You’re Not Stuck. You’re In Between. The difference between limbo and liminal space, and why it changes everything

There’s a particular kind of suffering that comes not from loss, or failure, but from not knowing where you are.

You look around and the old version of your life doesn’t fit anymore. The old you, the one who knew what she wanted, who had a clear sense of direction, who could explain herself at a dinner party, seems to have quietly left the building. And yet the new version of you, whoever that is, hasn’t quite arrived yet.

You’re in between.

And if you’re like most people, the word that comes to mind is stuck.

But what if stuck is the wrong word entirely? What if the experience you’re having has a different name, which changes everything about how you move through it?

Two Words. One Feeling. Very Different Meanings.

The words limbo and liminal sound like cousins, and in a sense they are. Both come from the Latin root limen, meaning edge or threshold. But they arrived in our language through very different doors, and they point to very different truths.

Limbo came to us through medieval Catholic theology. It described a borderland at the edge of the afterlife. Not punishment exactly, but not where you wanted to be either. A place of suspension. Of waiting. Of indefinite not-quite-anything. The souls there weren’t going anywhere. They were just… there.

Liminal space is something else entirely. The word was introduced into anthropology by Arnold van Gennep in the early 1900s, and later developed by Victor Turner. They used it to describe the middle phase of a rite of passage, the threshold state between who you were and who you’re becoming. Not a waiting room. A crucible, to one degree or another.

Here’s the crucial difference:

Limbo implies suspension without resolution. Stuck with no guaranteed way through.

Liminal space implies purposeful transition. Between, yes, but between in the way a caterpillar is between. Dissolving in order to become.

Same geography. Completely different relationship to what’s happening.

The Three Stages of Every Real Transformation

Van Gennep identified three phases to every genuine rite of passage, and once you see them you cannot unsee them.

The first is separation. You leave the old structure, the old identity, the old role, the old version of life. Sometimes this is chosen. Often it simply happens. A relationship ends. A career falls away. A health crisis rewrites the story. A chapter closes and you didn’t get to choose the timing.

The second is the liminal phase. This is the threshold itself. The between. The place where the old rules no longer apply and the new ones haven’t formed yet. This is the part that feels like being lost. Like dissolution. Like standing in fog with no landmarks.

This is the part most people call stuck.

The third is reincorporation. Emergence into a new form. Integration. The arrival, not back to where you were, but somewhere further along, shaped by everything the threshold taught you.

Here’s what Van Gennep and Turner both understood that most of us forget: the liminal phase is not a problem to be solved. It is the transformation itself.

The disorientation is not evidence that something has gone wrong. It is evidence that something real is happening.

Why We Mistake Liminal Space for Being Stuck

We live in a culture that treats all discomfort as a malfunction. If you’re uncertain, you should find certainty. If you’re unclear, you should get clear. If you don’t know who you are right now, that’s a problem to fix.

But liminality by its very nature resists fixing. You cannot rush the caterpillar. The dissolving is the point. The soup inside the chrysalis, that formless, unrecognisable stage, is where the wings are being built.

When we label this experience as stuck, we do several harmful things. We treat a natural process as a failure. We try to force our way back to the old form, because at least that was familiar. Or we try to leap forward prematurely into a new form that isn’t ready yet. We exhaust ourselves fighting a threshold that was designed to hold us for exactly as long as we need.

The nervous system, in particular, struggles with liminal space. It is wired for pattern recognition, for predictability, for knowing what comes next. When the ground dissolves beneath us, the survival brain reads it as threat. The anxiety, the low energy, the strange flatness, the sense of not-quite-knowing-yourself. These are not signs of breakdown. They are signs of profound reorganisation happening beneath the surface.

What Liminal Space Actually Asks of You

Traditional cultures understood this in ways that we have largely forgotten. Every indigenous rite of passage had a liminal phase, a time in the wilderness, a time of fasting, a time of isolation. The young person who entered was not the same person who emerged. The community held the space for that transformation, because they understood that it required holding.

What liminal space asks of you is very different from what our culture asks of you.

Culture says: produce, perform, know, achieve, move forward, show results.

Liminal space says: rest, receive, release, trust the not-knowing, let the old form dissolve without clinging.

It asks for surrender rather than striving. Receptivity rather than pushing. It asks you to trust a process that by definition cannot be seen clearly from the inside.

This is, perhaps, the most countercultural thing a person can do.

The Signs You’re in Liminal Space Rather Than Simply Lost

There are some markers worth noticing.

You feel between rather than nowhere. There’s a sense, even if faint, that something is completing and something is forming. You can’t see it clearly, but you can sometimes sense it at the edges.

Your old ways of being feel like clothes that no longer fit. Not because they were wrong, but because you have grown beyond them.

The things that used to energise you feel flat. The things that used to feel urgent feel less important. Something is being reprioritised at a level deeper than your conscious mind.

You’re being drawn inward rather than outward. Liminal space is inner work. It happens in the quiet, in the dream, in the journal, in the long walk.

Symbols and synchronicities feel louder. When we are between forms, the deeper self often communicates through image and metaphor rather than logic. Animals appear. Numbers repeat. The world feels strangely meaningful.

And there is often a quality of fatigue that no amount of sleep quite resolves. What is tiring is not the body but the enormous invisible work of transformation.

How to Work With the Threshold Rather Than Against It

If you recognise yourself in any of this, here are some things that help.

Name it. Calling the experience liminal rather than stuck is not just semantics. It repositions you from someone who has stopped to someone who is in process. That shift matters enormously to the nervous system.

Lower the demand on yourself. This is not a time for maximum output. Caterpillars do not try to fly while they are dissolving. Give yourself permission to be in the soup.

Tend to your body. The nervous system needs extra support during dissolution. Rest. Eat well. Move gently. The body is the container for the transformation. It needs to feel safe enough to let the process continue.

Stay curious about what’s leaving. What identities, beliefs, roles, or stories are falling away? Rather than grabbing for them, can you become interested in what the leaving is making room for?

Trust the process more than the timeline. Liminal space has its own timing and it doesn’t respond well to being rushed. I have a hard time with this part because I am someone who “pushes through”except it’s not the time to push through. You will emerge. The question is whether you emerge having fought the threshold the whole way, or having allowed it to do its work.

Find others who understand. Isolation amplifies the disorientation of liminal space. You don’t need people who will try to fix you or hurry you along. You need people who can hold space for the between.

A Final Thought

There is something that happens at thresholds that cannot happen anywhere else. The ordinary rules of life temporarily suspend. The fixed becomes fluid. What was impossible in the old form becomes possible in the new one.

Cultures across the world and throughout time have built their most sacred practices around the threshold, because they understood that this is where real change lives. Not in the comfortable, the familiar, the known.

In the between.

If you are in between right now, you are not broken and you are not stuck. You are standing on a threshold that is real, that has always been part of the human story, and that has a way through.

The question is not how to escape the liminal space. The question is how to move through it with as much trust, as much grace, and as much self-compassion as you can gather.

The other side exists. And it is shaped by who you are becoming in this very moment.

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