Liminal Space Psychology: Feeling Lost in Big Changes

Hi, I’m Paul Krismer. I’m your happiness expert, and I’m sitting here in the Calgary airport. As I was sitting here, I was kind of thinking, I’m in what’s called the liminal space. It’s an architectural term. Liminal means threshold, and it’s anything that’s kind of a transitional space. Hallways, corridors, that kind of thing are liminal spaces. From a psychological perspective, we often find ourselves in liminal spaces. Maybe a real clear one is like where I am right now, in this beautiful Calgary airport. I’m on my way from Grand Prairie, headed to Las Vegas, and then tomorrow I head to Paris. I know, poor me, headed to Paris. But there’s something more to it than just this physical space. It’s about where we are going in terms of our emotional states or our personal growth, and liminal spaces can be scary.

The dark, endless hallway is the classic horror movie scene. They do that weird full pull focusing where the person’s walking down the hallway and the distance at the end of the hallway seems to be forever away. So we know liminal spaces can be frightening. It’s any time we’re in the middle of a transition where we’ve already embarked on the beginning of the journey, where we’ve left the familiar behind and we’re not yet at the new normal, the new whatever. The new unknown is not yet arrived at, so that it becomes a known. So this video is about this topic of liminal space, which all of us in some fashion, and in some areas of our lives, are always in the midst of. They can be scary, unsettling, and disorienting spaces to be in. So I’m going to talk a little bit today in this video about managing, having some perspective on it, and kind of just what it’s like emotionally to be there. So stay tuned, coming right up.

As a coach, public speaker, and best-selling author, I teach topics just like this one all around the world. So stay tuned, and I’ll give you practical tools that you can use to make both yourself and those around you both happier and more successful. So, liminal spaces, they’re tricky. You know, even this morning, I was in a hotel in Grand Prairie, having done an event for a client physically in Grand Prairie yesterday. This morning, I was doing a virtual event. It was out of my usual home studio with all its good cameras and lightings, and all that. The picture will be somewhat humorous as to the setup I managed to make for my virtual event in Grand Prairie this morning. It felt very much a liminal space, not my settled regular space, but unsettled and kind of disorienting. That’s what liminal spaces are like, generally.

Maybe there’s no better example than the pandemic. We’re all in this particular liminal space together. We had a normal up till the end of February, more or less, 2020. Then the whole world went into this change that was clearly a departure from what we had known in the past. Now, 22 months later, we’re still not yet in some place where we say, oh this is the new normal or the new regular, the thing that I’ve become familiar with. We have a degree of familiarity, but we still feel very much like we’re in transition. That’s liminal space. It’s challenging emotionally. It’s disorienting. It’s anxiety-provoking sometimes, and downright fearful. Sometimes, we just want to rush through the liminal spaces. We want the security of feeling safe and normal. But there’s a potential loss there. We miss the opportunity for the growth and the learning that may be in the midst of that.

There’s other examples besides the pandemic. If you’ve not yet started a new job, you’re in a liminal space. It’s anxiety, and it might be exciting too, but we don’t know what we don’t know, and we will only know the unknown until we’ve been settled in the new normal. It might be that you’re choosing to pursue something in life: fitness, spiritual growth, whatever it is. Sometimes that’s just a wanted, desired, planned-out thing, and sometimes these things are forced upon us. We suddenly find ourselves in the midst of a divorce that we didn’t see coming. We’re clearly stuck in a significant liminal space when we find those circumstances.

Ideally, we find the path to growth. Now, there’s some grieving and sadness and being with the fear that we have to simply settle in with. But ideally, we also find the opportunity to become the bigger, better person in whatever this liminal space is offering us. Thinking of this word liminality, I looked it up on the internet, as was my tendency to do. I found a really good article, where the author talked about liminal spaces is kind of having this common horror movie reference or similarity. In every horror movie, the people we’re cheering for invariably break up. They get into this mysterious space. What happened to Larry? Well, let’s go find him. Instead of sticking together and being secure, they all split up to find Larry in different places. Of course, one by one, something horrible happens to them. So the first lesson, perhaps that was so beautifully illustrated in that story, is to take a friend with you through the liminal space.

It might be a psychological friend who’s not maybe not going the same place in life but they’re journeying with you, keeping you grounded, that the journey has an end, and you’re just doing the journey. The walk is something that they’ll be able to accompany you, at least part of the way with. That might be a therapist. It might be a really good friend. It might be your spouse. It might be just somebody in your life who you can confide in and say, here’s the journey I’m on. Will you accompany me? It’s also really important that we stay focused. Even in the pandemic, I don’t know how this is going to turn out. I know there’s degrees of familiarity that are opening up. I’m speaking in in-person audiences, as I was in Alberta yesterday. There’s this sense that we can put 30 people in a room and, yes, there’s some social distancing and all that, but it felt more normal than it did for sure in April of 2020 when just was everything was completely shut down and we didn’t see each other in person, we weren’t allowed to hug people. In certain parts of the world, people were literally in solitary confinement, allowed to leave their house only once a week to go and get groceries. Well, we’re in a very different place, but we’re not yet in the new known. We’re still in the becoming, in the disorienting, unknown space of where does this land.

The focus needs to be on an imagined destination. Where do we think it’s going? I expect that at one point we are going to be a maskless society again, where we go about all the normal activities that we did before, maybe with some heightened precautions, and maybe with an expectation of regular vaccinations annually, like some people do for the flu. So there will be differences, but we’ll get to some kind of new normal. Maybe we can focus on that longer term picture and maybe even see some milestones. Oh, I’ve got my booster shot. Well, I’m traveling like I haven’t done for months and months and months, and see nearer term milestones to feeling more like you’re in the known. That might be one way to find our way through liminal spaces. Of course, the last little tip I have is to be patient, and maybe even welcoming, inviting the liminal spaces and saying, there’s always something here, something to learn, something to grow by.

In the midst of this pandemic and whatever personal growth you’re doing, have some reflective time. How are you becoming a bigger, more expansive person in this? And if you can’t clearly see a way that that’s occurring for you, then maybe there’s an invitation there to say, what is it that I’m supposed to be learning? How am I supposed to be growing through this space? Anyway, that’s enough of a rather philosophical topic this week. Super great to see you all. Hope people are preparing for the holidays and feeling some familiarity to some of the routines and pleasures we get from this time of year, wherever you are. The next message I expect will come from Paris. If you like this kind of video, click the like button, share it with your friends and family, and we will see you next week. Thanks so much for watching. Bye for now.