Liminal States: Wandering in the Borderlands Between Who We Were and Who We Are Becoming
This post is a part of a series based on my presentation,
Betwixt & Between: Discovering the Gift of the Liminal.
To find out more, visit The Liminal Hub.
Your job ends.
Your marriage dissolves.
Your diagnosis arrives.
Beliefs that once held your world together begin to crack.
You may look like the same person from the outside, but on the inside, everything has changed.
You are no longer who you were.
But you do not yet know who you are becoming.
Welcome to the liminal state.
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What Is a Liminal State?
Liminal states occur when we become suspended at an existential or psychological threshold—between identities, roles, or ways of understanding the world. We sometimes refer to them as “times” or “seasons” because they unfold over time. They might:
arise through the passages of a human life, which we’ll call life-stage liminality
be triggered by external events — external liminality
emerge from internal change — internal liminality
These three types of liminal states often converge.
A life-stage or an external upheaval almost always catalyzes something internal. And sometimes what’s stirring inside us eventually cracks open—or blows up—our outer life as well.
Sometimes we choose liminal states.
But, usually, we don’t.
Of all things betwixt & between, liminal states have held my fascination the longest.
They are where/when/how the magic happens inside us.
Not guaranteed, but the potential is there.
Thomas Moore aptly refers to (certain kinds of) liminal states as dark nights of the soul, an image with a rich heritage in the Christian tradition. In fact, it was Moore’s book, Dark Nights of the Soul (Gotham Books, 2004), that introduced me to the liminal, twenty years ago. Understanding the role of the liminal in our human experience was so revelatory for me, I’ve never been able to let it go.
I hope you’ll find it helpful too.
Keep reading for a deeper dive into what makes them so fascinating.
Life-Stage Liminal States
Life-stage liminality is the oldest identified type of liminality that we have, thanks to the work of Arnold van Gennep at the turn of the 20th century. The passages of our human lives regularly place us between one identity or role and the next. Pregnancy and new parenthood, adolescence and menarche, midlife and menopause, aging and dying can all involve extended stretches in which our old way of being is passing away before a new one has yet fully taken shape.
Some of these passages we enter willingly, like when we choose to become a parent or retire, but many of these passages, like puberty, menopause, aging, and certainly some pregnancies, arrive whether or not our psyches are ready. Often there’s a gap between the physical change and our inner readiness—our biology moves first, and our identity has to catch up.
Life-Stage Liminality and Ritual in Modern Times
A question that fascinates me is this:
Did traditional rites do a better job than modernity at bringing clarity and community to life-stage liminality?
I suspect they did, but perhaps at the cost of rigidity and, by our modern standards, coercion.
Modernity seems to offer more freedom and flexibility, but, perhaps, at the cost of psychic impact.
Take, for example, the coming-of-age passage for a boy, which many traditional societies marked with an ordeal—wilderness seclusion, scarification, circumcision, and tests of endurance. For girls, the passage was often marked by menarche, sometimes with related rituals, soon followed by marriage—with no say in the matter.
The upside of these traditions, rites, and rituals was that no one was left wondering whether or not they’d crossed over.
But the downside was that the crossings — at least by our modern standards — were often forced, brutal, and traumatic.
Modern life keeps some of the ceremonies but drains the ordeal — and the trauma. Graduations, confirmations, quinceañeras, bar and bat mitzvahs, still mark the passage out of adolescence, but they’re mostly celebratory.
My question is, if there’s a ceremony, followed by a cake and a party — but no trial to go through — is it enough to help our psyches cross over?
Image from Unsplash via Squarespace
Maybe, in our modern world, the social-emotional upheaval (trauma?) of structured adolescence is enough.
Think about it.
For seven years, we throw them all into a locked cement building where they train to hide from active shooters while trying to learn (and perform on tests that will decide their future), while struggling to survive bullying brutes in the bathroom and lying lassies in the lunchroom, whose cut-throat machinations are so cleverly cruel they could contend with those of the most sophisticated political operatives in the world.
What does a couple of days in the wilderness have on that?
External Liminal States
External liminal states are the second type we might find ourselves in.
Sometimes they are of our own choosing, like when we take a gap year, sabbatical, pilgrimage, or retreat, or when we move or make a deliberate career change.
But usually they are forced upon us by external events, such as war, displacement, natural disaster, or the more personal earthquakes of a family death, prolonged illness, or partner walking out the door.
They tend to trigger a loss of control and certainty—a sudden disruption that strips away our old identity before a new one has a chance to form.
The following are some common characteristics of forced liminality.
I’m sure you’ll recognize them.
Sudden Disruption
The change almost always arrives before we’re ready for it. One phone call, diagnosis, decision, storm, dismissal, or death divides our life like a guillotine into the “before” and “after.” But our body and mind need time to adjust. To catch up. We often expect or at least wait for the former world to return even after it is gone.
Loss of Control
When the guillotine drops, certainty and stability are stripped away. We are often just trying to survive.
Old Identity Is Gone
Our role, relationship, home, community, or source of meaning disappears before a replacement exists. Inevitably we not so much ask as lament:
Who am I without this person?
Without this work?
Without this body?
Without this place?
But the answer is silence.
Because it has not yet emerged.
Image from Unsplash via Squarespace
Internal Liminal States
Internal liminal states are the third type.
Sometimes we choose them through solitude, therapy, retreat, pilgrimage, or sabbatical. But others emerge from within—a nagging question we can no longer ignore, a spiritual crisis, identity shift, or midlife reevaluation.
On the outside, we may look the same. Going to work, taking out the trash, making polite conversation at the Summer Sales Social.
But on the inside, our worldview is coming apart.
The following are a few of the more common experiences of interior liminal states.
Midlife Reevaluation
We spend decades pursuing personal and career goals and then wham! Suddenly they feel hollow. Empty. We become painfully aware of the tick tock of our biological clock, and our questions turn from how do I succeed? to what was this all for? Then we might spend some time grieving the roads we never took, no longer even certain the road we’re on is ours—suspended between the life we built and the alternate versions that will never be. Between the one we are in and the one we can still feel calling to us.
Spiritual Crisis or Awakening
Spiritual crises often ensue when we can no longer make sense of our lived experience within a given system of belief. The old language becomes inadequate. The old answers feel too small. Then we find ourselves in the lonely exosphere of unresolved dialectic, suspended between belief and unbelief, belonging and exile, certainty and mystery. It doesn’t always mean a loss of faith — sometimes it’s just the painful dismantling of one form before another becomes possible. I personally have been through the heady days of awakening and the painful years of crisis. In retrospect, I’m grateful for them both, but at the beginning of the crisis, I would have traded it away in a heartbeat. (More on that in Of Beginnings and Ends.)
Identity Shifts
Our identity may become liminal when we begin questioning who we are within a relationship, career, family, community, culture, or social role. We might choose the shift or it might feel like it chose us. If the latter is the case, I suspect it’s because our previous identities became impossible to inhabit, but we weren’t yet consciously able to recognize or admit it.
Usually we know what no longer fits before we know what does fit.
A Note of Caution for the disequilibrated
In periods of such uncertainty, there will always be those claiming to have the answers for us, perhaps involving prescribed roles within a particular worldview. To be sure, there is a certain relief that comes from surrendering to neatly packaged systems of belief, but it is wise to be wary, and wiser still to be still and patient, listening for what might emerge from your unresolved dialectic.
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Liminal Persons Can Seem Threatening to Society
Societies rely on recognizable roles, boundaries, and identities, and the ambiguity of liminal persons unsettles the social order. They blur distinctions and categories, so they appear confusing, disruptive, or threatening to others. They challenge the idea that social categories are natural, fixed, or permanent.
They remind us that the established order can change.
In some cultures, liminal persons are understood to possess a sacred but dangerous power, having access to possibilities unavailable to those firmly within it. Initiates, mystics, exiles, artists, and wanderers often occupy this ambiguous position—inspiring fascination and suspicion.
But feelings toward liminal persons can run even darker.
Anthropologist Mary Douglas examined how cultures treat ambiguous people, objects, and conditions and observed that a society committed to stability may interpret such ambiguity as chaos.
And social pollution.
You don’t have to look far to see this type of thinking in our own times, lurking in rhetoric about immigrants and trans people. Though we are a nation of immigrants, and the trans population is about 1% in the U.S., a segment of our society, stoked by politicians and influencers who play to these primal fears of social pollution and chaos, feels threatened by both.
The Pain and Power of the Liminal State
No need to sugarcoat it.
We all know these liminal states are hard.
When you’re in one, your old identity and sense of safety are gone, and a new one hasn’t yet arrived. That gap is filled with uncertainty, grief, disorientation, longing, helplessness, sadness, and sometimes real anger, but the incredible thing about them is this:
Liminal states carry the seeds of transformation.
The very deconstruction that feels so destabilizing in our lives is what makes room for something new.
New beliefs.
New identities.
New ways of being in the world.
That’s the power of the liminal—that the darkness is not just the end of something, but the threshold of a new beginning.
The power of the liminal is that the darkness is not just the end of something, but the threshold of a new beginning.
Image from Unsplash via Squarespace
Some Questions to Carry With You
When were you last in a liminal state?
Or are you in one now?
What has ended?
What has not yet begun?
What might be asking to emerge?
Continue Exploring the Liminal
Return to the main hub: What Is the Liminal?
Continue to: How to Navigate a Liminal State (Coming Soon.)
Explore S. K. Kruse’s many other projects!
