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A portion of this blog originally appeared as a guest feature on Career Pivot. Join me for a special AMA with Career Pivot on Friday, October 31st at 9:00 a.m. PT on the Substack App.

The call came on a Monday morning. I was still in bed, but when I saw that it was my boss, I jumped up, cleared my throat a few times and did my best to sound normal while saying “hello.”

It came out froggy and weak-sauce. I knew why she was calling. I’d been waiting for months to get the official notice of my firing. She sounded like she was reading from a script.

Later that week, boxes arrived from the office—my daughter’s photo in a freshly chipped frame, a half-full bottle of McCallans, a mug with lettering: Everybody’s Watching! It was both anti-climatic and gut-wrenching.

I spent the next several months in my bedroom cave, alternating between shame, humiliation, panic, depression and intense self-loathing. For the first time in ten years — really since I’d been with that company —there were no meetings to prep for, emails to craft with precision and diplomacy, or crises to be solved in a blink of an eye. So strange to have been stressed out and resentful of all that activity, and then to wish with every fiber of being I could have it back.

At the time, I didn’t know what to call what I was feeling. I was pretty sure I was broken because everything I did to feel better was a big fat turd ball. I took antidepressants, went to therapy, and worked with a life coach. I read books about igniting my passion, the art of letting go, and practicing gratitude. I went to Esalen (a holistic education center), worked with psychics and intuitives, and got a certification in Excel. Nothing worked no matter how great of a student I was because the books, workshops, readings, classes and teachings were missing a key element of my experience.

What I didn’t know then that I know now is that I was grieving.

The Grief No One Names

Turns out grief isn’t just for funerals. It shows up any time something meaningful ends—when a relationship fractures, when a home is lost, when a dream slips out of reach.

But the kind of grief that comes from losing your place in the working world? Most people don’t get it.

That’s because career grief is what bereavement experts call disenfranchised grief—a form of loss that society doesn’t officially acknowledge or validate. Instead, you get advice disguised as comfort: “You’ll land on your feet.” “It’s probably for the best.” “Everything happens for a reason.”

And at the same time, if you’re anything like me, you start to question yourself. Why can’t I just move on? Why does it still hurt? Why does everything, even sending a text, feel harder than it used to?

You may wonder if you’re overreacting. Well, you’re not.

What you’re feeling is a completely human response to loss.

Grief doesn’t mean you’re broken. It means something you were deeply attached to is gone.

You have permission to grieve your career losses.

The Myths That Keep Us Stuck

Once I tell people that, the next question usually comes fast: So how do I get over it? Getting over grief is one of several myths that cause harm. The world teaches us to treat grief like a bad cold. Take a few days off, drink lots of water, and pop a few aspirin if your head hurts.

Grief is not an experience you get over. Grief is an experience that gets integrated into your life. At the same time, that gaping hole in your torso cannot simply be filled with an alternate job.

Consider what happens when a tornado hits a town. Buildings collapse, trees uproot, familiar streets vanish. The landscape of the community is forever changed. Even when the debris is cleared and new structures are constructed, it’s not the same town—it’s a rebuilt one. Grief works the same way. When something you were deeply attached to is gone, it alters your internal landscape. You may rebuild, even thrive again, but you’ll always remember what once stood there—the job, the dream, the sense of belonging.

Then there’s the “five stages of grief” myth. You might’ve heard of them: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. They’ve been printed on posters, used in workshops, and turned into a cultural script for how we should grieve. But those stages weren’t meant to be linear—or even universal. Psychiatrist Elisabeth Kübler-Ross designed them to describe how terminally ill patients process their own mortality, not how the rest of us should manage loss. Somehow we turned that amazing research into a rulebook—and in doing so, we gave ourselves a new way to fail. If you have emotions outside of the five stages framework, you’re not doing grief wrong. Your range of emotions is completely normal.

Another myth? “If I stay busy, I won’t have to feel this.” That one’s especially common in ambitious people. Productivity can numb pain for a while—it gives the illusion of control. But grief has a way of leaking through the cracks and can show up as distraction, burnout, cynicism, the loss of motivation, and overall grumpiness.

One of the most common myths is a close cousin to getting over grief: the belief that time heals all. Let’s debunk that from two perspectives. First, the word “heals” implies that grief is an illness to recover from, something that can be cured. It’s not. Grief is a transformative experience that changes how you see yourself and the world around you.

Time, by itself, doesn’t heal—but it does create space. Over time, your relationship to what was lost shifts and the pain may soften with distance.

I really do wish grief came with a timeline, but it doesn’t. What time can offer is room to integrate the loss—to make it part of your story rather than the whole story.

What I’ve learned, both personally and through years of coaching, is that grief doesn’t obey rules—but it does respond to tasks. Tasks are not formulas or stages. They’re simple, human actions that help you acknowledge what’s changed and make sense of it.

The framework I use to describe those tasks is called RISE—because that’s what we’re learning to do after loss. Rise through understanding. Rise through intention. Rise through agency.

The RISE Framework: A Roadmap Through Career Grief

The framework offers a different way forward—each task builds on the one before it, but you don’t have to move in order. Think of RISE as a loop, not a ladder. You can circle back as often as you need to.

R – Recognize the Loss

The first task of grief is recognition—acknowledging what’s actually gone. It sounds simple, but most people skip it entirely. They rush to update their résumés, reach out to contacts, or start applying for jobs, believing momentum will ease the pain. But you can’t rebuild on ground you haven’t cleared.

Recognition starts by naming the visible and hidden losses. The visible losses are easier to point to: the title, the office, the daily structure. These are the losses that are more readily replaced, but don’t reflect the entire picture.

Beneath the visible losses are the hidden losses. These are the ones that may take time to name, but you feel them intensely. The loss of belonging. The loss of confidence. The loss of purpose. The loss of belief.

When I was fired, it wasn’t just the loss of my title that gutted me—it was the loss of identity. For years, I saw myself as smart, strategic, and capable. When the parting of the ways call came, all of that vanished in an instant. My identity shifted from someone accomplished to being a loser and an idiot.

That became my secret and my shame. I didn’t tell anyone how small I felt, or how humiliated. I poured all that emotion into self-criticism instead. It wasn’t until I learned to name the losses, especially the hidden ones, that I could start to get a clearer view of how to rebuild.

I – Investigate the Meaning

Here’s the thing: When I told myself I was a loser and an idiot, that was me creating meaning about something that happened that didn’t make sense. Why do we do that ourselves?

It’s because the brain can’t tolerate not knowing, so it rushes to fill in the blanks. Each time it lands on an explanation—accurate or not—it releases a small hit of dopamine, the brain’s reward for “solving” a problem. It feels good for a moment, but the comfort doesn’t mean the meaning is true.

That’s why the “I” in RISE invites you to investigate the meaning you’ve created from your loss because that meaning will shape what comes next.

I avoided opportunities that scared me. I downplayed my experience. I stayed small because I worried that I’d get my head chopped off again. After all, I was a loser.

Investigating the meaning you’ve created doesn’t mean forcing positivity or rewriting history. It means pausing long enough to get curious about what you’ve been telling yourself about the loss—asking whether it’s true, or whether it’s just the brain hard-wired to come up with answers. That’s why this step matters: it helps you question the meaning before it hardens into identity.

Here’s a hard truth: grief isn’t only about what happened; it’s about what you believe it means. When a career disruption occurs, we’re often left in uncertainty and no answers. So our brain jumps in and creates any ol’ meaning regardless of whet...

What If Losing Your Job Is Grief? 💔