When Kitty got her fourth layoff call, she took it via Bluetooth in her car. She knew the script by then: the sudden 15-minute meeting invite, the HR rep that pops into the call, the platitudes that precede the devastation of being unemployed — again.
“My boss says, ‘Hi Kitty,’ and I said, ‘You’re laying me off. Just go.’”
Something happens after the second, or third, or even fourth layoff. Shock gets replaced by trauma-informed familiarity. Grief turns into exhaustion, shame calcifies. The way a person understands work changes, imbuing the next job with cynicism that’s hard to shake.
A layoff victim’s relationship with work changes. Sometimes forever. But in order to keep going, it might be best to stop blaming yourself—and start looking at the reasons layoffs happen so often in the first place.
Losing your job means losing yourself
“The biggest disruption I see is the loss of identity, routine, and predictability,” says New York-based therapist Jacqueline Schmidt. “Work is a world you had, for better or worse.”
Schmidt’s clients deal with the typical feelings of disbelief, anger, and shame that come from being laid off. The idea that their work mattered less than they thought, and that their worth came down to a consultant’s number-crunching.
“‘I can achieve all my goals, hit the metrics, and I’m still dispensable.’ People can get stuck thinking they were to blame,” she says.
