Stuck in the In-Between: The Psychology of Liminal Spaces
Welcome back to PsyberSpace. I'm your host, Leslie Poston. Picture it. You're in an airport terminal at 2AM. Your flight doesn't board for hours.
Leslie Poston:The gift shops are closed. The seats are uncomfortable, and everything feels just a little too quiet. You're not where you were and not yet where you're going. You're just there waiting and suspended. Or maybe you're sitting in your car at a red light that seems to last forever, watching other drivers stare blankly ahead, or walking through an abandoned shopping mall where echoing footsteps are the only sound breaking the silence of the empty storefronts.
Leslie Poston:Maybe you're an asylum seeker or a refugee, stuck in a holding pattern with no place to settle in and a place where you don't speak the language, trapped silently in the waning game of red tape and bureaucratic stalling. This week, we're talking about liminal spaces. Those strange in between zones, both physical and psychological, that feel like you're standing on the threshold of something else. They show up in airports, traffic, hospitals, on the subway, in dead malls, and even in your own mind. And they can mess with your sense of time, memory, emotion, and self in ways that are both fascinating and unsettling.
Leslie Poston:Let's unpack why these in between spaces feel so powerful and why understanding them might be more important than ever as we move through a time of declining systems and constant uncertainty and change. The term liminal comes from the Latin liven meaning threshold. Anthropologist Arnold Van Gennep coined it in 1909 to describe the middle phase of rites of passage when someone leaves one identity behind but hasn't fully transitioned to the next. Think adolescence or grief or waiting for a delayed diagnosis. It's the part where your sense of self is blurry and uncertain.
Leslie Poston:Victor Turner took this further in 1969, suggesting that liminality breaks down social roles, allowing for what he called communitas, a temporary bond among people in the same transitional state. Think soldiers in basic training or strangers stuck together in an airport during a storm. The roles shift. You're unmoored from normal expectations. But here's where it gets a little more psychologically interesting.
Leslie Poston:Bjorn Thomason's research showed that liminality isn't just about ancient ritual it's woven into the fabric of modern life. These transitional states occur during breakups, job changes, long commutes, pandemics, and countless other moments where we're betwixt in between. Environmental psychologist Marc Colger gave us another critical part of the concept of non places. These are spaces designed for transit rather than dwelling. Places with no identity, no history, no meaningful social relations.
Leslie Poston:Think highway rest stops, chain hotels, or those sterile medical waiting rooms. They facilitate movement but resist meaning making, which creates a particular kind of psychological tension. Psychologically, liminality isn't just about physical spaces. It's a cognitive and emotional state. When we're in liminal situations, our brains struggle with the lack of clear boundaries, familiar cues, and predictable outcomes.
Leslie Poston:This uncertainty can trigger everything from creative breakthroughs to existential anxiety, often within the same experience. Airports are the gold standard of liminal spaces. There's quite a bit of research backing up why they feel so psychologically intense. You arrive early, wait endlessly, get processed through security checkpoints, and lose all sense of normal time. Clocks are everywhere, but time feels meaningless.
Leslie Poston:You're surrounded by people but emotionally detached. The chairs are bolted to the floor. There's no privacy. No true comfort. Cognitive science tells us this disrupts chronesthesia, your brain's ability to mentally project itself backward and forward in time.
Leslie Poston:Research shows us that when we lose temporal anchors like routines or meaningful spatial cues, our internal sense of time goes a little haywire. In an airport, that function becomes scrambled. You're nowhere temporally. And that does something profound to your mind. But there's more happening neurologically.
Leslie Poston:Studies have shown that the stress of airport environments can trigger cortisol responses, similar to those found in other high anxiety situations. The combination of surveillance, crowds, noise, and the underlying tension of impending travel creates a state of psychological suspension. You're alert but unable to act, present but not grounded. This is why airports are common sites of intense emotional reactions. People cry at the gate, have panic attacks in the security line, or experience sudden clarity about life decisions while staring out the terminal windows.
Leslie Poston:The liminal nature of airports strips away our usual psychological defenses, leaving us emotionally raw and cognitively vulnerable. And here's something else that's interesting: this vulnerability isn't always negative. Many people report having profound insights, making important decisions, or feeling unusually open to connection while traveling. The liminal state can break down our normal psychological barriers, creating space for transformation. But it can also leave us feeling untethered and anxious.
Leslie Poston:If airports are about movement, dead malls are about the ghost of movement, especially malls from the 80s and 90s America, once vibrant social hubs now decaying monuments to capitalism's promises. Photos of these empty structures circulate online and evoke a strange feeling that psychologists are just beginning to understand. You recognize the architecture immediately the escalators frozen mid flight, the pastel tiles, the artificial plants, the food court with its empty tables. But the people are gone. The music is silent and it feels like stepping into a dream you forgot until this moment.
Leslie Poston:Environmental psychology research tells us this taps into context dependent memory. Our hippocampus stores memories in relation to our environment. Sight sounds, smells, spatial relationships. When we encounter an abandoned but familiar setting, our brain tries to retrieve emotional and social data from the past. But with the human activity stripped away, there's a profound mismatch.
Leslie Poston:Researchers call this temporal dissonance. Your body is in the present, but your brain is reaching backward for emotional context that no longer exists. That cognitive tug of war creates what can be described as an intensely liminal experience: a memory without grounding, a feeling without clarity. Dead malls also represent something psychologically complex about American consumer culture. They were designed as artificial town squares, complete with benches, water features, and climate control.
Leslie Poston:But unlike real town squares, they existed primarily to facilitate consumption, not connection. When that economic function disappeared, the social meaning collapsed as well, leaving behind what some culture critics call ruin porn spaces that are beautiful in their decay but haunting in their emptiness. The popularity of dead mall photography and exploration speaks to our collective fascination with these failed utopias. They're liminal not just spatially but temporally, representing a recent past that feels both familiar and impossibly distant. Let's zoom in to something more mundane but equally powerful: sitting at a red light.
Leslie Poston:Or, worse, being stuck in bumper to bumper traffic. You're trapped in a metal box, surrounded by people you'll never meet, waiting for a system outside your control to let you move. These moments might seem trivial, but they're psychologically significant. When your mind has nothing immediate to focus on, neuroscience tells us it activates the default mode networka collection of brain regions that become active during rest. This network is responsible for daydreaming, future planning, self reflection, and often rumination.
Leslie Poston:I talked about it in more depth in the episode on why you get your best ideas in the shower. Talking about it just a bit here, research on the default mode network shows that these idle moments are actually periods of intense neural activity. Several studies reveal that boredom related mind wandering can lead to both creative insights and emotional distress sometimes within the same red light cycle. This is why traffic can be such an emotional minefield. You're physically constrained but mentally free floating.
Leslie Poston:Your thoughts can spiral into anxiety about work deadlines, relationship problems, or existential concerns, but you might also suddenly solve a problem that's been bothering you for weeks or have a creative breakthrough about a project. Traffic jams create a particular kind of forced meditation. Not the peaceful kind, but a restless, often agitated contemplation. You're in a liminal state between destinations, but you're also suspended between mental states. Your commute becomes a daily encounter with the psychology of waiting, patience, and involuntary introspection.
Leslie Poston:There's a social dimension, too. Road rage often emerges from this liminal frustration. The displaced aggression that comes from being simultaneously isolated and crowded, moving and stuck, purposeful and powerless can explode at other drivers. Public transit, especially subways, creates a unique flavor of liminality. You are physically close to dozens of strangers, but emotionally disconnected from all of them.
Leslie Poston:Everyone stares into phones, books, or the void. It's a form of collective dissociation together, yet utterly alone. Goffman described this as civil inattention, a learned behavior of politely ignoring strangers to maintain a social order. Subways force this into overdrive. The lighting is harsh, the seats are hard, and the environment is simultaneously overstimulating and numbing.
Leslie Poston:Research on heart rate variability shows that the noise pollution and crowding at subway systems can increase physiological stress, even when people appear outwardly calm. Evans and colleagues found that commuters in noisy transit environments showed elevated cortisol levels and decreased cognitive performance. Their bodies were responding to stress even when their minds had adapted to ignore it. Being underground adds another layer of psychological complexity. Subways disorient our circadian rhythms and spatial awareness.
Leslie Poston:Without natural light or clear geographical markers, time becomes harder to track. Many commuters report feeling emotionally dulled or mentally not there during their daily subway rides. Urban psychology tells us this creates transit dissociation, a state where people psychologically remove themselves from the immediate environment as a coping mechanism, who are present but not present, traveling but not really moving through space in any meaningful way. The subway becomes a daily practice and liminal endurance learning to exist in a space that's neither home nor destination, neither private nor public, neither comfortable nor entirely uncomfortable. It's a psychological holding pattern that millions of people navigate multiple times a day.
Leslie Poston:Hospitals and hotels represent another category of liminal space. Places that promise comfort and care but deliver something more ambiguous. They're designed to look neutral, even soothing, with their carefully chosen color palettes and generic artwork. But underneath that surface hospitality lies a deep sense of not belonging. Environmental psychologists call this ambiguous territoriality.
Leslie Poston:You are given a temporary space a hospital room, a hotel room but not given true ownership or control. You are expected to rest, heal, or sleep but within strict institutional limits. You're a guest, a patient, a temporary occupant, but not a person with full agency over their environment. Family therapist Pauline Bosses' concept of ambiguous loss that we talked about in the grief episode also helps explain the psychological impact of this. In hospitals, patients often experience grief for their former health, former identity, or uncertainty about their future.
Leslie Poston:In hotels, travelers might feel a subtler loss of routine, belonging, or emotional grounding. Research on hospital design shows us that environmental factors significantly impact healing and psychological well-being. Views of nature, natural light, and familiar design elements can reduce stress and improve recovery times, but many institutional spaces still prioritize efficiency over psychological comfort, creating environments that feel liminal by design. These spaces mess with our sense of self because they lack what environmental psychologists term symbolic permanencethe visual and spatial markers that help us understand who and where we are. The generic nature of institutional decor, the unfamiliar sounds and smells, the disrupted routines all contribute to this sense of psychological displacement.
Leslie Poston:Now let's talk about a newer form of liminal space: our phones and the digital environments we inhabit. Doomscrolling, idle browsing, and the endless feedthese all represent a form of digital liminality that's increasingly dominating our psychological landscape. Psychologically, infinite scroll creates what can be called an eternal present. You're not fully engaged with meaningful content, but you're also not truly resting or reflecting. You're suspended in a state of passive consumption where time distorts and attention fractures.
Leslie Poston:We've covered the psychological impact of doomscrolling in more depth in previous episodes, discussing both its benefits and drawbacks to our psyches. Studies show that heavy smartphone use can severely impair time perception, create persistent attention residue, and dull emotional awareness. People leave scrolling sessions feeling like no time has passed or, conversely, like hours disappeared without a trace. Either way, they're temporally disoriented. This digital liminality operates differently from physical liminal spaces.
Leslie Poston:Instead of waiting to move from one place to another, you're suspended in an algorithmic loop designed to prevent arrival anywhere. The scroll never ends, the feed constantly refreshes, and there's no natural conclusion to the experience. Apps have become the new liminal architecture, and our brains can sometimes feel stuck in digital hallways that lead nowhere. Unlike traditional liminal spaces that eventually resolve you know, flights bored, traffic moves, transitions complete digital liminal spaces are designed to be perpetual. You never actually arrive at the content you're seeking because the algorithm's job is to keep you seeking.
Leslie Poston:This can create a new kind of psychological exhaustion. Traditional liminality involved waiting with purpose. You were in transition towards something specific. Digital liminality often involves waiting without purpose scrolling without a destination and consuming content without satisfaction. Here's where the psychology of liminal spaces can get even more interesting.
Leslie Poston:They're not inherently good or bad. They're what we call psychologically potent, which means they can facilitate both breakthrough and breakdown, often simultaneously. Research on creativity and flow shows us that breakthrough insights often emerge during or after periods of ambiguity and uncertainty. When our normal cognitive patterns are disrupted, as they are in liminal spaces, we become more cognitively flexible. New ideas can emerge when old frameworks collapse.
Leslie Poston:Many artists, writers, and innovators deliberately seek out liminal experiences. They travel to unfamiliar places, work in transitional environments, or put themselves in psychologically uncertain situations because these psychological states can unlock creative potential. The discomfort of not knowing becomes a catalyst for discovering. Therapists who practice dialectical behavior therapy or acceptance and commitment therapy often work with clients to develop tolerance for liminal emotional states. Instead of rushing to resolve uncertainty or discomfort, they help people learn to sit with ambiguity and explore what emerges from the space.
Leslie Poston:But there's a shadow side. Extended or involuntary liminality can produce dissociation, anxiety, depression, or even identity diffusion, a fracturing of the sense of self. When people feel perpetually in between, never arriving anywhere psychologically solid, it can become destabilizing rather than creative. The key difference seems to be agency and time boundedness. Chosen liminality with clear endpoints can be transformative.
Leslie Poston:Imposed or endless liminality can be traumatic. Here's the uncomfortable truth about modern life: We're increasingly living in liminal spaces, both literally and metaphorically, and the psychological implications are enormous. No one likes talking about it anymore, but the COVID-nineteen pandemic has been perhaps the largest collective liminal experience in human history. In the beginning of this ongoing pandemic, everyone was suddenly suspended between their old life and an uncertain future. Normal routines disappeared.
Leslie Poston:Social roles became ambiguous. Time felt distorted. The psychological impact is still being both created and measured, but early research suggests it has already fundamentally altered how many people relate to uncertainty and change. People who are disabled or otherwise still practicing good health practices like masking are still stuck in another kind of liminal limbo as the world tries to force a normality that won't return. But this pandemic is just amplifying existing trends.
Leslie Poston:Sociologist Sigmund Bowman's concept of liquid modernity describes a world where traditional structures careers, relationships, communities have all become fluid and temporary. Nothing stays stable long enough to provide lasting psychological anchoring. The gig economy creates employment liminality. People are always between jobs, between projects, between sources of income. Climate change creates environmental liminality.
Leslie Poston:We're suspended between the world we knew and an uncertain ecological future. Social media creates social liminality. We're always between authentic connection and performative display. Research on emerging adulthood shows that this liminal existence has become a life stage. People in their twenties and thirties who might otherwise financially be able to do some of these markers of adulthood marriage, homeownership, or career commitment, though homeownership is increasingly rareare instead living in an extended period of exploration and uncertainty.
Leslie Poston:And this isn't necessarily negative, but it requires new psychological skills. Previous generations could rely on relatively stable social structures to provide identity and meaning. Current generations must learn to find stability within instability, to create meaning within uncertainty, to build identity during perpetual transition. Some researchers argue that liminal tolerance, the ability to remain psychologically healthy during periods of uncertainty, is becoming one of the most important mental health skills of the twenty first century. So where does this leave us?
Leslie Poston:If liminal spaces are increasingly unavoidable, how do we navigate them psychologically? First, recognition. Understanding that these in between feelings aren't character flaws or signs of weakness they're normal responses to abnormal situations. The discomfort you feel in an empty mall, the anxiety that emerges during a long commute, the disorientation of scrolling through your phone these are understandable reactions to psychologically challenging environments. Second, intentionality.
Leslie Poston:Instead of trying to escape liminal experiences, we can learn to work with them. This might mean using waiting time for reflection rather than distraction, approaching uncertainty as opportunity rather than threat, or treating transitions as spaces for growth rather than obstacles to endure. Third, boundaries. While some liminality can be creative and transformative, endless liminality can be destructive. Creating islands of stability within a sea of uncertainty becomes critical for psychological health.
Leslie Poston:Finally, community. Turner's concept of communitas suggests that shared liminal experiences can create unexpected connections. The strangers stuck with you in an airport delay, the fellow commuters on a broken down train, the TikTok communities navigating similar life transitions. These temporary bonds can provide meaning within meaninglessness. The goal isn't to eliminate liminal spaces.
Leslie Poston:That's impossible in our contemporary world. The goal is to develop psychological literacy about them, to understand their effects on our minds and emotions, and learn to navigate them with greater awareness and skill. Because here's the paradox: liminal spaces are uncomfortable precisely because they hold so much potential. They're the space where change happens. Growth occurs where new possibilities can emerge.
Leslie Poston:The threshold isn't just a place of waiting, it's a place of becoming. Thanks for spending time in the in between with me today. I hope this exploration of liminal spaces helps you notice and understand the psychological complexity of those transitional moments we all navigate daily. Whether you're sitting at an airport terminal, stuck in traffic, wandering through an empty mall, or just feeling suspended between one phase of life and the next, remember that these experiences are more than mere inconveniences. They're glimpses into the fundamental human experience of transition, uncertainty, and change.
Leslie Poston:Thanks for listening to PsyberSpace. I'm your host, Leslie Poston, signing off and reminding you to stay curious about the spaces between, because that's where the most interesting psychology happens. And don't forget to subscribe so you never miss a week, and send this to a friend if you think they'd like it.
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