GRIEF AT WORK
Grief is not usually associated with your work life. However, anyone who has ever been fired or laid off knows how painful that can be. For some, the experience of being passed up for a promotion can leave them feeling devastated.
The level of emotional reactivity you experience when you just have a job or a career depends upon how much you source your identity in what you do for a living. Many people find purpose and meaning in their work, throw the might of their egos and power behind it, pour their hearts into it, and measure their success in life by their work achievements.
When you are invested in your work, you care deeply about it and see it as a big part of who you are.
Here are some common experiences of loss in the workplace, the kind that could keep you awake at night wondering about your next move:
Losing your job: being fired, laid off, downsized
Company or plant closures
Company reorganization or relocation
Being passed over for a promotion
Relationship losses - a cherished boss, mentor, or co-worker dies or leaves the company
Project failures and lost accounts/clients
Sometimes it’s waking up to the realization that you’re simply in the wrong job for you and you can’t take it anymore.
WORK GRIEF REACTIONS
These reactions are common when it comes to work grief:
Numbness, shock, denial
Fear, anxiety
Anger, frustration, rage
Overwhelming sadness, hurt
Confusion, rumination, forgetfulness
Betrayal, abandonment
Shame, humiliation
Powerlessness
Disengagement, withdrawal
Self-doubt
It’s understandable that you’d feel any of these, and more. The more you place your sense of worth in what you do, the more worthless you might feel when it comes crashing down around you. Your very sense of survival seems to be on the line. Your reactions are coming from the “fight,” “flight,” and “freeze” areas of your brain.
SECONDARY LOSSES
There’s a lot to mourn when any of these situations strike. Loss of income and benefits are usually highest on the list. Acknowledging your secondary losses is an important part of the healing process. Here are a few of these secondary losses to consider:
Sense of security
Purposeful engagement
Respect from the people around you
Friendships and a sense of belonging
Familiar routines
Self-esteem
Marital and family stability
HEALING YOUR WORK GRIEF
It’s important to give yourself time to grieve what was lost before picking yourself up and starting over again. And, it’s easy to slip into depression and apathy if things don’t start looking up soon. That means letting go of the past, stop waiting for the calvary to come rushing in to save you, and start to take the necessary action NOW to move yourself into your future.
I’d like to introduce here the Dual Process Model (Strobe and Schut) of coping with grief. Traditional “grief work” approaches encourage you to focus on the pain of your loss and face it head-on. To do otherwise is to be in denial and avoidance. It can be exhausting and hard work. You may not have the luxury of all the time in the world right now to focus on your feelings.
The Dual Process Model is based on the belief in our capacity for wholeness and natural resilience. In a nutshell, it’s important to do the grief work, and it’s also important to take breaks from it. This pattern is called oscillation - moving from Loss-oriented focus to Restoration-oriented focus. Essentially the process is dosing yourself with the pain, expressing and releasing it, and then moving to distracting, suppressing, and avoiding it so you can take action to move forward. Back and forth. Back and forth.
THE TRANSFORMATION YOU ARE LOOKING FOR
You’d like to emerge from this experience victorious, arriving on the other side of this transition into your new beginning, having learned valuable lessons along the way. Can you see yourself a year from now talking with a friend about how this upset in your work life actually turned out to be a huge blessing?
I’ve coached clients through these transitions where they created new careers, new positions, new mentors, new teams, new opportunities, new work that brings them alive. The scenarios are different, but the theme is the same. Being pushed out of the old was a necessary step to creating possibilities that never would have happened had they stayed put.
The new beginning does ask something of you. You have to be willing to die to what was in order to be born into what’s next. That means paying attention to your grief and attending to it in a loving and compassionate way.
YOU CAN’T HEAL WHAT YOU DON’T WANT TO FEEL
People think they can figure out how deal with grief and loss on their own, that they can muddle through it somehow and just take massive action to get that new job (or whatever strategy seems most pressing and urgent). Because you may be feeling shame over a job loss or a project failure, you may feel tempted to isolate yourself and soldier through. You tell yourself to suck it up and get over it.
This approach doesn’t work. Minimizing, avoiding, distracting, rationalizing - the ways we cope - lead to getting stuck and making mistakes that create more delays and further suffering.
My Rebuilding Your Life After Loss Program provides information and tips on how to grieve well and adapt to your losses so that you are free to move forward into your next chapter to create work that you love.
SUPPORTIVE TIPS FOR YOUR COPING WITH YOUR WORK GRIEF
Understand the process of oscillation and that there will be good days and bad days
Talk to your friends and family about how you’re doing
Reach out to mentors in your field for inspiration and ideas
Network with your peers (Linked In, etc.)
Define your short-term and long-term strategies
Read, watch, do research on topics that fascinate you
Do something fun/creative every day
Keep your body moving - exercise, yoga, etc.
Forgive yourself and forgive others
Keep a journal
Be gentle with yourself
If you are dealing with loss and grief, you may be wondering if you’re going to make it through this experience and be okay. Take my free “Coping with Grief and Loss Assessment” to discover how you are doing in areas like finances, self-care, emotional volatility, acceptance, support systems, etc. In 5 minutes, you’ll have a comprehensive report that shows the areas that most need your immediate focus to help you navigate through the grief process.
Coaching is a way to accelerate your progress from loss and grief to where you want to be on the other side. I can help you discover what you want, who you are meant to be, and give you the tools, skills, and processes you need to get there…faster.
Contact me to schedule your complimentary Rebuilding Your Life After Loss discovery session by clicking here. You can also send me an email at carrie@lifesnextchaptercoaching.com.