Keeping Your Head After Losing Your Job (3 page)

As one of my clients said when we went through the basic points in this book, “These are good ideas not only while I am unemployed but as things I should do for the rest of my life. These ideas apply to anyone.”

I only ask that you apply them to yourself—
now
.

Just because you are currently unemployed does not mean that life has stopped for you. After all,
you have to live every day of your life
. Why not make every day a better day? You may be unemployed, but I am going to ask you to get to work on yourself—and on your life. You have a lot to do. This is now your full-time job: the job of living your life in-between and getting the most out of it. Let’s turn this into a time to grow.

2

YOU HAVE A RIGHT TO YOUR FEELINGS
AND THE ABILITY TO CHANGE THEM

What is the worst thing to say to someone who is unemployed? “Snap out of it and get on with things.” If you have heard that, you probably felt similar to a lot of people who are going through this time. You may have felt angry, frustrated, infuriated, humiliated, ashamed, alone, hopeless, anxious and confused—or all of those feelings. You probably thought, “They just don’t understand. They don’t get it. This is really a miserable time for me.”

We will deal with all of these completely human feelings throughout this book. But the first thing I want you to think about is that you have every right to every feeling that you have. You have just lost your job. You may feel that it was unfair, so you feel angry. You may think that you have been trying hard to get another job, so you feel frustrated. You may think that other people don’t treat you with respect, so you feel infuriated and humiliated. Or you may think that others look down on you, so you feel ashamed and alone. You may dwell for hours on how this could have happened to you, so you feel confused. And you may think that no matter what you do, nothing will work out—it will always be as bad as it is now, so you feel hopeless.

Finding the strategies for moving on

One way to think about your feelings is that there are millions of other people who have felt the same way during their time of being unemployed. You are a human being coping with a difficult situation. It’s hard, at times, to cope with this, and it takes some real effort to work out how to make things better when you are feeling so down. But I want you to work with me in this book to try some ways of coping that might really make a difference. It won’t be easy; you may say to yourself, “I can’t do this” or “I shouldn’t have to do this—I should just get a job” or “What does he know? He has a job.” All of these thoughts make sense, but they won’t help you. This is an important time in your life where you need yourself to be on your side all the time.

You may feel that no one really understands what you’re going through, and you may even think that no one really cares, but you don’t know that these thoughts are true unless you try connecting with people. You might find that some people actually want to be supportive. I often think that it is a hallmark of my friendship when I can be supportive to someone I care about. It’s a chance for me to be a friend, a chance to get closer, a chance to matter. I want to matter. Don’t you?

It’s hard to have feelings that are painful, that you feel alone with, and that you think others would never care about or understand. A lot of times people are ashamed of their feelings when they are out of work, thinking that other people are going to judge them or want to avoid them. They keep their feelings inside, isolate themselves, and hide from the people in their lives.

I have learned that the most important thing in a relationship is to show that you really want to understand how the other person feels and that you really care. The one person you can start this with is yourself. You can validate yourself, understand yourself and give yourself the right to feel the way you feel.

Let’s try to work out how you can live with your feelings now.

1: Validate your feelings

What does it mean to “validate” your feelings? It means a number of things. First, it means that you recognize what your feelings are. For example, you might feel sad, anxious, hopeless and angry, So identifying your feelings is part of validating them. Sometimes you might focus on only one feeling—for example, sadness—and not realize that you also have a lot of other feelings about being unemployed. For example, you might also feel anxious and worried about the future. You could certainly feel angry that it was unfair. Or you might feel confused, not knowing what to do or why this has happened. If you feel anxious, you might worry about the future, predicting terrible outcomes and treating your predictions as if they are facts. You might find yourself thinking that you will end up homeless. Or if you are angry about being unemployed, you might find yourself directing this anger towards your husband or wife or towards your kids. Try to be honest with yourself about these feelings so that you know where you are coming from.

EXERCISE: WHAT ARE YOU FEELING?

Write out all the different feelings that you have been having. The more you can identify, the more you can understand—and the more feelings you can change.

You can understand that your feelings are related to what you are going through and how you are thinking about it. If you lost your job and you think that you will never get another job or that you will never feel good again, then it makes sense that you feel down. You can validate your sad and anxious feelings by saying to yourself, “Of course I am feeling this way. I’ve lost my job. I tried to do a good job, but now I am out of work. I think I won’t get a job for a long time, I am having all these negative thoughts about myself and I feel isolated and helpless. So it makes sense that I feel this way right now.”

Discovering what’s really true

Realizing that your negative thoughts lead to your negative feelings does not mean that your thoughts are true. For example, you might feel sad and hopeless because you believe you will never get a job, but that is just a thought—it’s not a fact. You can’t know what the facts are until you get the facts. And the future, right now, is not known. You don’t have a crystal ball.

Validating feelings doesn’t mean that there isn’t another way to feel—or to respond to your situation—it simply means, “I understand what I am experiencing. I can see how it makes sense.” Ask yourself, “What am I saying to myself that is making me feel so bad?” How you feel is often based on what you think about things. Your feelings are related to a long stream of negative thoughts that you believe at the present moment. These thoughts are driving your misery.

Of course, there is always another way to look at what is happening and lots of different ways to cope with it. For example, if you believe it’s all your fault and that you are a failure, then you are likely to feel bad. But what if there is another way to look at it? What if you are not a failure, and what if you could get another job, would you feel differently? Probably so. Validating the way you feel doesn’t mean that you will have to feel the way you feel forever. It’s only the way you are feeling now.

EXERCISE: MAKING SENSE OF YOUR FEELINGS

Ask yourself these questions now:

•
What are the different feelings that I am having?

•
Don’t I have a right to those feelings?

•
Aren’t there other people who would feel the same way?

•
What am I saying to myself that makes me feel the way I do?

•
Could there be another way of looking at things?

•
How would I feel if I took a different point of view?

2: Relate your feelings to your values

When you feel down because you think, “I won’t be able to take care of my family now,” your sad and hopeless feelings reflect important values. You care about other people. You want to be responsible and to do the right thing. So it makes sense that you would feel badly right now. Of course, we might examine whether there are ways of taking care of your family that don’t include your job. For example, perhaps taking care of your family might involve loving them, being affectionate, doing things with them and helping out with the chores. You don’t need a job to do those things. But if you believe that you won’t be able to take care of them, it makes sense that your values will be affected; however, we can examine if that is
really
true—although it feels true for you right now.

Another important value is being conscientious and doing a good job. Your period of being unemployed might mean to you that you are not doing anything—because you have no job, so you feel down. As you will remember from Chapter One, though, I am going to argue in this book that you have a number of new jobs to do now that you don’t have that old job. For one, your job is looking for a job—and that is a big job. But you have other jobs, including taking care of yourself, connecting with the people in your life, perhaps engaging in volunteer work, getting into better physical shape and preparing for the next job with the right attitude, the right way to cope and the right skills. Being conscientious doesn’t require the old job, but it’s understandable that you will feel down if you aren’t living up to your values.

You may feel that you are not living up to your values of taking care of your family or that you are not being conscientious because you don’t have a job right now. Your values are important—they are part of who you are. Even though it’s hard at the moment, it would be harder if you gave up on your values. Perhaps there are ways of being supportive and loving without having that job, or of being conscientious. For example, you could be conscientious by focusing on self-care—such as exercise, proper nutrition, reduced drinking and eliminating smoking. You could be conscientious in searching for a job, and in helping out with chores in the home and being there for your family. You could acquire new skills, and network with people to reach out and broaden your possibilities. There are lots of ways of pursuing the right values.

Values and identity are greater than any job

It’s possible to love and support your family—even more—now that you have more time to do it. It’s possible to be conscientious: working at finding a job, working at taking care of yourself, and even volunteering to help others. You might even have more work to do right now, simply because you don’t have that other job. You don’t want to give up your values simply because you lost your job. In fact, you might want to double-up on those values, by really focusing on the right thing to do, and then to do it.

EXERCISE: THINK DIFFERENTLY ABOUT YOUR VALUES

Consider the following:

•
What are the values that you feel are affected by being unemployed right now?

•
Are there other ways of aiming towards those values?

•
What could you do today to move towards those values?

3: Notice that your feelings change with what you are doing

Over the last 30 years of seeing people who are anxious and depressed, one comment always strikes me as intriguing because it is never really true: “I am always depressed.” Even the most depressed clients that I have seen—people who have recently come out of the hospital, or people who report years of treatment for depression—have changes in their moods every day. I often like to reflect with them, “I noticed that you said that you are always depressed, but I noticed that you laughed a few times in our session today. How is this consistent with the idea of always feeling sad?” If your feelings can change in the next ten minutes, then it may be possible that we can work out how to change them every day.

This is important: your feelings change during the course of the day. For example, let’s say that you are feeling sad and I ask, “From 0 to 10, how sad do you feel?” and you say, “10.” That’s really sad, but I am willing to bet that if I asked you to keep track of your sadness every hour of the week you might find that your sadness increases and decreases depending on what you are doing. For example, Claire, who we met in Chapter One, found that she was a lot less sad—actually feeling pretty good –when she was out to dinner with friends. One client, Dave, felt much less sad when he was working out at the health club. Another, Karen, felt a lot less sad curling up with her dog and listening to music. Feelings are not permanent—however painful they may be at the time.

So what are you doing when you feel the most sadness? Here are some examples of activities commonly related to feeling down: sitting at home alone dwelling on your negative thoughts, watching television for hours, lying in bed doing nothing, or hiding from other people because you don’t want them to know that you don’t have a job. Changing your activity may help you change the way you feel—at least, today—at least, for now.

EXERCISE: KEEP TRACK OF PLEASURE AND EFFECTIVENESS

Keep track of your activities every hour of the week. Then, rate your feelings for each hour and each activity using two different categories: pleasure (“How good did I feel doing this?”) and effectiveness (“How competent did I feel doing this?”).

Use a scale from 0 to 10 with 0 representing no feelings of pleasure (or effectiveness) and 10 representing the most pleasure or effectiveness that you could imagine. For example, taking a bath might be “8” in pleasure for you, but only a “3” in feeling effective, so your response here would be 8/3.

Putting together a list of people to contact about jobs might be a “2” in pleasure but a “7” in effectiveness, so your response here would be P=2/E=7. Sitting around dwelling on how bad you feel might be a “0” in both pleasure and effectiveness, so your response here would be 0. Below is an example of the sort of thing that you might write. However, don’t forget you need to write down and rate your activities from when you rise until bedtime