Navigating Collective Thresholds
Something is breaking down.
You can feel it — in the news, in your neighborhood, maybe in your own living room. Relationships are fraying. Certainties are dissolving. The ground that felt solid six months ago now feels like it could shift at any moment.
And if you’re paying attention — really paying attention — you might notice something uncomfortable: you don’t know what comes next.
A Collective Threshold
We’re living through a collective threshold.
Not just a bad news cycle. Not just a rough patch. A threshold — a genuine passage between what was and what will be, with all the disorientation that entails.
We’ve seen collective thresholds before. The world wars. The civil rights movement. The fall of the Berlin Wall. These weren’t just political events — they were moments when the shared story of how things work stopped working. When the old maps couldn’t navigate the new territory. When people had to find their way forward without knowing where forward led.
That’s where we are now.
The institutions we trusted are straining. The assumptions we built our lives on — about democracy, about civility, about what we could count on — are being questioned. Some of us are grieving a world that seems to be disappearing. Others are angry, or frightened, or numb. Many of us are all of these at once.
And here’s what makes collective thresholds so disorienting: we’re going through it together, but we’re not going through it the same way. Your neighbor might be celebrating what you’re mourning. Your family might be split down the middle. The “we” that used to feel solid has fractured into competing realities.
This is what it feels like when a society crosses a threshold. Messy. Confusing. Polarized. Unresolved.
Three Phases
William Bridges, who spent his life studying how humans navigate change, described transitions as having three distinct phases: an ending, a neutral zone, and a new beginning.
Most of us want to skip straight from the first to the third. We want to know what’s on the other side before we’ve fully left what came before.
But transitions don’t work that way — not for individuals, and not for societies.
The ending comes first. Something has to be released before something new can take its place. A relationship ends. A job disappears. A political landscape shifts so dramatically that the map you were using no longer matches the territory. An old way of being — in your own life, or in the life of a nation — reaches its limit.
These endings ask something of us: to acknowledge that what was, no longer is. To stop pretending we can hold on.
Then comes the neutral zone.
This is the hardest part — the in-between space where the old is gone but the new hasn’t yet arrived. Bridges called it a “fallow” time. It feels like nothing is happening, but that’s not quite true. Something is happening — just underground, out of sight.
“The neutral zone doesn’t respond to thinking. It responds to presence.”
Collectively, we’re in this space right now. The old agreements are crumbling, but the new ones haven’t formed. We don’t know what kind of country we’re becoming, what kind of relationships will survive, what kind of world our children will inherit.
This is where most of us panic.
The mind wants to fix it. To plan, strategize, figure it out. We scroll through news feeds looking for certainty. We run scenarios. We argue about outcomes we can’t control. The mind spins and spins, trying to think its way to solid ground.
But here’s what I’ve learned — both in my own life and from the women I work with: the neutral zone doesn’t respond to thinking. It responds to presence.
What Helps in the Middle Space
What helps in the middle space isn’t a better plan. It’s keeping your hands busy while your psyche — and perhaps our collective psyche — does its quieter work.
This looks different for everyone.
Tending to others — cooking meals, holding a grandchild, showing up for a neighbor. Small, unglamorous acts of care that anchor us in what’s real and immediate. When the big picture is overwhelming, the small picture becomes sacred.
Creative practice — writing, painting, working with your hands. Not to produce something, but to stay in conversation with the deeper currents moving through you. The arts have always been how humans metabolize uncertainty. There’s a reason we’ve been making things since we lived in caves. And there’s a reason artists and writers emerge from every period of collective upheaval with work that helps the rest of us make meaning.
Inner work — Collective thresholds have a way of surfacing what we’d rather not see — in the world and in ourselves. The intensity of the outer landscape stirs up our own shadow material: the fears we thought we’d resolved, the judgments we didn’t know we carried, the inner tensions between who we think we are and how we’re actually responding.
This isn’t a problem. It’s an invitation. When we find ourselves unexpectedly reactive, rigidly certain, or emotionally flooded, something is asking for our attention. Not to be fixed, but to be witnessed. What old wound is being touched? What part of ourselves have we exiled that’s now demanding a seat at the table? The outer chaos becomes a mirror — and if we’re willing to look, we may discover that the work isn’t just out there. It’s also in here.
Acknowledging what we feel — the fear, the grief, the not-knowing — instead of pushing it away. Feelings don’t disappear when we ignore them. They just go underground and do their work in the dark. Better to let them move through us, even when it’s uncomfortable.
Braided Together
Here’s what I want you to know: your personal threshold and the collective threshold are not separate.
The uncertainty you feel about the state of the world is landing in a body, a nervous system, a life that may already be navigating its own transitions — aging, loss, identity shifts, the particular reckonings of the second half of life.
You don’t have to sort out which feelings belong to which threshold. They’re braided together. And that’s not a problem to solve — it’s simply the territory we’re walking.
I don’t know what’s on the other side of this particular threshold. Neither do you.
“The seeds germinate in the dark.”
But I do know that new beginnings emerge — not when we force them, but when we’ve allowed the ending and the middle space to do their work. The seeds germinate in the dark. The clarity comes after the confusion, not instead of it.
Bridges wrote that the neutral zone is “the chaos in which the old way of doing things has ended but the new way is not yet clear.” He also wrote that it’s where the real transformation happens — if we can resist the urge to rush through it.
Collectively, we’re not there yet. We’re still in the middle. Still in the not-knowing.
So if you’re standing in that in-between place right now — personally, politically, or both — you’re not doing it wrong. You’re not broken or behind. You’re in transition.
And transition asks us to trust the process even when we can’t see the destination.
Keep your hands busy. Tend to what’s in front of you. Make something. Feel what you feel.
The ground will settle. The new beginning will come. But not yet. And that’s okay.
Terri Altschul is a depth coach working with women in the second half of life. Learn more at terri.coach.
LET'S CONNECT
Terri Altschul Coaching
Terri Altschul is an ICF PCC—a Professional Certified Coach with more than 30 years of experience and thousands of coaching hours. She works exclusively with women in the second half of life, drawing on Jungian depth psychology to guide women across the threshold into wholeness. Her gift is holding space for what’s emerging—and helping you become who you haven’t yet been.
