You must cope with the emotional fallout of separation as part of mid career vocational transition. In the process of working on your emotions, you can learn a great deal about yourself that will help you succeed in your next job or career. But, if you don't deal with your feelings if you try instead to bury them in the interests of moving beyond an unpleasant experience you may be haunted by them throughout your quest for a better work life. When loss of a job sets off a cascade of anger, anxiety, and depression, the sufferer is likely to have great difficulty performing the tasks that searching for a new job requires. Unresolved anger and constant anxiety can cripple your self confidence and interfere with your productivity, prolonging your search and preventing you from enjoying the self discovery and vocational exploration that lie ahead.
The Inevitability of Unpleasant Feelings
Anger almost always accompanies termination. Because anger occurs on both sides of the termination process those who do the firing are as often angry as those who get fired the chances of getting through job loss without feeling anger are just about zero. Since angry displays often provoke anger in others, anger can be strong, escalating, and debilitating during and after the loss of a job.
Anger and anxiety go hand in hand. They are related physiologically and psychologically. The fight or flight response is a set of interrelated and complex physical changes involving many body systems that occur automatically when we feel threatened. This response prepares us for the strenuous physical requirements of fighting or fleeing. Our skeletal muscles tense, our hearts beat faster, and we breathe more rapidly; we perspire more heavily, our pupils dilate, and nonessential systems like digestion shut down so that resources can be directed to functions more immediately necessary for survival. If the threat provokes anger, our bodies are prepared to do battle; if the threat provokes fear or anxiety, our bodies are prepared to take flight. In either case, the state of physiological arousal is similar.
Given the physiological similarity between anger and fear, it isn't too surprising that we find psychological connections as well between these two emotional responses. We often get angry at what we fear, though we may be unaware of having both responses to a given provocation, and we often fear our own anger, especially when it is intense. Whether angry or anxious, we are apt to feel tense. A moderate amount of tension can be an enlivening sensation, but when tension threatens to become unbearable, we try to reduce it and restore to ourselves a sense of security and calm.
Each of us has developed an arsenal of defenses against being over whelmed by uncomfortable, tension producing emotions.
One defense against such feelings is to stop having them. We can do so by sleeping, by using drugs including alcohol and prescription drugs by watching television, or by numbing ourselves with a variety of other narcotics and distractions. For many people, work is an effective haven from unpleasant feelings and may actually ward off anxiety about familial or intimate relationships. Thus, when deprived of employment, some people experience a surge of anxiety about many aspects of their lives, which gives them a strong motivation to find a way of turning off their anxieties. Not surprisingly, incidences of alcoholism, violence against children and spouses, and drug use tend to be significantly higher among the unemployed than among the general population, regardless of social or economic status.
Depression, too, can be triggered by job loss. Losing a job means losing the organization and people on which you have depended for survival because having a job means having an income, which in turn provides food, clothes, housing, and medical care, A job can also be the most important source of self esteem in an adult's life. Performing a job can demonstrate competence and value, provide a role to play and a position within a hierarchy, and give each day an organizing principle, thus keeping existential questions and boredom at bay, rather like a good parent.
On the other hand, a job may feel somewhat like a bad parent: one who is too critical, intrusive, and aggressive; one who withholds approval and reward, demands too much, or behaves too seductively. Whether people experience jobs as good parents, bad parents, or something in between, they can form extremely intense and dependent relationships with their bosses, their co workers or clients, and ultimately with the organization that supplies employment.
Psychotherapists tell us that we tend to form dependent relationships with objects. The term object designates our private and unique mental representations of a person or a kind of relationship, as opposed to the real person or relationship that inspires our mental representations. An object, therefore, may be a vastly inaccurate image or a relatively realistic portrait. Frequently our objects are formed from potent mixtures of conscious and unconscious wishes, fears, fantasies, and residues of actual experiences. For most of us, mother is our first object, but we soon take as objects other important people in our lives, including fathers, nannies, siblings, and teachers. Organizations such as corporations, churches, schools, or government agencies, can also become objects in our psyches, and we can form dependent relationships with them.
Humans respond to the loss of an object with feelings of anxiety, anger, guilt, despondency, rejection, abandonment, and depression. Even when replacements for our lost objects are relatively easy to find, we may feel and behave as if our very existence were threatened. Psychotherapists explain our adult capacity to respond so strongly to object loss by pointing to our experience as children.
The human child depends for an extraordinarily long period on other bigger, older, more competent, and more knowledgeable humans for help in dealing with life's demands. To maintain this dependent state, which allows us to be elaborately socialized as demanded by contemporary society, we must form strong ties of affection with parents and other adults. But real people, as opposed to objects, are mortal, changing, needy, and insecure, so we create mental objects to meet our emotional needs more reliably than real people. We carry into adulthood our desire and ability to have reassuring relationships, which we can make into dependable objects. Depression is difficult to avoid after losing a job because psychologically we may have lost more than a job. We may have lost an object, which is a reassuring, anxiety reducing part of ourselves, not something external and readily replaceable.
