Grief after redundancy: mourning the work you've lost
Redundancy is called restructuring, not loss. Yet you grieve — for your rhythm, your place, and who you were at work.
“Your role is being discontinued.” That’s what it’s called. Or: “the position no longer exists.” They’re words that sound as though something is happening to the organisation rather than to you. And while you sit across from someone who delivers it carefully, what you mostly hear is that it isn’t personal. Except that it happens to you, personally.
You go home with a folder, an arrangement and a date. And then something begins that nobody has a name for. Because this isn’t called grief. It’s called a restructure, a transition, a new phase. No condolence card arrives, there’s no moment when people fall quiet. There’s a leaving drink, and then it’s Monday.
What you’ve lost is bigger than an income. You’ve lost your rhythm: the hour you got up, the route you drove, the structure that carried your days without you having to think about it. You’ve lost the people you shared something with almost daily, and from whom you’ll now slowly disappear. You’ve lost the place where you were needed, where people knew what you were good at. And you’ve lost a future you had already half sketched out: that project next year, the step that was coming, the calm of knowing where you’d be standing in five years.
You aren’t alone in this, though that may offer little comfort right now. In the Netherlands, the UWV recorded around 355 notifications of collective redundancy in 2025 — the highest figure in ten years and well over forty per cent more than the year before. Nearly 25,000 people were affected. So tens of thousands of people are walking around with precisely this grief, and almost none of them call it that.
What makes it more complicated is that the feelings run into one another. There can be relief: it was a hard place, you’d seen it coming, you never have to sit through that meeting again. And grief at the same time, because it was also your place. There can be anger about how it was handled, and shame about being angry, because others had it worse. That mixture means the grief doesn’t feel clean. And what doesn’t feel clean is harder to allow yourself.
The people around you don’t always help. “Maybe this is exactly the opportunity you needed.” “With your experience you’ll find something in no time.” “Take a breather and then start fresh.” It’s kindly meant and it isn’t untrue, but what it says underneath is: it’s not that bad, keep moving. And it is that bad. You’ve lost something, and the fact that it’s about work doesn’t make it smaller.
Then there’s something that makes this loss unlike most others: you have to apply for jobs. After nearly any other loss you’re allowed to fall apart for a while. Here you’re asked to present yourself convincingly at exactly the moment you’re no longer sure who you are. You write letters setting out what you’re worth, while you don’t quite believe it yourself. And every rejection that arrives doesn’t land somewhere neutral. It lands on the wound.
What I often see in my work with people after redundancy is that beneath the grief there’s a layer of identity. For many people work isn’t only something they do, but part of who they are: the one who kept an overview, who could be relied on, who always sorted it out. When that place falls away, a sentence tends to form. “Apparently I’m expendable.” “I mattered less than I thought.” “I’m too old.” “I can’t keep up any more.” That sentence rarely stays with the redundancy. It becomes a filter that the job interview passes through, and the conversation with your partner, and the moment someone at a birthday party asks what you’re doing these days.
With IEMT I work on two layers at once: the emotional charge attached to the loss, and the sentence you’ve started believing about yourself since. You don’t have to live through your whole story again for that. With calm eye movements the sharpness of the feeling can soften, and the grip of that belief can loosen. The memory stays — that work was yours, and it’s allowed to remain so. What can shift is that it no longer floods you. Often you notice it in something small: you can name your old role without that stab in your stomach. A rejection is simply a rejection again, rather than more evidence. You can become curious about what you actually want now, instead of only about what you’ve lost.
IEMT isn’t a universal answer. It often works surprisingly well, and sometimes it doesn’t work this time — that’s information too. I’m an IEMT coach, not a therapist, and if there’s more going on than I can work with, I’ll say so and refer you on.
The hardest thing about this kind of grief is that you can never tell in advance whether something will work for you. So I’d rather invite you to experience it: a free video call of about 20 minutes, in which we look together at what’s going on for you and whether this way of working suits you. No preparation needed, no obligation afterwards. If you’d first like to read about how a loss like this affects the way you see yourself, have a look at grieving who you could have been.
Ready to see what might shift? Book a conversation — calmly, and without judgment.