As I See It: Surviving a Job Loss

by Victor Rozek

Stay in the work force long enough, and chances are you will eventually lose a job. You may be fired for good cause or bad, laid off for economic reasons, or become redundant because of a merger or an acquisition. And if those reasons don't suffice, you may simply be downsized, rightsized, outsourced, offshored, or separated from the company. The result, however, will be the same: someone will have decided to terminate your employment, thereby depriving you of your livelihood.

Sometimes being terminated is not an unexpected, and perhaps even not an unwelcome, event. Regardless, if the process is handled with some measure of grace and dignity--especially if a more desirable employment opportunity is readily available--the inherent trauma of losing a job is greatly reduced. When there is no insult, the injury becomes more bearable.

But more frequently the process is contentious, and the firing is seen as unjust by the person being forced to depart. Often the chances of finding an equivalent job are slim, causing financial hardship. And long-term financial adversity can result in the loss of other things of value, like a lifestyle or a relationship or a home. Anger, anxiety, and fear are just some of the predictable responses, but if losing a job is akin to dropping a boulder into a placid lake, how long will the ripples reverberate until the lake regains its calm? Are there predictable long-term effects of losing a job, and just how severe can the impact be?

Granted, a good many variables go into the crafting of that answer, but research suggests that the effects of losing a job have surprising staying power. Psychologist Edward Diener, which Time magazine describes as having done "extensive work on adaptation," found that the loss of a job is one of only two life events powerful enough to derail a person's normal sense of well-being for an extended period of time. The other is the loss of a spouse.

In the January 17 special edition of Time, titled "The Science of Happiness," Diener's research is referenced, the writer noting that "it takes five to eight years for a widow to regain her previous sense of well-being. Similarly, the effects of a job loss linger long after the individual has returned to the work force."

Equating job loss with the loss of a spouse would, at first consideration, seem overstated. But while the comparison arguably exaggerates the emotional impact of unemployment, it makes sense if losing a job has symbolic meaning beyond the actual event. More than the literal loss of employment, it is the threat posed to these symbolic values that can produce such devastating and lasting emotional consequences.

Coincidentally, in the same article, a book called Authentic Happiness, which speaks to these values, is also referenced. Written by research psychologist Martin Seligman, it identifies the three components that Seligman's research shows to be essential to lasting happiness: pleasure, engagement, and meaning. The last two may explain why a job loss can be so devastating.

By engagement, Seligman means "the depth of involvement with one's family, work, romance, and hobbies," while meaning entails "using personal strengths to serve some larger end." Well, in the workplace, engagement and meaning go hand in hand; and the more meaningful the work, the more engaged we are likely to be. Because the psychological need for engagement and meaning is so basic, it's easy to take them for granted, like believing that shelter will always be available to us. To be suddenly stripped of both leaves a big hole to fill, and pleasure, it turns out, is a poor substitute. Of the three avenues to happiness, Seligman insists, "pleasure is the least consequential." Thus the "pleasure" of being unemployed and having free time is eventually offset by lack of meaning and engagement, not to mention the lack of cash.

A large part of the meaning that work provides is a sense of personal worth and identity. In our culture, one of the first questions strangers will ask each other is, "What do you do?" The answer, however, is rarely couched in terms of behavior, such as "I do programming," but rather as a statement of identity: "I am a programmer." The answer then becomes the basis for numerous subtle judgments about a person's worth, financial status, intelligence, education level, ambition, and social position. Admitting "I don't do anything" is the equivalent of saying "I am nothing," and is therefore not acceptable, unless you are independently wealthy. When practiced by the very rich, idleness is considered a reward for past virtue.

To be less than financially independent and to admit you're unemployed is akin to admitting you have little value. And the longer you're unemployed, the less value you are thought to have. The presumption is that, if you are unemployed, you must be either lazy or defective. The lack of something "to do" becomes an assessment of the doer, so if a person lacks engagement he is therefore also presumed to lack meaning.

Thus, unemployment produces a state of extreme vulnerability, both financial and personal. Knowing the world is much kinder to those with means; not having a job is akin to being a hobbled animal that depends on speed for its survival. It is the memory of that vulnerability that apparently lasts well beyond the actual event.

Coincidentally, Seligman's research has led him to assign particular credence to the power of memory. In contrast to those who believe happiness is primarily the result of doing (chasing pleasure), Seligman believes that the quality of our memories, particularly how we remember ourselves, is far more important than the ephemeral nature of pleasure. "I think we are our memories more than we are the sum total of our experiences," he says. He may have a point. Although our experiences become our memories, they are not held in their entirety. Typically, the most emotionally significant experiences, both pleasurable and painful, are retained; the minutia of day-to-day life is quickly forgotten. Hence, a memory of ourselves as unemployed, unwanted, without meaningful engagement or a socially acceptable identity, can be a powerful subconscious force not easily displaced by the prospect of new employment.

For one thing, being fired leaves a residue of distrust that can contaminate relationships with future employers. If it happened once, the reasoning goes, it could happen again. Back when lifetime employment with a single corporation was not uncommon, the security offered by employers was repaid by employees with fierce loyalty. That loyalty has become fragile and highly conditional. Mutual trust requires a certain amount of predictability (I won't job-hop at first opportunity, and you won't get rid of me the first chance you get). The wide-scale pruning of the workforce, however, has left everyone wedded to their own interests and to their own fears.

If job loss is inevitable, there are ways to minimize its impact. Al Siebert, author of The Survivor Personality, divides people who have lost their jobs into two camps: those who react as victims and blamers and those who respond by coping and learning. As a coping mechanism, he suggests writing down your feelings about the dismissal rather than internalizing them. "Include all the things you would like to have said to your bosses but didn't," he counsels. "Continue expressing your feelings over and over until you feel emptied. Do this once a day for a week; afterward, do this anytime you have a flashback."

Beyond catharsis, Siebert's advice apparently produced an unexpected but serendipitous benefit: quicker re-employment. Referencing the work of psychologist James Pennebaker, he described an experiment in which "one group of unemployed people wrote down their feelings about being laid off for twenty minutes, five days in a row. He had a similar group of unemployed people write about their time schedule for their job search for twenty minutes, five days in a row. In the months that followed, more of the people who wrote about their emotions found employment. Afterward, the emotions writing group said they wished someone had told them about what to do sooner."

It is particularly important, says Siebert, to write about your feelings if the termination was painful or humiliating. "Were you called out of a meeting and told to leave? Did coworkers watch as you were escorted from the building by security guards? Did your manager send you a memo and refuse to talk with you in private? Recall the details and write about how you feel over and over and over again. Doing this helps you overcome post-traumatic stress, begin to heal, and stop feeling like a victim wounded for life."

Those of us who are currently employed, but are perhaps waiting for the layoff shoe to drop, can take comfort from the fact that we are not the first generation of workers to grapple with this issue. Fats Domino must have been prescient or between gigs when he said, "A lot of fellows nowadays have a B.A., an M.A., or a Ph.D.; unfortunately, they don't have a J.O.B."

Old Fats was popular in the 1950s and 1960s. In 1964, he cut a record called "Gotta Get a Job." Since I haven't heard much from him since, maybe he wasn't so successful.

Keep scribbling down those feelings, Fats. We feel your pain.