Understanding Career Grief after Job Loss and How to Heal

 

What Nobody Tells You About Losing a Job You Loved

Laverne McKinnon spent years climbing the ladder in entertainment at CBS, helping develop shows like CSI and Criminal Minds. She was the person advocating for writers, championing stories, literally changing people’s careers with a single yes. Every 18 to 24 months, she was promoted. She went from children’s programming to primetime – like going from little league to playing professionally.

Then one day, after being promoted constantly and having what seemed like a fantastic career, her boss told her she was a liability. Just like that, everything she thought defined her was gone.

“I was so tied to this external job as a source of validation for my identity. I was never looking inward, always looking outward,” Laverne shared with me. “When I was fired, it was like I’m no longer competent and capable, and that gutted me.”

The devastating part? She ended up living in her bedroom, essentially in a cave, for almost a year.

Why Career Loss Hits So Deep

Here’s what I learned from Laverne that completely shifted how I think about career setbacks: grief isn’t just about death. Grief is really about the loss of anything that we’re attached to. And in Western culture, we’re incredibly attached to our jobs.

Think about it – when you meet someone new, what’s usually the first question? “What do you do?” We use jobs to assess whether someone could be helpful to us, whether they’re a friend or foe. Our careers become so intertwined with our identity that losing them feels like losing ourselves.

Bereavement experts actually have a term for this: disenfranchised grief. It’s any type of grief that isn’t openly acknowledged, socially validated, or publicly mourned. Career setbacks fall right into this category, along with miscarriage, moving, pet loss – all those losses that society tells us to just “get over” and “move on” from. Laverne explains disenfranchised grief here.

But here’s the thing – the depth of your grief isn’t about the specific job itself. It’s about how attached you were to it. You might get fired from one job and feel relieved, while losing another job completely devastates you. It’s all about that attachment.

The Hidden Losses Nobody Talks About

When Laverne walked me through her experience, she explained something that made so much sense. There are visible losses – the salary, the title, the parking space, the place to go every day. Those are the things people see and understand.

But underneath those are the hidden losses that really gut you:

• Your identity and sense of who you are
• Your feeling of belonging and community
• Your sense of safety and security
• Your trajectory and future plans
• Your confidence in your own abilities

“We can replace the visible losses,” Laverne explained. “I got another job, another salary, another parking space. But what wasn’t being addressed were those hidden losses. And that’s what really needed to be mourned.”

This is why you can land a new job, maybe even a better one, and still feel broken inside. Because you haven’t dealt with those deeper losses.

When Your Intuition Was Screaming (But You Didn’t Listen)

One of the most powerful parts of our conversation was when Laverne talked about ignoring her intuition. Looking back, she could see that she’d grown into someone who valued independent thought, but the corporate culture she was in wanted soldiers, not generals.

“I can trace back the big mistakes in my life to when I didn’t pay attention to my intuition,” she told me. “My intuition was lit up and I just ignored it.”

Sound familiar? That feeling in your gut that something isn’t right, but you push it down because you need the job, or you think you should be grateful, or you’re afraid of the unknown?

I asked Laverne about this because I’ve been there too – those moments when your heart rate is probably at 144 when it should be 70, but you just keep powering through. Sometimes life has to get really loud – like a career ending abruptly – before we finally pay attention.

The Grief That Society Doesn’t Understand

What makes career grief so isolating is that most people don’t get it. They see you got another job and think you should be fine. They don’t understand that you’re still processing the loss of that work family, that sense of purpose, that version of yourself you thought you were.

And for us as mothers? It’s even more complicated. We’re already dealing with so much change, so many transitions, and society expects us to just handle it all gracefully. Don’t make a fuss about childbirth, don’t complain about sleepless nights, don’t mourn the identity you had before kids, and definitely don’t grieve a job loss for too long.

“I feel like frequently as a mother, I am not allowed to make a mistake, have a misstep, have a discovery process,” Laverne shared. “And I’m human. I am going to sometimes not say things in the most elegant way. I’m going to have a reaction as opposed to a response. How human of me.”

But here’s what Laverne helped me understand – you can make a choice that you know is right for you and still grieve what you’re leaving behind. If you transitioned out of professional life to focus on motherhood, it’s normal to feel sad about what you’re no longer doing, even though it was your choice. If you’re transitioning back to work after being home with kids, it’s normal to grieve that time and closeness you’re giving up.

Making the right choice and feeling grief about it can coexist. You don’t have to feel guilty about the sadness.

How to Actually Heal from Career Grief

After ten years of carrying this unresolved heartbreak, working amazing jobs but still feeling broken inside, Laverne finally understood what she needed to do. And now she helps other people through this process.

1. Give Yourself Permission to Grieve

First, you need to know that career grief is real. You’re not making it up, you’re not being dramatic, and you’re not weak. Bereavement experts have studied this – losing something you were deeply attached to creates real grief, whether it’s a person, a place, a job, or an identity.

2. Identify the Hidden Losses

Look beyond the obvious stuff – the salary, the title, the daily routine. What are the deeper things you lost? Maybe it was your sense of being competent and capable. Maybe it was feeling like you belonged somewhere. Maybe it was the security of knowing what your future looked like.

These hidden losses are what need to be mourned, not just replaced with a new job.

3. Create a Ritual to Say Goodbye

This was the most powerful part of Laverne’s healing process. Ten years after being fired from CBS, she still had files from that job, still clinging to the idea that somehow she could get back what she’d lost there.

One day, she opened her filing cabinet – four inches of files – and walked them down to the recycling bin. Her heart was beating fast, her palms were sweaty. She consciously said goodbye to that job, acknowledging it was never coming back, that the things she associated with it weren’t going to come back in that form anymore.

“I remember the sensation of closing the lid of the recycling bin and saying, I am complete. And then that creates space internally,” she told me.

One of her clients wrote a eulogy for a screenplay that never got made, then buried it while reading the eulogy to friends who witnessed and understood the loss. Another client had a ceremony to say goodbye to a creative project that couldn’t come to full term.

When someone dies, we have funerals. When there’s a career setback or major life transition, we usually don’t have any ritual to acknowledge and honor that loss. But our brains need help understanding when something is actually over.

4. Rewrite the Meaning You’ve Created

Here’s something fascinating about how our brains work – we’re meaning-making machines. We cannot tolerate not knowing or uncertainty. So when something bad happens, like getting fired, our brain immediately creates a story: “It’s because I’m a failure, I’m a loser, I’m not good enough.”

But 99% of the time, there’s no actual data to support that meaning we’ve created. We’re just making things up to feel like we understand what happened.

Laverne’s breakthrough came when she realized: “I just was no longer a fit. And that was the hard truth.” Not that she was incompetent or incapable, but that she’d grown into someone who valued independent thought in a culture that wanted compliance.

5. Rebuild Trust with Yourself (Starting Tiny)

If you ignored your intuition and got hurt, you need to rebuild trust with yourself. But start really, really small.

Laverne’s example: After their conversation ends, she’s going to go have a bite to eat. When she does it, she’ll acknowledge that she took care of herself and did what she said she would do. That’s how you start rebuilding trust.

Where people mess up is trying to do something big right away – “I’m going to write for two hours today” or “I’m going to spend all afternoon job searching.” That’s too much pressure. Make it safe by making it small.

And when you don’t follow through on something, don’t judge yourself – assess instead. Maybe you didn’t eat lunch because your daughter needed you when you walked out of your office. That’s context, not failure. Give yourself grace and figure out what system you need (like setting labeled timers) to support yourself better.

What Happens After You Honor the Grief

The beautiful thing about actually dealing with career grief instead of suppressing it is that it creates space for something new. Not just a new job, but a new relationship with work, with yourself, with what really matters to you.

Laverne discovered she’s actually an entrepreneur at heart, not meant for corporate life, even though being an entrepreneur terrified her. (“How am I gonna have medical insurance? Where’s my salary gonna come from?”)

But sometimes the universe has to tough-love us into where we actually belong.

After her healing process, Laverne now helps other ambitious professionals navigate career grief as both a strategist and grief recovery specialist. She found her purpose in helping people cross their finish line – something she’d been doing all along at CBS, but now in a completely different way.

“The grief never fully goes away,” she explained, using the metaphor of a broken arm. “If I break my arm and don’t set it properly, I might be able to function but with discomfort and pain. If I set it correctly, I regain full motion. Maybe when it rains I feel a little ache, but that’s it. Years later, an X-ray would still show the arm had been broken, but the intensity of pain is gone because I had a proper healing process.”

For the Mothers Carrying Extra Weight

If you’re a mother dealing with career grief, I want you to know that you’re carrying an extra load that society doesn’t always acknowledge or support. We’re expected to handle career transitions gracefully while also managing everything else – kids, relationships, our own changing identity through motherhood.

It’s okay to feel sad about the professional life you left behind when you became a mother, even if staying home was your choice. It’s okay to grieve the time with your children that you’re giving up when you go back to work, even if working is what you want and need to do.

We can love our choices and still mourn what we’re not choosing. That’s human.

Moving Forward Without Forgetting

Career grief isn’t about staying stuck in the past or feeling sorry for yourself forever. It’s about honoring what meant something to you so you can move forward with integrity and wholeness.

When you try to skip the grief and just “move on,” you carry that broken piece with you into every new opportunity. But when you take time to properly mourn what you’ve lost, you create space for something authentic and aligned to emerge.

Maybe that’s a new career that actually fits who you’re becoming. Maybe it’s finally listening to your intuition about what kind of work environment you need. Maybe it’s discovering, like Laverne did, that your real calling was something you never would have considered before the loss forced you to look inward.

Your Next Chapter Starts with Honoring This One

 

If any of this resonates with you – if you’ve been carrying around the sadness of a career that didn’t work out, a dream that died, or just the version of yourself you thought you’d become by now – I want you to know that your feelings are valid and important.

Don’t let anyone rush you through this process. Don’t let anyone tell you to just be grateful for what you have now or to focus on the future instead of dwelling on the past.

Sometimes we have to honor what we lost before we can step into what’s next.

Your career setback isn’t your ending – it might actually be the beginning of finding where you really belong. But first, give yourself permission to grieve. Create your own ritual. Start rebuilding trust with yourself one tiny step at a time.

And remember, beautiful soul – you are so much more than your job title. The real work is figuring out who you are without all that external validation. It’s scary work, but it’s also the most important work you’ll ever do.

If Laverne’s story resonated with you and you want to learn more about her work with career grief, you can find her on LinkedIn at Laverne McKinnon, visit her website at LaverneMcKinnon.com, or join her community on Substack at substack.moonshopmentor.com where she offers workshops, meditations, and ongoing support for just $5/month.

Listen to the full conversation with Laverne McKinnon on the Mama What’s Next podcast, available wherever you get your podcasts.