When Work Breaks Your Heart
When a job becomes a source of meaning and identity, losing it can feel like far more than a professional setback.
Write to me with any problem or dilemma at AskPhilippa@yahoo.com Subject to Terms and Conditions
Dear Philippa,
I’m in my forties and I used to love my job. In more than 20 years of career as an engineer I had changed jobs a few times when I felt like facing new challenges. Then, I was sacked for the first time in my life. The company got into financial difficulties, made up a false accusation against me and showed me the door. I fought and won in court, obtaining large compensation. Meanwhile I also found a new job, with a better salary, in a lovely workplace. So, happy ending, right? Not quite.
Before that unfortunate episode, I used to be enthusiastic, to exceed expectations, to work extra hours voluntarily because I had fun and derived joy from my job. All this has vanished since. Now I just drag myself through my working days, waiting for the weekend, still feeling betrayed and on my toes. Mark Twain said “Find a job you enjoy doing, and you will never have to work a day in your life.” I used to be one of those lucky few, and now I’m not anymore. This is so depressing. How can I get over my grudge and restore some confidence?
My Reply
I wonder whether you are expecting yourself to have recovered from this experience because, on paper at least, everything worked out. You won your court case, received compensation and found a better-paid job in a workplace you enjoy. The facts suggest a happy ending. Yet our emotional lives do not always keep pace with the facts, and sometimes the consequences of an experience linger long after the practical problems have been resolved.
For more than twenty years, work seems to have been a source of pleasure, challenge and meaning. You describe throwing yourself into it, exceeding expectations, working extra hours because you wanted to rather than because you had to. Then you found yourself falsely accused and dismissed by an organisation to which you had given a great deal of your time, energy and loyalty. It is hardly surprising that your feelings about work changed as a result.
I find myself wondering whether what you are experiencing is something closer to grief than resentment. We tend to associate grief with bereavement, but we can also grieve assumptions about how the world works. Perhaps you believed, quite reasonably, that if you worked hard, acted in good faith and contributed generously, your employer would behave honourably towards you. Then you discovered that organisations do not always operate according to those principles. That can be a painful lesson, particularly when it arrives after decades of positive experiences.
What struck me was that you seem to regard your loss of enthusiasm as evidence that something valuable has gone missing inside you. I am not so sure. It may be that part of you is protecting itself. Enthusiasm requires trust and it requires us to invest ourselves in something without constantly looking over our shoulder. After what happened, it seems that some part of you might be reluctant to do that again. You learned that even when we do everything “right”, we can still be treated unfairly.
I also found myself wondering whether your relationship with work had become entwined with your sense of identity. You describe being one of those fortunate people who never felt they were really working at all. There is something wonderful about that, but there is also a risk. When we derive a great deal of meaning, satisfaction and self-worth from one area of life, a blow in that area can shake us more than we might expect. What happened was not only the loss of a job. It was a loss of faith in a story you had told yourself about work and about your place within it.
I am not entirely convinced by Mark Twain’s quote because even people who love their work sometimes have difficult colleagues, disappointing employers, tedious tasks and periods of disillusionment. Loving your work does not exempt you from being vulnerable. In fact, it may make you more vulnerable because you have more invested in it emotionally.
I am also not sure that confidence is what you have lost. After all, when you were treated unfairly, you challenged it. You went to court and won, then found another position and rebuilt your career. That sounds to me like somebody with considerable confidence and resilience. What may have been damaged is trust, and trust tends to return more slowly than confidence. It grows through repeated experiences that show us we are safe enough to invest ourselves again.
For that reason, I would be cautious about trying to force yourself back into the version of you that existed before this happened. That person had not yet learned what you now know. The task may not be to recover your former innocence about work but to develop a different relationship with it, one that allows for enjoyment, commitment and enthusiasm while also recognising that employers are institutions rather than families and that no workplace, however good, can guarantee complete security.
You ask how to get over your grudge. I suspect grudges fade when we have fully acknowledged what we lost. What you lost was not only a job but you lost a sense of trust in the world of work and perhaps a belief that dedication would always be recognised and reciprocated and I think that is worth mourning. Once we have mourned something properly, we are often less preoccupied with getting back to who we were before and more interested in discovering who we are now.
I meet people often who have lost their jobs (I’m a recruitment consultant) and I’ve recently trained in grief work. Losing your job is a form of grief, one that is often not acknowledged as such. We try to “move on”, tell ourselves “it is what it is” (how I loathe that phrase) and that we should be able to “get over ourselves”. What I witness is people who haven’t grieved their loss bring the shadow of their loss to every subsequent role. I firmly believe that we need to give ourselves space to grieve and include and release all the emotions meaning sadness, fear and anger. And honour it as a grief. I wish your LW well.
I really feel for this writer. I think there’s a lot here that is similar to the experience of betrayal in a long term relationship. You’ve been living / working, giving of yourself under what it turns out are false pretences (in part at least). Relationships that you thought were trustworthy .. turn out not to be. Good for you for taking them on. I’m sorry for your loss of joy and ease of engagement with your work .. that is huge and you obviously appreciate how precious it is to have that in the first place. I hope you find a new way forward and that the ground begins to feel steady again.. so that all you are and can give to the world through your work, can shine through again.