Transitions · May 30, 2026 · 5 min read
Living in the Liminal: When You Are No Longer Who You Were
The in-between after a relationship, a role, or an identity ends is disorienting by design. A look at why liminal periods feel like fog - and how to move through them.
Anthropologists use the word liminal for the middle stage of a rite of passage: the threshold, after you have left one status and before you have arrived at the next. You are not who you were. You are not yet who you are becoming. Culturally, we have almost no rituals left for this stage - so it gets experienced privately, as failure.
Why the fog is not a malfunction
Identity is partly structural: it lives in routines, roles, bodies, and relationships. When several of those change at once - a breakup, an injury, leaving sport, a career shift, becoming a parent, losing someone - the scaffolding goes before the new structure is built. Disorientation is the accurate response to that, not a sign something is wrong with you.
What helps in the in-between
- Naming the transition out loud, so it stops being invisible
- Grieving the version of yourself that is ending, rather than rushing past it
- Small embodied anchors: movement, rhythm, contact with the body you are in now
- Company - a relational space where you do not have to be the strong one
Liminal periods rarely resolve through more thinking. They resolve through being accompanied while the new shape forms.
Written by Sarah Cushing, Registered Psychotherapist (CRPO #15706), offering depth-oriented psychotherapy in Ottawa and virtually across Ontario. This article is educational and is not a substitute for individual clinical care.