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Key points
- Consciously crossing thresholds of life changes can help us develop ourselves more fully.
- Helping clients face thresholds is a crucial aspect of our work.
- Reviewing how we've crossed thresholds in our own lives helps us develop skill with threshold work.
A threshold is "the door sill, the point of entering,” according to the Online Etymology Dictionary.
Thresholds can be as small as a glance that tells us a relationship is beginning, or as big as a catastrophe. Thresholds can be so quiet as to go unnoticed, or they can roar through our lives with a fierceness that leaves us shattered—an unexpected job loss, a scary and voracious pandemic, a need to shed an old life and shape a new definition of self.
A trip to India in my 20s stands as one of the most pivotal thresholds I’ve crossed—that journey clarified my deepest values and became my “north star.” A particular conversation with my mom where I held my ground in the face of prodigious pressure to meet her expectations is another—facing her disapproval taught me that although it was daunting to stand steady, the clear sense of self afterward was well worth it. The death of a very dear friend, a threshold that shimmered with meaning—I hiked in the mountains for days, tears streaming down my face as my heart learned new depths of letting go. With each of these thresholds, I was a markedly different person afterward.
Standing in a Different World
Irish poet John O’Donohue describes threshold moments like this:
if you’re in the middle of your life, in a busy evening with fifty things to do—and you get a phone call that someone you love is suddenly dying, it takes ten seconds to communicate that information, but when you put the phone down, you’re already standing in a different world.
Standing in a different world—that’s the hallmark of a threshold moment, the kinds of moments that bring many of our clients into therapy or that therapy brings them to. In a case consultation group I facilitate, one therapist talks about a client’s new cancer diagnosis, another talks about a teen client deciding to come out. Different thresholds, both carrying inherently thorough change, both entering that “different world.” In another consultation group, we discuss a client reckoning with the subtle thresholds of aging—arising bit by bit, almost invisible. There are thresholds of development: the first time a client tells the truth after a childhood where it was easier to evade, or the moment a client holds a firm “no” with their partner when the pressure to agree or conform is immense.
We might cross one of life’s thresholds into a new freedom or an expanded sense of wonder in life—we win the love lottery, marvel at our newborn child, or wave goodbye to the young adult we’ve raised, sighing with pleasure at a task completed. At other times, we cross a threshold of painful loss or searing upheaval—maybe we chose it directly, or maybe we didn’t see coming. Divorce, death, and the ever-changing definition of “self” come to mind.
Sharing the Threshold Concept With Clients
Sharing the concept of “thresholds” with clients helps to normalize profound changes that push them into new lives, new selves, and new dimensions of experience. When I named the change a client was facing as a “threshold,” she sat back in her chair, took a deep breath, and said, “I never thought of it that way. Stepping through a doorway. Yes, that’s exactly what I’m doing.” She looked at me and laughed with delight and newfound courage.
Sometimes, it’s useful to have a conversation about how thresholds were handled in their family of origin or whose threshold-crossing they admired—were changes welcomed or discouraged, celebrated or ignored? David, a client I worked with for several months, talked about how neither of his parents noticed or “marked” changes he was going through. As long as he seemed OK, they didn’t inquire more deeply as to how his world might be changing. Helping clients consciously cross over the threshold, so they can integrate as much growth as possible from the experience of change, is crucial work. As O’Donohue writes, the threshold is the “place where you move into a more critical and challenging and worthy fullness.”
Once a client can harness a threshold’s dynamic process, they develop a trust in their ability to change and in their ability to find new territories of self that will come to feel like home.
Reviewing the thresholds in your life can help you better assist clients with their threshold awareness. You might make a list of the major thresholds you’ve encountered:
- What were the moments when you were living one life before and living a very different life after?
- Was the change shaped by a shift in your external world or a variation in your internal landscape?
- Was it a big threshold full of noise or drama or was it the tiniest unseen moment that changed your world?
- What “worthy fullness” did you find on the other side of the threshold?
With practice, we can all not only learn to notice life’s thresholds, but we can also learn to celebrate and embrace them.
