The termination process itself is often fought with anxiety promoting experiences: you may have spent months in a state of uncertainty about the security of your position before finally getting the axe; you may have been subjected to harrowing sessions with organizational functionaries as you tried to ensure access to the retirement funds accumulated in your name or tried to figure out the paperwork involved in extending your group health insurance benefits under the provisions of COBRA.
In some respects, anxiety is even more taboo in the workplace than anger. Anger can be a sign of power, but anxiety is always taken as a sign of weakness and self doubt. If you doubt yourself, according to workplace logic, why should anyone else have confidence in you? This attitude toward anxiety puts the recently terminated job seeker between a very big rock and a very hard place. He or she is probably quite anxious generally at this point in life and feels anxious about letting any anxiety show in interviews. Added to which may be a sense that he or she must also hide anxiety from family and spouse, lest they become plagued by anxiety too.
The inclination to dampen or bury anxious feelings thus becomes very powerful, not only because they feel unpleasant, but also because they threaten the success of efforts to find another job.
As with feelings of anger, expressing your anxieties can help you cope with them. Family members, however, may be too close to be the best audience for such disclosures. Support groups, friends, and helping relationships often provide the best listening when anxiety is the subject.
A particularly useful exercise for overcoming anxiety is to play what I think of as the "worst case game." Articulate to someone else or on paper the worst things you can imagine happening during your moments of most intense anxiety. The extreme unlikelihood or outright absurdity of some of the outcomes we fear often becomes apparent only when we force ourselves to translate general feelings of anxious discomfort into actual scenarios of what might happen if our worst fears were realized. All feelings are closely related to our thought processes, but we are often unaware of the thinking habits that contribute to our emotional responses. The goal of the worst case game is to force what are sometimes termed automatic thoughts out into the open so that we can examine them rationally. The following example demonstrates how articulating anxieties can help keep them within reasonable limits.
A client of mine told me she had recently misplaced a confidential, intra office memo and feared it's getting into the wrong hands. I then asked, What was the worst thing, which could happen, if it did. She spun an incredible tale worthy of a top flight spy novelist. It ended in the ruin of the company for which she worked and her own ostracism from the real estate industry. When she finished her fantasy, she was silent for a few moments. Then, with no further prompting from me, a big smile spread across her face. "That's pretty ridiculous, isn't it?" she concluded with a mixture of relief and amusement.
Articulating anxieties and giving them imaginative substance can help us see that many are unrealistic and that lurking behind them may be a great deal of anger. Consider John, a 50 year old insurance company vice president who lost his job when his oldest son was a junior in college and his two younger boys were finishing high school. He sought help when his anxiety had grown so intense that he was, in his own words, "paralyzed and unable to go on looking for jobs." He explained that he had graduated from Harvard and wanted each of his sons to have a comparable education.
"But now that I'm out of a job, all I can think about is how John Jr. may have to drop out of school and my other boys may never have a chance to attend good schools. If John Jr. has to drop out now, he'll never be able to get into medical school. He'll probably have to take some job in business like I had to after graduation to pay back my loans. That would make him miserable. Sometimes I'm afraid he'll commit suicide. Many nights I just can't get to sleep because I keep picturing him driving off a cliff. We just got him a car last year."
I asked what he made of the fact that when anxious about John Jr., he pictured the young man driving off a cliff. As John Sr. elaborated on his son, the car, and himself, it became clear that he was pretty angry at John Jr. and that the car represented advantages that the older man had not enjoyed as a youth. In addition, father John had hoped that son John would volunteer to sell the car and take a summer job to help pay for tuition. John Sr. had not voiced these hopes to his son, however, and his son had not made any spontaneous offers.
Allowing himself to articulate and to listen to his anxiety instead of wishing it would simply go away enabled John Sr. to hear the anger, resentment, and other feelings that anxiety had been masking. Hearing them, he was able to articulate to himself and eventually to his son what he wanted John Jr. to do. Also, when some of this anxiety began to lift, John was able to evaluate his financial situation in a calmer, more realistic, problem solving frame of mind. Dealing with financial difficulties straight on instead of living in continual dread of running out of money at some vague date in the near future in turn lessened anxiety and restored to John a sense of having control of his life.
