What Happens When You No Longer Know Who You Are? Exploring Existential Liminality
There are moments in life when the ground beneath us gives way—not with a dramatic crash, but with a quiet, steady erosion. You’re not who you were. But you’re not quite anyone new yet either. This unsettling in-between—this collapse of certainty, identity, and coherence—isn’t just confusion or a rough patch. It’s something deeper, more existential, and more misunderstood. That’s what the concept of existential liminality helps explain.
In my recent academic paper, I introduced existential liminality as a psychologically distinct state of suspended selfhood. It’s the experience of being in a threshold—not only between roles or life stages, but between identities. It happens when the stories we tell about who we are fall apart, but no new narrative has emerged to take their place. And in a world that demands constant performance, coherence, and productivity, this state of limbo is often ignored, pathologized, or rushed through before its meaning can be fully lived.
From Ritual to Rupture
The term “liminality” originated in anthropology, where scholars like Arnold van Gennep and Victor Turner used it to describe the middle stage of a rite of passage—where the person is no longer who they were, but not yet who they’re becoming. These moments were culturally structured and symbolically rich. They involved rituals, community acknowledgment, and clear endpoints.
But in modern life, we don’t have many rituals for navigating psychological thresholds. We don’t hold space for the long, murky moments between jobs, between belief systems, between identities. Instead, we expect people to bounce back, move on, or reinvent themselves without missing a beat. The internal experience of transition has outlasted the external containers that once held it. So people find themselves lost, but with nowhere to name that lostness.
That’s where existential liminality steps in—not as a metaphor, but as a real psychological condition marked by disorientation, suspended meaning, and a fractured sense of self.
The Inner Landscape of Being “In Between”
Existential liminality isn’t the same as crisis. A crisis is acute, urgent, and often reactive. Liminality is quieter. It stretches. It disorients not because something is happening too fast, but because nothing feels solid anymore. Time itself can feel strange—like the past doesn’t belong to you, and the future won’t reveal itself.
This state is often described by those who say things like:
“I feel like I’m in between lives.”
“I don’t know who I am anymore.”
“Everything that used to make sense doesn’t anymore.”
Clinically, these states are sometimes mistaken for depression, dissociation, or identity disturbance. But existential liminality isn't inherently pathological. It’s a profound threshold—a space where the psyche is doing real, difficult work behind the scenes. When we mistake that process for illness, we risk shutting down a deep transformation that is still underway.
In my paper, I argued that existential liminality deserves recognition as a valid psychological structure. It’s a state that can be triggered by life transitions like adolescence, midlife, illness, or retirement. But it can also emerge without any visible event. Some people simply wake up one day and feel the life they’ve built no longer fits—and nothing new has arrived to replace it.
This can happen during spiritual upheaval, after ideological disillusionment, or when long-standing roles begin to dissolve. A parent whose children have left home. A person who leaves a tightly controlled religious community. A professional who no longer finds meaning in their work. In each case, the self unravels—quietly, existentially—and the world doesn’t always see.
Existential liminality, then, is what happens when coherence collapses, but the next self hasn’t arrived yet.
What makes existential liminality so disorienting is that the usual markers of identity—your name, your job, your relationships—may still be there. But inside, something is missing. You may feel emotionally muted or overwhelmed, depending on the day. You might struggle to make decisions, not because you’re indecisive, but because the part of you that knows what it wants hasn’t yet re-formed.
Time feels different. You may find yourself unable to imagine a future, or unable to recall the emotional clarity of your past. Things that once mattered might feel strangely flat. Socializing becomes difficult because you don’t know how to “be” anymore. And yet, you’re not broken. You’re in process. Something is taking shape, but it’s not ready to speak.
That is the phenomenology of existential liminality—and it deserves compassion, not correction.
Why Modern Culture Makes It Worse
One of the reasons existential liminality is becoming more common—and more agonizing—is because we’ve lost the cultural tools that used to contain it. In traditional societies, rites of passage helped individuals mark transitions in a communal, symbolic, and emotionally structured way. Today, many of those rituals are hollow, commercialized, or missing altogether.
At the same time, our fast-paced, performance-driven culture demands constant identity clarity. Social media asks us to display a stable self. Employers want confidence and decisiveness. Even in therapy, there can be a rush toward naming, labeling, and resolving what should be allowed to unfold more slowly.
Without symbolic rituals or collective validation, people navigating liminality are often left feeling isolated and ashamed. They worry that something is wrong with them. But often, nothing is wrong. They are simply in a state that our culture does not understand how to hold.
The Clinical Challenge—and the Opportunity
In psychotherapy, recognizing existential liminality is essential. When therapists mistake this state for a disorder, they may impose structure too soon. They may interpret ambiguity as avoidance, or encourage clients to stabilize when what they need is to stay in the in-between a little longer.
But when clinicians understand liminality, they can offer something much more powerful than solutions. They can offer containment. They can witness the unfolding without pushing for clarity. They can sit with the uncertainty and allow the client’s new identity to take shape organically.
This doesn’t mean doing nothing. It means honoring that the “not-knowing” is part of the transformation—not an obstacle to it. In this way, liminality becomes not a problem to fix but a passage to honor.
Who Lives in Liminal Space?
While everyone encounters liminal moments, some groups live in liminality longer than others—sometimes indefinitely. Marginalized individuals, such as queer or trans people in heteronormative cultures, or refugees without state identity, often occupy a chronic form of liminality. Their identities are not fully recognized by dominant cultural narratives, and so they live in ongoing psychological thresholds. The same is true for people navigating grief that goes unrecognized, or life transitions that aren’t marked by ceremony.
These individuals often experience profound disorientation—not just internally, but because the social world does not validate their in-between-ness. Understanding existential liminality can help us see these experiences not as anomalies, but as part of a broader human condition intensified by systemic neglect.
Liminality Is Not a Symptom—It’s a Signal
When someone feels unmoored, undone, or unknown—even to themselves—it’s easy to assume something is going wrong. But sometimes, that unraveling is a sign that something deeper is unfolding. A self is dissolving. And a new one, if held with reverence, will emerge.
In the paper, I proposed a theoretical framework for understanding this psychological state—not as a rare anomaly, but as a central feature of identity development that recurs throughout life. Adolescence. Midlife. Late adulthood. Major life losses. Spiritual crises. These are not detours; they are part of the path.
Existential liminality is not a failure to evolve. It is the silent, painful, necessary work of becoming.