This reflection serves as the philosophical foundation of LiminalPie—a space dedicated to exploring the inner terrain of thresholds, transitions, and slow transformation.

Summary

We tend to treat liminality—the ambiguous, in-between spaces of our lives—as temporary problems to solve rather than necessary terrain for transformation. But from a psychological and philosophical perspective, these threshold moments are not deviations from real life. They are real life. This essay explores why we expect stability, why we resist change, and how normalizing liminal experience opens the door to a deeper and more integrated self.

In Defense of Normalizing Liminality

A contemplative essay for clinicians, seekers, and those in transition

The Myth of Stability

Most of us carry a quiet but persistent assumption:
That life, once properly set up, should become stable.

We imagine there’s a version of adulthood where the self becomes defined, the routines become reliable, the relationships settled, the questions resolved. We hope, often unconsciously, that we will “arrive”—that with enough effort or insight, we’ll reach a kind of inner and outer equilibrium.

Within that vision, difficult seasons—grief, uncertainty, transition, spiritual dryness, emotional unraveling—are treated as detours. Something to get through quickly on the way back to “normal.”

But what if that assumption is not only false—but damaging?

What if liminality—the experience of being in-between—is not the exception, but the ordinary terrain of a life honestly lived?

And what if our insistence on treating it as a problem keeps us from receiving what it offers?

Why We Long for the Solid Ground of Normal

Before we challenge the ideal of stability, it’s important to understand why we’re drawn to it in the first place.

Stability Is a Developmental Need

From our earliest days, we need structure. As children, the presence of a reliable caregiver, predictable rhythms, and a coherent sense of who we are—all of this forms the psychological “holding environment” we depend on to feel safe.

As we grow, we internalize that environment in the form of routines, roles, belief systems, and personality traits. These become the scaffolding that gives continuity to our sense of self.

That scaffolding is necessary—but not permanent. And over time, it can harden into rigidity.

When the Ground Shifts

At some point—often many points—life disrupts the scaffolding.
A loss, a diagnosis, a betrayal, a crisis of faith, a transition. These aren’t just events. They’re thresholds.

The old world loses its clarity. The inner architecture no longer fits.

What Is Liminality?

The word liminal comes from the Latin limen, meaning threshold. It describes the state of being between what was and what will be. The old identity has loosened. The new one hasn’t yet arrived.

Anthropologists like Arnold van Gennep and Victor Turner used the term to describe transitional stages in rites of passage—where people are no longer who they were, but not yet who they will become.

In traditional cultures, these phases were marked by ritual and community recognition.

But in modern life, we often lack language and ceremony for these spaces. And without support, liminality can feel like failure.

The Cultural Pressure to Resolve

We live in a culture that prizes clarity, speed, and forward motion.

Liminality, by contrast, feels inefficient, slow, murky. We don’t celebrate it. We don’t talk about it. We tend to hide it—or pathologize it.

Instead of naming it as a normal human experience, we diagnose it. We rush to solutions. We grasp for new identities or goals—not because they are deeply true, but because they offer temporary relief from ambiguity.

In some therapy models too, there can be subtle pressure to resolve the client’s disorientation rather than witness it.

But often, what a person most needs is not to be fixed—but to be held long enough to discover what’s trying to emerge.

What Happens in the Threshold

Though disorienting, liminal space is not a void. It is fertile ground.

It is the place where the usual coordinates loosen—and where something deeper begins to surface.

Growth Through Disintegration

From a Jungian perspective, psychological development isn’t linear. Jung spoke of individuation as the lifelong process of becoming whole—not by perfecting the ego, but by integrating what the ego excludes.

This means confronting the shadow, encountering archetypal images, and revisiting foundational beliefs. And this doesn’t happen in comfort. It happens in disorientation.

The liminal isn’t where the self is lost. It’s where the deeper self is forged.

Between Worlds

Philosophers like Kierkegaard and Heidegger described human beings as fundamentally open-ended. Kierkegaard called anxiety “the dizziness of freedom”—our awareness of possibility, of becoming. Heidegger’s Angst refers to the moment we confront Being itself—not a specific fear, but an encounter with our freedom and responsibility.

We are not static creatures. We are always in motion, always on the edge of the next unfolding.

To normalize liminality is to recognize that the disorientation is not evidence of failure. It is evidence of life.

The Ache for Arrival

So why do we keep longing for stability? For a sense of having “arrived”?

Part of the answer may be spiritual—or mythic.

The Shadowlands of Longing

C.S. Lewis spoke of sehnsucht—a deep, unfulfillable longing that haunts our most powerful experiences. Moments of beauty, joy, or ache that feel as though they point to something beyond themselves. Lewis believed that longing was a signpost to a greater reality—that we were made for something more, and that this world, while meaningful, is not final.

He called it living in the shadowlands. Not meaningless. But not home.

Whether or not we share Lewis’s theology, many of us recognize the ache: the desire for a stable life, a clear self, a coherent world.

It’s not wrong to long for that. But we mislead ourselves when we treat stability as the goal. As if the point of life were to hold still.

The point is not to arrive.
The point is to become.

A New Clinical Posture: Holding the Threshold

As clinicians, friends, or fellow travelers, we can learn to meet people differently in their in-between places.

From Fixing to Witnessing

Rather than asking, “How do we help you return to normal?”
We might ask, “Who is trying to emerge through this?”

That small shift opens new space.
It invites curiosity instead of control.
It allows grief, fear, confusion—not as symptoms, but as part of the path.

Our work is not always to interpret or explain.
Sometimes it is simply to remain present.

To hold the threshold, not rush it.

In Praise of Lingering

There is deep wisdom in learning to linger in the in-between.

Not forever. But long enough.

Long enough for the old self to loosen.
Long enough for the deeper questions to rise.
Long enough for what’s truest to take shape.

Liminality is not comfortable. It’s not efficient.
But it’s often the only space where lasting transformation begins.

A New Normal

To normalize liminality is not to celebrate confusion or glorify pain.

It is to tell the truth: that transitions, doubts, disorientation, and inner unravelings are not signs that life has gone wrong.

They are signs that something is happening.

And if we can learn to remain present in those spaces—with one another and with ourselves—we might just find that liminality is not a detour at all.

It is the terrain where a more whole and honest life begins.

For Reflection

• Where in your life are you currently “in-between”?
• What would it mean to stop trying to resolve it quickly?
• Who or what might be trying to emerge through this threshold?