Why You Shouldn’t Confuse the Shock of Job Loss with Grief or Trauma

The rapid pace of layoffs across sectors like tech, retail, and healthcare continues to surge, with thousands of employees from companies like Meta, Google, and Amazon abruptly losing jobs.

Given the shock of a sudden layoff, many now associate this experience with grief and trauma. While being laid off is no doubt destabilizing and challenging, we should reserve the use of terms such as “grief” for truly irreversible loss and “trauma” for actual traumatic events.

According to the American Psychological Association (APA), “grief” is defined as “the anguish experienced after significant loss,” listing the death of a loved one as their prime example. Moreover, the APA defines “trauma” as “any disturbing experience that results in significant fear, helplessness, dissociation, confusion, or other disruptive feelings intense enough to have a long-lasting negative effect on a person’s attitude, behavior, and other aspects of functioning,” listing traumatic events such as rape, war, and natural disasters as examples. The combination of the two, or “traumatic grief,” is described as “a severe form of separation distress that usually occurs following the sudden and unexpected death of a loved one,” which includes several painful and dysfunctional symptoms, such as a sense of futility or meaninglessness of life.