The Liminality Loop: When Grief Gets Emotionally Stuck
Artist: VJH “Ocean Sky”
Have you ever felt caught between yesterday and tomorrow — between a painful past and an uncertain future?
In the wake of loss, time can feel like it’s standing still.
You exist in a strange in-between — no longer living in the world that was, not yet part of the world that will be.
It’s as if you’re standing on a threshold:
A foot in each realm.
A heart heavy with what’s gone.
Hesitating to step into what comes next.
This suspended state is what I call the Liminality Loop — a psychological holding pattern where grief lingers between past and future.
🔗 Related Post: Schrödinger’s Grief: How Physics Helped Me Understand Loss
Discover how quantum theory helped me name a state of mourning where nothing feels real — until someone looks.
In my first post on Schrödinger’s Grief, I explored how loss can exist in multiple states at once. The Liminality Loop is what happens when we hover between them — not collapsing, not moving. Just circling.
Quantum Grief Series Navigation
1️⃣ Schrödinger’s Grief: How Physics Helped Me Understand Loss
A personal journey through grief as a quantum phenomenon.
Read it here
2️⃣ The Liminality Loop: When Grief Gets Stuck Between Past and Future
Why we linger between collapse and healing — and how identity complicates loss and why grief persists.
(You’re here!)
3️⃣ The Holographic Nature of Grief — Why Loss Never Truly Leaves Us
How grief lives on inside us through memory, nervous system patterns, and entanglement.
4️⃣ Coming Soon: The Quantum Grief Model
A full framework exploring how grief transforms, repeats, and expands across time.
5️⃣ Coming Soon: Infinite Thresholds — Grief as a Quantum Spectrum
This part explores how grief, like quantum particles, moves in unpredictable, nonlinear patterns—shaped by culture, neurodivergence, and the impossibility of a single emotional truth.
Resisting Closure: The Fear of Transformation
Think about the last time you refused to finish a book or a show because you didn’t want it to end.
That reluctance comes from the same place as resisting the finality of loss.
Closure makes it real.
And when you admit something is truly over, you also admit you are no longer the same person.
Why do we shy away from closure in grief? A few reasons might sound familiar:
Finality is painful: To close the chapter on a loved one’s life or a broken relationship is to confront the full weight of that loss. It hurts.
Identity shifts: If your life was intertwined with what you lost, who are you without it? That question alone can make us freeze.
Clinging to hope (or illusion): As long as you don’t say goodbye completely, some part of you can pretend nothing has changed. Not closing the door leaves it cracked open — just in case.
Avoiding closure gives us cushion.
It buys time.
But it comes at a cost.
The Liminality Loop: How Grief Creates an Emotional Holding Pattern
Liminality literally means a threshold — the space between one room and another.
In grief, it’s like living at the doorway.
You haven’t returned to the past (because you can’t), but you aren’t engaging with the future either.
This in-between space can feel oddly safe, like the eye of a storm.
💭 The chaos of heartbreak swirls around you, but in the center — in liminality — there is a quiet, static hush.
Why the Liminality Loop can feel like a refuge:
It prevents collapse: By hovering in a half-healed state, you avoid the free-fall into despair.
It offers predictability: Nothing new happens in limbo. No new pain. No new goodbyes. It’s repetitive but comfortable in its sameness.
It gives you breathing room: Major change is exhausting. Lingering in the doorway lets you rest and gather strength before taking the next step.
This loop can be a necessary pause.
But living in a doorway forever is no life at all.
✦ The Existential Trade-Off ✦
Why We Linger in the Liminality of Grief and Relationship
Some people don’t stay in liminality because they’re afraid to move forward.
They stay because moving forward would mean letting go of possibility —
not just the person.
This shows up everywhere:
In romantic love
Between sons and fathers
Daughters and mothers
Mothers and sons
Fathers and daughters
Siblings
Friends
Lovers
Any caregiver
And parents grieving their children —
especially children who left us too soon
Liminality holds all of us.
Because when someone we love dies —
and the relationship never fully formed,
or broke before it could repair —
we are left not with presence…
…but with potential.
It’s not the grief of what was.
It’s the grief of what might have been.
So we stay.
In the doorway
In the in-between
Not to preserve what we had
But to protect what we wished could have happened
We hold onto:
The almost-memory
The gesture that almost came
The version of them we imagined
The words they never said
The apology we never heard
The way they looked at us once —
and almost became who we needed
This ache is especially strong in relationships where love was complicated:
Estranged parents
Emotionally distant fathers
Unhealed mothers
Any caregiver who couldn’t give what we needed
Children we couldn’t reach
Children who left us too soon
Partners who never knew how to show up
Or when a caregiver or parent left...
Before we fully knew ourselves.
Before we had the words to ask the questions.
Before we had the clarity to name what we needed.
Sometimes we keep them in liminality
not because we’re broken —
…but because we’re still entangled
with the idea of who they could have become.
If time had been longer.
If love had known how to speak.
✦ This is the ache of almosts.
And it keeps us circling. ✦
Almost-Healing: The Trap of Staying Too Long
While the liminal space offers temporary relief, it comes with a hidden trap: stagnation.
Liminality is supposed to be a transition, not a destination.
It’s like a wound that never quite closes — the scab never becomes a scar, because we keep picking at it or protecting it from fully forming.
What happens when grief gets stuck in limbo?
Emotional numbness sets in: The protective numbness of liminality can calcify into true disconnection.
Life is on pause: Dreams, relationships, and forward motion stall.
Bitterness or regret accumulates: You know time is passing and you’re still stuck. That quiet frustration builds into something sharp.
In the Liminality Loop, you’re almost okay — but not actually okay.
It’s a static existence.
And over time, the air in this closed room gets stale.
The Unseen Observer: Why We Resist Being Seen in Grief
One reason people linger in liminality is the fear of being truly seen in their grief.
To be seen is to be observed — and observation has power.
In physics, there’s the famous thought experiment — a paradox I wrote more about here — of a cat that’s both alive and dead until someone checks the box.
As ridiculous as it sounds, it illustrates a truth:
Observation forces a reality to take shape.
In grief, as long as we hide our pain, we stay in a kind of suspended quantum state — the loss is both “there” and “not there.”
The moment someone sees us — or the moment we see ourselves — the suspension breaks.
We collapse into one state:
A heartbroken human who must carry on in a changed world.
And that moment?
It’s terrifying.
We say “I’m fine” when we’re anything but.
We dodge our own reflection — literal or metaphorical — because we’re not ready to meet the person we’ve become through loss.
But staying invisible has a cost.
Unseen grief can’t heal. It just hovers.
Liminality is Necessary — But Not Forever
Here’s the insight: Liminality is necessary.
It’s a natural part of trauma recovery and deep emotional processing.
All rites of passage have a liminal phase —
The cocoon.
The twilight.
The hallway between worlds.
But liminality isn’t meant to be a permanent home.
The cocoon is meant to open. The dawn must break.
So how do we step forward when we’ve hovered for so long?
We allow the closure we once feared.
We let ourselves be seen — gently, gradually.
We open the box.
We face what’s inside.
Yes, it hurts.
But that pain is part of the transformation.
Leaving the Liminality Loop feels like a second loss — the loss of that safe, numb space.
But it’s also a rebirth.
When you finally step fully into the future, you carry the love and lessons of the past with you. You transform.
Beyond the Threshold: A Holographic Understanding of Grief
What lies beyond liminality?
After we collapse the wavefunction of grief and enter our new reality, a curious truth emerges:
The past isn’t gone. It’s encoded within us.
Here’s where the Holographic Principle from quantum physics offers profound comfort.
This principle suggests that every part of something holds information about the whole — like how a single piece of holographic film can project a full 3D image.
Applied to grief, it suggests:
The person you lost
The relationship that ended
The version of you that changed
…isn’t gone.
It’s stored within you — in your memories, your nervous system, your stories.
You left the liminal space, but you didn’t leave everything behind.
Grief isn’t an event or a stage. It’s a transformation that follows its own quantum logic.
This idea forms the foundation of what I call The Quantum Grief Theory — a model I’ll be sharing more about as this series unfolds.
✦ The Threshold is Waiting ✦
You have been hovering on the threshold long enough.
The next room awaits.
And it contains all of you.
Are you ready to step through?
Stay Connected
Want more on quantum grief, emotional transformation, and trauma-informed healing?
Stay Tuned to explore the next chapter coming soon: The Holographic Nature of Grief—Why Loss Never Truly Leaves Us
Because healing doesn’t follow a straight line — it follows your own sacred rhythm.