As an integrative counsellor and psychotherapist, I often meet people some weeks after the news has landed, when the practical scramble has quietened and something heavier has moved in behind it. They are frequently surprised by how hard it has hit. “It was just a job” they say. “I don’t know why I feel this shaken”.

You feel shaken because it was never just a job.

The losses beneath the loss

Redundancy rarely arrives as a single, clean loss. On the surface there is the obvious one - the income, the security, the immediate worry about what comes next. But underneath it sits a whole quiet stack of others that we are not always taught to notice.

There is the loss of routine: the shape your days took, the rhythm your body knew without thinking. There is the loss of belonging: the colleagues who knew your particular way of doing things, the small daily currency of being part of something. And perhaps most tender of all, there is the loss of a certain sense of yourself - the quiet, steadying feeling of being useful, capable, of having a place.

When work has carried part of your identity, being told you are “surplus” can strike somewhere deeper than the bank account. This is not an overreaction. It is a proportionate response to losing several things at once, most of which the world around you does not think to acknowledge.

Why “just bounce back” misses the point

Redundancy is one of those transitions our culture wants us to move through quickly and gracefully. Update the CV, stay positive, land the next thing.

There is often an unspoken pressure to skip the grief and get straight to the resilience.

But something in you knows a loss has occurred and the body will not be talked out of it simply because the calendar says it is time to move on. Trying to force positivity over an unacknowledged grief tends to backfire; the feeling does not disappear, it just goes underground and shows up as exhaustion, irritability or a flatness you cannot quite explain.

Allowing yourself to grieve the structure you have lost is not self-indulgence. It is what makes genuine forward movement possible.

What the body carries

A transition like this often lives in the body before it is fully understood by the mind. This is where a somatic, body-based approach earns its place.

You might notice a low-level agitation, a sense of being braced for something. You might wake at the hour your alarm used to sound, your system still keeping to a rhythm that no longer exists. There may be a heaviness in the mornings, when the shape of the day used to be decided for you and now stretches out unstructured.

Through interoception - the felt sense of your own internal state - you can begin to listen to what your body is registering rather than overriding it. That heaviness is not weakness. It is your nervous system adjusting to the loss of a structure it had come to rely on. Meeting it with curiosity, rather than judgement, changes your relationship to it.

A few gentle practices

Name what you have actually lost. Beyond the job title, what has gone? The routine, the identity, the sense of contribution? Naming each loss individually helps the body process what is otherwise a vague, overwhelming weight.

Give your days a gentle shape. Your nervous system was used to an external structure. In its absence, one or two anchoring points - a morning walk, a set time to sit with coffee, a small daily task - can offer the reassurance of rhythm while you find your feet.

Let the feeling take its time. A transition is not a day you cross but a season you live through. You do not have to feel resolved to be exactly where you need to be right now.

When it helps to have someone alongside you

Many people find their own way through redundancy, drawing on their resources and the people around them. But for some, it stirs up more than expected - old fears about worth and security, a shaken sense of identity or a grief that is hard to sit with alone. Sometimes it arrives tangled up with other pressures and the whole thing becomes too much to hold by yourself.

If you have been knocked sideways by something the world expects you simply to recover from, that response makes complete sense - and you do not have to navigate it on your own. Integrative counselling offers a space to explore what has been lost and what might come next, gently and at your own pace, with attention to both the thoughts in your mind and the weight your body is carrying.

Being made redundant asks more of you than a new CV. It asks you to grieve a structure that held more than you realised. Giving yourself permission to do that is not a detour from moving forward - it is the beginning of it.

If this is where you find yourself, my door is open.