Grieving after job loss: Honouring the loss and instilling hope

Losing one’s job can be a difficult experience with which to cope. It can lead to a host of physical and mental health problems (McKee-Ryan, Song, Wanberg, & Kinicki, 2005) as well as relationship difficulties (Harris & Isenor, 2010). There are also those who derive much of their core identity from their work, and when it is taken away, they can experience a grieving reaction, mourning the loss of co-worker friendships, their role of worker/provider and the personal meaning they took from their work (Sharabi & Harpaz, 2010).

How can we as career development practitioners (CDPs) help these clients to receive the additional support and understanding that they need when coping with job loss? We need to take the time to allow our clients to tell us their entire job loss stories, beginning with how they found and secured the job originally, then learning about how they immersed themselves within the work role and the relationships they formed within the workplace. The job loss narrative should be rich in detail and cover the positive experiences as well as the negative. Our work as CDPs is to ask questions that encourage clients to thicken their work stories, to explore the characters and events involved (Gillies & Neimeyer, 2006). If our work environments do not allow for the time necessary to fully extract the clients’ stories, we can look to referrals to counselling that can occur prior to (or parallel to) the clients working with us on career decision-making or job search tasks. However, the support to allow clients to first tell their story may be paramount to their ability to successfully engage in career development work.

Once the stories have been told, we then want to use strength-based, hope-promoting interventions to build up our clients’ energy to engage with the career development process. The higher clients’ levels of hope, optimism, and self-efficacy are, the less likely the clients will be to experience lasting grief or depression following job loss (Isenor, 2011). Utilizing evidence from the clients’ own job loss stories, we can bring into focus the times when clients were successful, were able to make positive career decisions and developed skills that they could use in their new careers. We can explore client metaphors that appear to use hopeful imagery or language and reframe negative parts of the story by asking clients if there were any positive outcomes or lessons learned from the event (Larsen & Stege, 2010a). A more explicit use of hope in counselling interventions could be to help our clients to identify hopeful behaviours that they could engage in (Larsen & Stege, 2010b) and to discuss how engaging in hopeful thoughts or behaviours might change their negative thought patterns, strained relationships, and career planning outcomes. Hope, however, does not always need to come internally from the client; certainly we hold hope for our clients even when they might feel all hope is lost, but other relationships (e.g., friends and family members) can also be a significant source of hope for clients who are struggling (Larsen & Stege, 2010b).

Author Bio

Jessica Isenor is a PhD student at the University of Ottawa, President of the Career Counsellors Chapter of the Canadian Counselling and Psychotherapy Association, and Canadian board member for the Asia Pacific Career Development Association.

References

Gillies, J. & Neimeyer, R. A. (2006). Loss, grief, and the search for significance: Toward a model of meaning reconstruction in bereavement. Journal of Constructivist Psychology, 19, 31-65.

Harris, D. H., & Isenor, J. (2010). Loss of employment. In D. Harris (Ed.) Counting our losses: Reflecting on change, loss, and transition in everyday life (pp.163-170). New York: Routledge.

Isenor, J. K. (2011). Exploring the impact of job loss as a function of grief, depression, optimism, hope and self efficacy. (Unpublished master’s thesis). University of Western Ontario, London.

Larsen, D., & Stege, R. (2010a). Hope-focused practices during early psychotherapy sessions: Part I: Implicit approaches. Journal of Psychotherapy Integration, 20, 271-292.

Larsen, D., & Stege, R. (2010b). Hope-focused practices during early psychotherapy sessions: Part II: Explicit approaches. Journal of Psychotherapy Integration, 20, 293-311.

McKee-Ryan, F., Song, Z., Wanberg, C. R., & Kinicki, A. J. (2005). Psychological and physical well-being during unemployment: A meta-analytic study. Journal of Applied Psychology, 90, 53-76. doi: 10.1037/0021-9010.90.1.53

Sharabi, M., & Harpaz, I. (2010). Improving employees’ work centrality improves organizational performance: work events and work centrality relationships. Human Resource Development International, 13, 379-392.