What the edge of the sea teaches us about change and transition - and how therapy can help
Photo by Damir K for Pexels
Visiting the beach is always a wonderful experience for me. I spent much of my childhood near the sea and find the open skies and changing beach landscape grounding. I can go to the same place and see something different each time based on the tide, the light, the weather, my feelings.
When we stand at the water's edge for long enough, it’s hard to spot quite where the sea ends and the land begins. Every wave that comes in and retreats rewrites that line. The ground – be it sand, shingle or stones - under your feet shifts from being solid, to having a slight ‘give’ to it, from being saturated to being submerged to being revealed again. You're standing in a place that refuses to be fixed.
This is one of the most ancient liminal spaces we know. And I hear from clients time and again that they might be drawn to the shoreline when their lives feel like they're turning over.
The word limen is Latin for threshold; it's where my practice gets its name. A threshold is the strip of stone or wood beneath a doorway - the place you occupy when you're no longer fully in one room but not yet in the next. The Romans understood a threshold as sacred. Janus, the god of transitions, doorways, gates, endings and new beginnings, is depicted with two faces: one looking back, one looking forward. Standing at a threshold meant standing in both directions at once, which requires a particular kind of steadiness.
The shoreline seems to be quite similar. Behind you: the solid, familiar ground of what has been. Ahead: deep water, the uncertain, constant movement, the unknown. Beneath your feet: something that's neither, something that keeps changing.
That feeling of being between solid ground and open sea is something many of us know well. Not because of numerous visits to the coast, but rather it's how we might feel during times of major change.
Life's changes and turning points feel like standing at the water's edge
When a long term or significant relationship ends, there's often a time where we’re not sure who we are without it. Not because we don’t have an identity of our own, but the story we’ve built, the routines, the shared shorthand, the future we’d imagined, it’s all now behind. The next chapter hasn't written itself yet – and we’re stood on the shoreline.
I see the same things happening in grief. The person we were before the loss no longer fits, and we’re left standing in the in-between. Sometimes it feels overwhelming with the tide coming in.
Career endings and beginnings carry it too. Redundancy strips away a role that may have been central to how you understood yourself. Even a welcome retirement means waking up on a work day without the structure that shaped decades. And sometimes the change is quieter than any of these: a growing sense that your life no longer fits you, that something needs to shift, without anything so dramatic as a crisis to blame.
These are all threshold times – and can feel uncomfortable, partly because we’re not encouraged to sit with them. We tend to be far better at beginnings and endings than we are at the territory in between.
Why the in-between feels so unsettling
Bridges, a psychologist who spent much of his career writing about life transitions, makes a distinction that I find useful: a ‘change’ is something that happens to you, while a ‘transition’ is the psychological process of adapting to it. The change might take a moment - a phone call, a signature, a diagnosis. The transition can take years.
What makes transition so difficult for many of us is that the old sense of self has dissolved, or is dissolving, before the new one has formed.
And identity doesn't like a vacuum. When the labels we use to understand ourselves – be it parent, partner, professional, healthy person, organised, quick decision maker – no longer apply in the way they did, it creates a particular kind of anxiety. The mind wants to know who it is. When it can't answer that question with its usual clarity, it often interprets the uncertainty as a problem to be solved quickly, rather than a passage to be moved through at its own pace.
This is where the image of a shoreline comes to mind. The tide doesn't hurry; it simply comes in – and goes out. It does what it does on its own schedule, regardless of how long you've been standing there waiting for it to do what it will do. And there's something about being at the actual edge of the sea and the scale of it, the sound, the movement, that somehow seems to bypass the intellect's demand for answers and speaks directly to something older in us. Something that already understands that not everything can be rushed.
Anecdotally, many people seem to be drawn to water when they're going through something significant.
What liminal spaces actually offer
Arnold van Gennep first described liminality in 1909 as he studied the rites of passage across cultures. He remarked that nearly every culture has rituals for helping to move people through major life transitions, and that those rituals all include a middle phase; a period of ‘in between’ during which the person was neither one thing nor the other.
Perhaps stripped of their former identity, not yet given the new one.
van Gennep didn't treat this middle phase as a problem. Rather, he saw this as an essential. He saw that something had happened there that couldn't happen elsewhere. The old self had to come loose before the new one could take shape.
Turner later built on van Gennep's work, naming this middle state liminality and writing about this as a time of unusual possibility with the normal rules being suspended. That is, social roles, hierarchies, fixed identities, all become temporarily fluid. And in that fluidity, transformation becomes possible in a way that it simply isn’t in our ordinary, fixed lives.
This doesn't make liminality comfortable – but it does make it fertile.
The shoreline itself is fertile; the intertidal zone, that strip of beach covered and uncovered by the tide, is a highly biologically productive environment. It's also one of the most demanding. Only organisms that can survive two very different conditions - submerged and exposed, wet and dry, still and turbulent can live there.
But those that do are extraordinarily resilient. The conditions that make it hard are exactly the conditions that produce that resilience.
Our own liminal period works like this too. And the discomfort we feel isn't incidental, but it is part of the process.
Hypnotherapy and the liminal state
There's a reason I work with hypnotherapy as part of integrative practice for people navigating life transitions - and it connects directly to this.
Hypnosis itself is a liminal state. You're not asleep, but you're not in ordinary waking consciousness either. You're at the edge of something. The analytical, critical, habitual mind relaxes its grip, and what lies beneath becomes more accessible: patterns you've been running without realising it, beliefs that formed long ago and have been shaping your decisions ever since, futures you can begin to imagine with more vividness and less fear.
Typical talking therapy is hugely valuable - I combine it with hypnotherapy precisely because different kinds of work reach different depths. But hypnosis offers something particular during transitional times: access to the parts of you that haven't been able to speak clearly when the analytical mind is running at full volume, insisting on certainty and resolution.
In a hypnotic state, it becomes possible to look back with more clarity at what you're leaving behind: to understand it, to grieve it properly if needed, to recognise what was real and worthwhile and what perhaps wasn't serving you. And it becomes possible to begin to sense, not just think, what might be ahead. To feel your way toward a future self, rather than just planning for one.
This isn't magic. It's working with how the mind actually functions: below the level of conscious narrative, where change tends to happen first.
The courage to stay at the shoreline
One of the most common responses to a liminal period is to rush out of it. To make a decision – any decision – that gives the feeling of solid ground again. To leap into a new relationship before the last one has been properly mourned, or to take the first job offer rather than sitting with uncertainty long enough to find out what you actually want next.
Sometimes urgency is real. But more often, the rush is driven by the discomfort of not knowing, rather than by any genuine need to decide immediately.
Standing at the shoreline takes courage. Letting the tide come in and go out without trying to hold it in place, without running back up the beach, without deciding in advance what the water is going to do - this is harder than it sounds. The mind doesn't like open questions. It doesn't like to be at the edge of its own understanding.
But something important tends to happen when a person can tolerate being in the in-between long enough. Things start to clarify – and not all at once, and not on demand. What matters becomes visible. What was obscuring it and the noise, the rush, the demand for certainty, falls away.
Therapy, in this context, isn't about speeding you through the transition. It's about making it possible to stay at the shoreline. To be in the uncertainty without being overwhelmed by it. To have a steady presence alongside you while everything else is moving.
You don't have to know what comes next.
Whatever brought you to this particular in-between – loss, grief, menopause, a new start - doesn't require you to have it figured out. The fact that you don't know what comes next isn't a problem, and it simply means you are in transition. You just have to be willing to stay at the water's edge long enough to find out.
If you're standing at a threshold right now and you'd like someone alongside you to help you explore, to relook at the past, and look at the future, shall we talk and see if I can help?
Common Questions About Liminal Spaces and Therapy
What is a liminal space in psychological terms?
In psychology, a liminal space refers to the in-between state that occurs during major life transitions — the period after one chapter has closed and before the next has clearly begun. It's characterised by uncertainty about identity and direction, a loosening of old patterns, and often a heightened emotional sensitivity. Rather than being pathological, this state is a normal and necessary part of genuine change. The discomfort it produces is partly what makes it so generative.
Why do so many people feel drawn to the sea during difficult times?
The shoreline has always served as a natural liminal space - the literal edge between two worlds, neither land nor sea, constantly in motion. Research in environmental psychology suggests that proximity to water tends to lower cortisol levels and shift the nervous system toward a more regulated state. Beyond the physiological, there's something about the scale and rhythm of the sea that mirrors the experience of being in transition: large, beyond control, moving on its own schedule. Many people find that their thoughts clarify near the water in a way they don't elsewhere.
How is hypnotherapy different from talking therapy for life transitions?
Talking therapy — whether psychotherapeutic or counselling-based — works primarily through conscious, verbal exploration. Hypnotherapy also works beneath that level, accessing the parts of our experience that are held in pattern, habit, image, and body rather than in articulated thought. During transitions, this is often where the most important material lives: the beliefs formed long before the current change, the emotional residue of what's been lost, the first tentative sense of what might be coming. Used together, these approaches reach different aspects of the person. My integrative approach draws on both as each client's needs call for.
How long does a life transition take, and how do I know when I'm through it?
Transitions rarely follow a predictable timeline, and there's no universal answer. William Bridges observed that the inner transition — the psychological process — often takes considerably longer than the external change that triggered it. A relationship ending might take weeks in practical terms and a year or more in psychological terms. What tends to indicate that someone is moving through a transition rather than being stuck in one is a gradual return of agency: the sense of being able to make meaningful choices, to imagine a future with some specificity, to feel less overwhelmed by the uncertainty and more curious about it. This shift rarely arrives all at once.
Is it normal to feel worse during a transition before feeling better?
It can be, and this is one of the most important things to understand about liminal periods. The process of letting go of an old identity or way of life -even one you wanted to leave - involves a kind of grief. The familiar, however uncomfortable, has the advantage of being known. Moving away from it means giving up the certainty it provided, even if what you were certain of wasn't particularly good for you. This is why transitions often involve a phase of feeling more disoriented or more distressed than you expected. It doesn't mean the transition is going wrong. It often means it's going exactly right.
What does an integrative hypno-psychotherapy approach actually look like?
In practice, it means that sessions draw on whatever combination of approaches best fits where you are and what you need. Some sessions may be primarily conversational, drawing on psychotherapeutic principles to explore what you're carrying and where it comes from. Others may include guided hypnosis to work at a different depth — using imagery, relaxation, and the heightened receptivity of the hypnotic state to access material that's harder to reach through talking alone. The balance shifts depending on the work. There's no fixed structure because each person's transition is its own thing, and the approach follows that.