The redundancy letter. The restructure that eliminates your role. The dismissal that came from nowhere or felt inevitable for months. However it happens, the day you lose your job, you lose more than an income.
You lose the answer to “What do you do?” You lose the structure that organised your days, the colleagues who became friends, the identity you’ve built over years or decades. You lose the sense that you’re contributing, that you matter in a tangible way. And for many people, you lose something even more fundamental: the feeling that you know who you are.
In the first few days, there might be relief. A break from stress, from office politics, from the alarm clock. But then the reality settles in. The mortgage still needs paying. The family still looks to you. And somehow, without the job, you’re not quite sure what you’re supposed to be doing with yourself.
This isn’t just practical stress. It’s an identity crisis that touches everything.
Exploring What Work Means Beyond Money
We’re taught from childhood that work defines us. “What do you want to be when you grow up?” we ask children, as if their future job will tell us who they are. By adulthood, career has become shorthand for self-worth. What you do for a living determines how people see you and, often, how you see yourself.
Work provides more than income. It offers purpose and a reason to get up each day. It gives structure and routines that organise time and create predictability. It brings identity and a clear answer to “Who am I?” in social situations. It delivers status, the respect that comes with certain roles and achievements, the sense of being someone who matters. Work creates community through colleagues and professional networks. And it generates the feeling of being useful, of contributing something that matters.
When the job disappears, all of that disappears with it. You’re not just looking for new employment. You’re grieving an entire life. The salary that funded holidays, meals out, your children’s activities. The seniority you’d worked years to achieve. The respect in your voice when you said what you did. The lifestyle you built that now feels unsustainable.
And then there are the expectations. Your partner might be supportive with their words, but you sense their worry about money, their adjustment to a different future. Or perhaps they’re less supportive, and the pressure is explicit. Either way, real or perceived, their expectations become another weight you’re carrying alongside your own sense of failure.
The Internal & External Weight of Expectations
The pain of job loss gets heavier when you add the weight of what you think you should be. Gender conditioning plays a huge role here, though it affects everyone differently.
Men, particularly those raised with traditional expectations, often carry the belief that providing financially is their primary value. Losing a job can feel like failing at the most fundamental requirement of manhood. There’s shame in not being the breadwinner, in needing a partner to carry the financial load, in feeling like you’ve let your family down. Even when partners are supportive, even when finances are manageable, the internal narrative can be brutal.
Women face different but equally painful conditioning. If you’ve spent years prioritising career, job loss can feel like wasted sacrifice. If you’ve balanced work with caregiving, there’s often guilt about feeling devastated by losing the job when you “should” be grateful for more time with family. And if returning to work after raising children, redundancy can confirm the fear that you’re no longer valued in the professional world.
Add age to this, and the impact intensifies. Losing a job in your twenties feels different to losing one in your fifties or sixties. Younger people have time to rebuild. Older workers face the reality that they might never reach the same level again, that their experience counts for less than it should, that they’re considered too expensive or not adaptable enough. The job loss becomes a statement about your remaining value in the world.
Society tells us that our worth is measured by productivity and economic contribution. When you can no longer produce in the way you’re used to, that internalised message becomes a weapon against yourself.
A Spiralling Mental State
Days blend together without the structure work provided. You tell yourself you should be job hunting, networking, being productive, but the motivation doesn’t come. You start avoiding people because you’re tired of the question “Any luck with the job search?” or the well-meaning advice that makes you feel worse.
Sleep patterns shift. Either you’re sleeping too much because there’s no reason to get up, or you’re lying awake worrying about money, about the future, about what happens if you can’t find something soon. Appetite changes. The things that used to bring pleasure feel hollow. You’re irritable with family or withdrawn from friends.
This can feel like depression settling in, though you might not recognise it as such. You think you’re just stressed about employment, just being realistic about prospects, just tired from the emotional toll. But it has its own momentum. It tells you you’re useless, that nobody will hire you, that you’ve wasted your career, that you’re a burden on your family. You start to retreat from friends and family and self-care becomes a chore. The shame feeds the depressive feelings, which feeds the inability to take action, which confirms the shame. Round and round until you’re stuck in a pattern that feels impossible to break out of alone.
For older workers, this can feel particularly hopeless. If retirement isn’t far off, there’s the question of whether to keep trying or just accept defeat. If retirement is years away, there’s the panic of how to survive financially and psychologically until then. Either way, the loss of the job becomes tangled with mortality, with the sense that your productive years are over and what’s left doesn’t count.
Using Counselling To Find A New Path
Counselling someone who’s lost their job, the work isn’t about writing CVs or interview coaching. It’s about untangling worth from work, examining whose voice is telling you you’ve failed, and exploring what you actually value beyond employment status.
We look at the stories you’re telling yourself. “I’m a failure.” “I’ve let everyone down.” “I’m too old to start over.” Where did those stories come from? Whose expectations are you measuring yourself against? What would a kinder, more accurate narrative look like?
We examine what the job was really providing. If it was purpose, what else might offer that? If it was structure, how can you create it independently? If it was identity, who are you when work isn’t defining you? These aren’t comfortable questions, but they’re necessary ones.
Often we need to grieve. The loss of a job, especially one you held for years, is a genuine loss that deserves mourning. You’re allowed to be sad about what’s gone, angry about how it ended, and uncertain about what comes next. Pushing those feelings down to appear strong or positive doesn’t work. They need space.
We also look at practical overwhelm. When everything feels enormous, we break it into smaller pieces. Not “find a new career” but “update one section of your CV today.” Not “rebuild your entire life” but “establish one routine this week.” Small steps create momentum when motivation is absent.
Through Counselling, we work on separating your worth from your employment status. This is the deepest work and often the hardest. You’ve spent decades absorbing the message that what you do determines what you’re worth. Dismantling that takes time and gentle persistence.
Rebuilding From Different Foundations
Some people do find another job similar to what they had. Others take the loss as an opportunity to completely change direction. Some reduce hours or step away from career ambition entirely. There’s no single right path.
What matters is that the next chapter, whatever it looks like, feels more aligned with who you actually are rather than who you thought you should be. That it’s built on values you’ve chosen rather than ones you’ve absorbed without questioning.
Maybe you discover that status mattered less than you thought and flexibility matters more. Maybe you realise the career you spent decades building was really about proving something to people whose opinions shouldn’t have mattered so much. Maybe you find that the parts of work you miss can be met through volunteering, hobbies, or different kinds of contribution.
This doesn’t happen quickly or easily. There will be days when the old narrative returns and you feel like a failure for not having figured it out yet. But gradually, with support, the grip of job loss on your identity loosens. You start to remember or discover who you are beyond what you do for money.
Moving Through, Not Over
Losing your job hurts. It can create a practical stress and existential crisis simultaneously. If you’re struggling with this, if a struggle or depression has settled in and you can’t see a way forward, that’s not a weakness or lack of resilience. It’s a natural grief response to losing something that society taught you was central to your self-worth.
The path forward isn’t about quickly landing another position to prove you’re still valuable. It’s about questioning whether your value was ever dependent on employment in the first place. About rebuilding your sense of self on sturdier foundations. About creating a life that feels meaningful whether or not it includes the career you thought you’d have.
This work is difficult and often requires support. If you’re in this place, Counselling may be able to help. Not to fix you or rush you into the next thing, but to help you navigate the grief, challenge the harsh narratives, and find your way toward something that feels more true.
