience Matrix into account, the Secure Self could gain in several ways.
Explore multiple identifications rather than a single larger whole, for a more nuanced approach to belonging.
Identify natural impulses that emerge from lived experience rather than searching for one mission, which preserves fluidity and allows the person to change.
Integrate all the spaces of the Matrix to build systemic coherence, rather than working only on the cognitive and identity-related aspects.
Recognize the temporal dimension not as a straight line toward a fixed goal, but as the continuous emergence of our singularity.
The Matrix seen in the mirror of an older procedure
The exercise shows how productive it is to question the Experience Matrix through an earlier procedure. Far from being simply superseded, the Secure Self works as a revealer. It helps make the Matrix’s conceptual moves clearer and shows what they change in practice.
The comparison shows that the Matrix does not replace existing NLP practices; it gives them a new sense. It offers a conceptual frame that explains why certain procedures work, how they might be enriched, and how they fit inside a broader and more nuanced view of human experience.
Meaning as a journey through the spaces
The existential search that the Secure Self sets out to address can be understood as a journey through all the spaces of the Matrix.
In the Context space, we look for the settings that nourish us and let us grow. In the emotional space, we develop our capacity to feel what echoes in us, the perceptual finesse that guides us toward what carries meaning. In the behavioral space, we test our impulses concretely and watch their effects on the world and on ourselves.
In the Knowing space, we build a map of the world that gives our experiences coherence and orients our choices. In the Know-How space, we develop the skills that let us act on what moves us. In the Identifications space, we find the multiple belongings that place us in the fabric of the world.
And in the Meta space, we cultivate the meta-identity that outlasts time, the awareness that recognizes the deep coherence of our path beyond changing circumstance.
The search for meaning is then no longer the discovery of a fixed mission. It is the art of moving well through all these spaces, developing the sensitivity that lets us feel when we are aligned with the unconscious desire that inhabits us and guides us.
In that movement, each space of the Matrix becomes a note in the melody of our existence, and meaning emerges not from any one of them but from the whole.
Footnotes
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WikiPNL is an encyclopedic project on Neuro-Linguistic Programming directed by Alain Thiry. See the page on the Secure Self model (in French). ↩