Liminality is the state of being in between: no longer what you were, but not yet what you’re becoming. The word comes from the Latin “limen,” meaning threshold, and it describes any period, place, or experience where the usual rules and identities feel suspended. You’ve likely experienced it without knowing the name, whether during a major life change, walking through an empty hallway late at night, or sitting in that strange gap between quitting one job and starting another.
Where the Concept Began
The idea of liminality originated with the French anthropologist Arnold van Gennep, who published “The Rites of Passage” in 1909. Van Gennep studied how traditional societies marked major life transitions, such as coming of age, marriage, or death, through structured rituals. He noticed a consistent three-stage pattern across cultures: separation, transition, and incorporation.
In the separation phase, a person symbolically leaves behind their previous identity or social role. The middle phase is the liminal one: a period of crisis, uncertainty, and disruption where the normal structure of society is temporarily suspended. In the final incorporation phase, the person emerges with a new social identity and begins a new chapter of life. A wedding ceremony is a compact example. The engagement separates you from single life, the ceremony itself is the liminal threshold, and married life is the incorporation.
The British anthropologist Victor Turner later expanded the concept in the 1960s and 70s, applying it far beyond tribal rituals to modern life, art, and social movements. Turner saw liminality as a space where creativity, transformation, and even rebellion could flourish precisely because ordinary social hierarchies were dissolved.
What Liminality Feels Like
Liminality carries a distinct emotional signature. People in liminal states commonly report a sense of disorientation, loss of control, and deep uncertainty about who they are. Your old identity no longer fits, but no new one has solidified. This creates a paradoxical tension: the pull between stability and change, between holding on and letting go.
During a career change, for example, this shows up in a very specific way. You’ve disengaged from your current career, but you’re nowhere near your new one. You’re taking action, talking to people, exploring ideas, but nothing has clicked yet. As one career changer described it: “I was mortified to find myself in a place where there was nothing clear to aim for. I didn’t know how to live like that.” That discomfort is the hallmark of liminality. Many people who abandon major life changes don’t quit because they lack motivation or skill. They quit because they weren’t expecting this feeling and assume they’ve done something wrong.
Liminality also carries a quieter, more generative quality. It is simultaneously a time of destruction and creation, disorientation and reorientation, unmaking and becoming. The identity questioning that feels so unsettling is also what allows genuine transformation. Without the dissolution of old patterns, new ones can’t form.
Liminal Spaces and Why They Feel Eerie
The term “liminal space” has taken on a life of its own, especially online, where photos of empty hallways, deserted malls, and fluorescent-lit stairwells evoke a specific uncanny feeling. These are physical spaces designed for passing through, not staying in. Lobbies, parking garages, hotel corridors, airport terminals, and stairwells all qualify. They sit on the boundary between one destination and another.
Architect Tara Ogle of Page & Turnbull describes these as places that “occupy the spaces between,” including boundary zones between indoor and outdoor, public and private, or simply here and there. They’re typically functional rather than aesthetically designed, which is part of why they feel so odd when you actually stop and pay attention to them. Empty of people, they lack clear markers of identity or ownership. Your brain expects movement and purpose in these spaces. When that’s absent, you feel a subtle wrongness, a loss of orientation that mirrors the psychological experience of liminality itself.
Time has its liminal moments too. Twilight, the period between day and night, has long carried a sense of being caught between two states. The Old English prefix “twi-” literally means “in two ways.” Dawn and dusk, solstices and equinoxes, the last moments of December, these temporal thresholds have inspired ritual and art across cultures precisely because they feel like the world is holding its breath between one condition and the next.
Liminality in Illness and Health
Researchers have found liminality to be one of the most useful frameworks for understanding serious illness, particularly cancer. In a study of colon cancer patients, three consistent experiences emerged regardless of how long ago treatment had occurred or whether the disease was still present. First, the cancer diagnosis created a permanent identification as a “cancer patient.” Second, patients felt a variable alienation from the people around them, an inability to communicate what the experience was actually like. Third, they described a persistent sense of boundedness: an awareness of limits to their time, space, and power that hadn’t existed before.
These patients entered liminality at the first sign of illness and never fully left it. An initial acute phase brought disorientation, loss of control, and deep uncertainty. Over time, this shifted into what researchers call “suspended liminality,” an enduring state in which patients constructed and reconstructed meaning through personal narrative. This phase persists, likely for the rest of the patient’s life. The old identity of a healthy person is gone, but the future remains permanently uncertain, so the liminal threshold never fully closes. This framework helps explain why cancer survivors often struggle long after treatment ends. They aren’t returning to normal. They’re living on a permanent threshold.
How People Move Through It
Exiting liminality isn’t like flipping a switch. Research on family caregivers, who undergo their own intense rite of passage when a loved one becomes seriously ill, shows that people move “backwards and forwards” across the boundary repeatedly before settling into what researchers describe as a “new normal.” The past and present gradually integrate to create a new future. Identity re-establishes itself, sometimes in a form the person couldn’t have predicted.
The strategies that help people navigate sustained liminality are surprisingly simple: living in the moment, retaining humor, staying hopeful, and finding meaning in the experience as it unfolds rather than waiting for it to resolve. Some caregivers and patients described reaching a point of acceptance that wasn’t a return to who they were before, but an evolution. As one study participant put it: “You couldn’t return to where you were. People think that getting better is getting back as you were. She got better but in a different way. We evolved our life in a different way.”
This is the essential insight of liminality as a concept. The passage through the threshold doesn’t bring you back to where you started. The incorporation phase, when it arrives, delivers a new identity rather than a restored one. Personal growth, changed perspective, and a redefined sense of purpose are common outcomes. The discomfort of the in-between isn’t a sign that something has gone wrong. It’s the texture of genuine transformation in progress.
Liminality in Learning
Educators have adopted liminality to explain a phenomenon familiar to any student who has struggled with a concept that suddenly, irreversibly, changed how they understood a subject. Researchers Jan Meyer and Ray Land introduced the idea of “threshold concepts,” ideas so transformative that once you grasp them, you can’t go back to your previous way of thinking. Before that understanding clicks, the student exists in a liminal state: confused, frustrated, unable to fully integrate the new knowledge with what they already know. The concept feels “troublesome,” resisting easy absorption. But once the threshold is crossed, the learner’s entire view of the subject shifts permanently. The temporary confusion was necessary for the transformation to occur.