Why it’s so important to find community after job loss
Over and over again, I see and hear how hard it is to feel like you’re alone when you lose your job. You’ve lost your daily support system and your routine—you know, things that help stave off things like depression. You don’t have that coffee break during the day when you can chat with coworkers about stress or, better yet, get to have a few soul-affirming laughs over the absurdity of something that’s going on. You don’t have the change of scenery of going into an office, or if you work from home, you don’t have the mindset shift that can come with logging on for the day, making yourself available on Slack, and exchanging emails.
What you might be experiencing, instead, might be staying in your home/apartment all day. Regardless of whether you live alone, after a job loss there’s a significant change right away in how many people you’re interacting with over the course of a day. You’ve lost a big community in your life. And if this seems like an introvert’s paradise, even introverts need social interaction. Community and social interaction afford us several really useful things.
Mirroring
Social interaction allows our experiences to be mirrored back to us, which is kind of like having our experience of reality triangulated and heightening our awareness. Do you ever find yourself deep in conversation with someone and realize that your body positions (or perhaps the way you’re holding your hands, or tilting your head) are nearly identical? We naturally mirror one another often, and this is a really helpful input. Sometimes that mirroring can also bring greater awareness to a thing we’re not even aware of. I can’t tell you how often I’ll mimic a gesture in session (because it seems significant to something happening for them in some way), only for my client to feel surprised at this realization—they had no idea they were making that gesture.
Body posture isn’t the only thing that can be mirrored, it’s just the easiest one to explain. Often, in addition to things we can see, we help mirror someone’s experience back to them so that they can see it more clearly. A few months back I wrote about a friend who was miserable at work, and how his partner named this out loud. Even though my friend knew he was miserable, it was this triangulation from his partner that helped him become more aware of how severe it actually was. When people hear our stories, stories we might brush off as “not too bad”, and react with anger or sadness in line, it can help us recognize how “bad” those experiences actually are without our natural tendency to minimize getting in the way. Mirroring can be extremely useful, and sometimes even vital for our sense of shared reality.
If you are looking for a job and you’ve applied to 200 positions and have gotten 150 rejections and 50 ghostings, internally you might have all sorts of stories about needing to do more and push harder and for goodness sake stay positive and don’t breathe for a minute until you get a job. But if you tell that story out loud to other humans, there’s a good chance someone might say, “HOLY COW that’s a lot of applications! You are doing so much work. That must feel so defeating.” Mirroring.
Emotional regulation
One of the main ways mammals (including us humans) regulate their nervous systems is through what’s called limbic co-regulation. It’s actually super cool, and I love to geek out about it as often as possible. The co- in co-regulation refers to the fact that you must be with another mammal in order to co-regulate. (Yes, your furry friends count!) Ok, so really this applies to mammals, but for the sake of simplicity, I’m going to talk primarily about co-regulation between humans.
When we are born, we don’t yet have the ability to understand what’s happening to us, what we’re feeling, let alone regulate our own nervous systems. We are still developing long after we’re born (heck, our brains aren’t fully developed until our early to mid-20s), and that means we rely on caregivers to get what we need. In addition to feeding us and keeping us safe, caregivers also let us piggyback on their nervous systems. If our caregiver’s nervous system is steady and stable, our nervous system settles down. If, on the other hand, our caregiver’s nervous system is highly alert and anxious, our nervous system will attune to that state and we will also be on high alert. We can’t detect safety versus danger yet, so we rely on our caregiver’s state to tell us that information.
Ok, so here’s the thing… even once we have a developed nervous system, it continues to be impacted by other nervous systems around it. Infants rely on another’s nervous system, but even as we develop a nervous system and begin to have more control, our nervous system continues to rely in part on external nervous systems. !!! It’s not just something infants experience! Even as grown-ass adults, we continue to rely on others for regulation.*
So let’s say you’re feeling a lot of shame and despair after being unemployed for months. On top of that, you’re isolated at home because you have no office to go to and you don’t feel like you can burden your friends with how low you’re actually feeling right now. Your nervous system might be what we call “hypoaroused,” a fancy way of saying you feel shut down, depressed, and have an absence of energy. And because you’re isolated, there are no other nervous systems around that can give your body helpful cues that you are safe. This isn’t to say that all of your problems go away with social interactions—we both know you’re more complex than that. But by providing your nervous system with external cues from being in community with others, you are giving it a fighting chance! (And also pet your cat.)
*As an aside: Other people can continue to help us tune our nervous system even as we work on the skills to calm ourselves. This is actually one of the ways therapy works—if your therapist is regulated, calm, and in their “seat” (and really, they should be), your nervous system is able to sense that, and can use that as a springboard for its own settling. It’s so freaking cool!!! And I in no way did this topic justice. If you want to know more, I highly recommend the book A General Theory of Love by Lewis, Amini, and Lannon.
Play
Ok, I’m sneaking this one in here because I think it’s super important. This is a weird phenomenon, but I’ve found that often when folks are out of work, rather than allocating time for play just as you would when you have a job, they instead decide that they haven’t “earned” play or that, somehow, by playing they aren’t taking their circumstance seriously enough. (It’s worth noting that I see this crop up less when finances aren’t involved—in other words if your employment status is not really impacting your life financially speaking or you have a long runway before things get serious, you probably don’t have trouble finding time to play.) But for folks who are either struggling or can see the end of the runway, play can sometimes feel like an indulgence. It’s as if the need to have fun completely goes away *poof* if you can’t afford not having a job.
And you know what, it makes sense that you might not feel like a lot of fun if you’re scared about your future. You might be feeling really low where your nervous system is in hypoarousal like we talked about before. Or, there’s also a good chance your nervous system might be in hyperarousal—a fancy way of saying you’re on high alert, feeling really anxious, terrified, or rageful. Either way, it’s not exactly prime “play” territory, is it? In either of these states, when left to your own devices you simply will not play.
Being around other people, though, introduces spontaneity and a little spark of chaos to the mix. We can’t reliably predict what will happen—maybe someone will crack a joke that somehow bypasses our overwhelmed nervous system and gets us to laugh. Or maybe we’ll see a really cute baby mean-mugging for seemingly no reason, and we can’t help but chuckle despite ourselves. Guess what you can’t do? Play and be overwhelmed at the same time. Play and laughter can help our parched nervous systems get a drink of safety. It gives your whole body a break and gives your resilience a boost. Play is not just a luxury, it’s important for your health.
And there are probably a lot more reasons…
There are so many good reasons to find community whether or not you’ve lost your job and here I’m really only scratching the surface. But hopefully, these are enough reasons to really sell you on the idea of community and finding ways to be around people, especially in the aftermath of a layoff. Community can look like a bunch of different things—circles of friends, faith-based organizations, recreational leagues, community groups, volunteer organizations, 12-step groups, and therapy groups just to name a few. There’s no wrong way to be in community; the important thing is that to find ways of being in community with other people.
If you’re in California, dealing with the aftermath of a layoff in tech, and want to find a community of folks who are having similar experiences, check out my online therapy group, The Aftermath of Job Loss.
