When something ends, we tend to want a clean break and a fresh start. To move on and keep busy, not to dwell. That’s the cultural script, especially in fast-moving cities like London. But even if the outer direction is clear (and it isn’t always, by any means), inner change unrolls at its own pace, often slowly, sometimes messily and painfully.
There is often a middle phase that we aren’t prepared for, a kind of no man’s land, where the old life has slipped away but the new one hasn’t yet taken shape. William Bridges, in his work on transitions, called this the neutral zone, a time of confusion, suspension, and quiet inner undoing of what was. Or as he put it, “a nowhere between two somewheres.”
It can feel like being stuck or even lost. You’re not where you were, but you’re not yet where you’re going. The structure of the old life has gone, but the new self hasn’t formed.
The Neutral Zone Isn’t Failure
People often arrive in therapy in exactly this state, although they rarely call it that. They might say, “I don’t know what’s wrong,” or “Things are fine, but I feel off.” They’ve made the change they thought they needed, perhaps a job shift, a breakup, or a move and find themselves feeling not uplifted but unmoored, as if the change was somehow a failure, or they are still waiting for something to happen.
Being in the neutral zone doesn’t feel good, but it may be some kind of help to realise that it isn’t supposed to. It’s not a problem that can be quickly fixed, but it is a phase, a phase to live through.
You might feel blank, overly sensitive, irritable, tired, or adrift. You might question everything. Time stretches out oddly and days pass without much to show for them. Old interests drop away. You wonder whether you’re getting anything “done”, or if anything at all is changing.
But this isn’t a breakdown nor a failure, even if it sometimes seems like one. It’s a psychological space where the old self has started to dissolve, and the new one isn’t ready. There’s no blueprint, no deadline. Just a slow inner rearrangement.
Unfinished Business Can Have a Long Shelf Life
Transitions rarely travel alone. A current loss can wake old ones. You change careers and find yourself grieving an old friendship. You leave a relationship and find anger rising that has little to do with your ex. As Bridges put it, the feelings that emerge in the neutral zone are often “the product of the resonance set up between situations in your present and those in your past.
This kind of emotional echo is common and it can confuse us. We expect to feel liberated when we let go of something that no longer serves us. Sometimes we do get that sense of release, but alongside it, there may also be mourning.
We Prefer Beginnings
We like the idea of fresh starts. New year, new you. But real transitions involve endings, and we often avoid those, rushing ahead. We try to start over without fully dismantling what came before. The risk is that we drag the old story into the new chapter. The job changes, but the old dissatisfaction remains. The partner is different, but the emotional dynamic repeats.
In therapy, I sometimes hear people say, “That’s in the past. I want to focus on the now.” It sounds forward-facing. But when the past has to be kept in the dark, I cannot but wonder what’s still unfinished?
I’m reminded here of the Death card in the Tarot pack. It looks ominous, a skeleton on a horse. However, it often doesn’t mean literal death or finality, but the death of life as it was. It symbolises transformation, something ending to make room for something else to grow. Yet that can feel frightening and we shy away from it, flinching at the messiness and painfulness of it all.
Old Wisdom, Modern Silence
There’s something older cultures understood about this neutral stage, which we’ve lost. In traditional societies, transitions were often marked with ritual. In rites of passage, adolescents would be removed from everyday life, stripped of their former identity, then given a new one. That time out of ordinary life induced disorientation, which wasn’t a glitch, but necessary to the process.
Anthropologist Victor Turner called these spaces between the old and new, “liminal” or threshold places. They are neither what came before nor what’s coming next. Rituals, like the ritual of becoming an adult described above, made these threshold places visible. The ritual said: this confusion is necessary. This dismantling is part of the process.
But we no longer have a sense of those old structures for transition. Life changes now come without ceremony. You clear out your desk or pack a bag or sign a piece of paper and are meant to carry on, as if you had no feelings, no emotional needs. But internally, something more complex may be happening. Something that needs time.
Joan Halifax writes:
“We have to let ourselves die a little every day to truly live. The person who walks into the unknown doesn’t emerge the same. That’s the point.”
It’s hard to live that out in a world that prizes productivity and progress. But the inner world doesn’t care about deadlines.
What Helps When You’re In The Neutral Zone
There’s no neat to-do list for living in the neutral zone. But there are ways to support yourself.
Don’t try to force insight. This is a time when understanding often arrives slowly, or after the fact. Walking helps. Talking helps. Journalling, sitting still, letting yourself feel odd or not-quite-yourself. Therapy can also be useful here, not really to move things along faster, but to help you keep going and to hold space for what’s unfolding in its own time.
Let go of the idea that you should be feeling a particular way. That you should have clarity. That you should know what comes next. The neutral zone often asks the opposite of us: to tolerate not knowing.
This Middle Phase Of Transition Matters
The neutral zone doesn’t get much airtime. It’s not marketable and it doesn’t sparkle, but it’s often where the real shift happens. Not the external change, but the deeper turning which happens inside. It’s where the old self lets go, and the new one begins to stir.
Like the barren garden bed in the early part of the year, it can look like nothing is happening, until something entirely new begins to shoot up and grow.
