5 Types of Brain Melt After a Traumatic Job Loss

75% of respondents to my recent survey had experienced a “severely” traumatic job loss.

This impacted their ability to find a new role. 

Put simply, when you experience trauma, your brain stops working as it should. 

For a while.

Or maybe much longer than a while….

The following five different types of “brain melt” can inhibit rational decision making after a traumatic departing employee experience:

Rumination

It might seem that we are trying to make sense of things when we obsess about past events, but the immersive nature of the negative thought patterns of rumination means that we can think about little else. We get stuck in a pessimistic feedback loop with no hope of escape.

Trying to figure out your next career move is impossible if you are pre-occupied with a traumatic job loss. When nothing makes sense, your “why” is hard to fathom. 

Catastrophising

Catastrophising is the partner in crime of rumination – when you convince yourself that things are worse than they are. These irrational thoughts can feel all-encompassing. You lost your job, and everyone hates you. Who in their right mind would want to employ you?

The uncertainty of a job search provides fertile ground for catastrophising if you allow a traumatic job loss to justify your pessimistic thought patterns. Your memory and imagination work against you to make you live through the worst possible outcomes.

Dissociation

The mental process of disconnecting from one’s thoughts, feelings and experiences is common after an episode of acute trauma. Events seem utterly unreal, and you question even basic truths about who you are. 

This sense of detachment can then spread to memories of your earlier career exploits. The world seems distorted, you have lapses in memory, and you feel emotionally drained. 

Excess cortisol

The stress hormone cortisol can help us to react swiftly to dangerous situations, but it can be incredibly harmful when it is present over an extended period of time.

Excess cortisol not only supresses the immune system and increases blood pressure, but it has also been proved to reinforce the reconsolidation of  traumatic memories. Cortisol provides the mental ink to imprint those traumatic moments in your mind.

Depression

I am sad to say that I will be writing about this last one a lot. Depression lurks in the shadows of every job search. There are many shades of mental illness that a traumatic job loss can awaken – depression is one of the most debilitating. 

It can easily set in after an unexpected and cold-hearted departing employee experience. It can leave devastating mental scars that may never fully heal.

These are just five examples of mental imbalance after a traumatic job loss.

There are many more.

The nature of the departing employee experience (DEX) will influence the scale of the disruption.

When the departure is particularly brutal, all five of these brain-melt scenarios can kick in simultaneously. Such a mental state is not conducive to a successful job search.

I hope that employers come to realise just how much of a responsibility they shoulder in helping their people to move on as compassionately and productively as possible.

The mental devastation of a traumatic job loss can wreak havoc on lives and careers.

How can employers not care more?

There are many other things that they can do to soften the blow…

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This blog is shared with Job Seeker Duetists. 

Written by former recruitment ghostwriter Paul Drury (not AI).