THAT'S MEN:Remember that there is, and always was, more to you than the job you do. Begin to know and appreciate that person, writes PADRAIG O'MORAIN.
YOU KNOW those morning TV shows in which people confess their sins to a presenter with an open-mouthed audience feeding on sensation? The theme for the show scrolls across the bottom of the screen: “I had an affair with my girlfriend’s mother” – stuff like that.
If I was running such a show, one of my themes would be, “I got fired by a jerk.” A lot of people are getting fired these days. Some are fired by people who find it genuinely hard to do and who bring whatever dignity they can to the proceedings.
Others are fired by jerks, or by people working for jerks. They are escorted from the jerk’s office to the car park and are not allowed to pick up their stuff from their desk: it will be sent on later.
There are variations on the theme but I think we’ve all read of such scenarios. And I suppose we’ve all wondered how you actually recover from an experience like that.
The people hardest hit by a shocking experience like this are probably the same people who have always believed that if you work hard you will be rewarded as surely as night follows day.
We probably get this belief from our parents and it’s a good belief to get so long as you understand that it’s a theory that works a lot of the time, but not all of the time.
I think men are more likely than women to swallow this theory whole – discrimination, subtle or otherwise, helps to disillusion women earlier.
The thing about working hard is that sometimes it leads to rewards and sometimes it doesn’t. There are invisible people, working for the minimum wage or less, who are never going to be well rewarded no matter how hard they work. There are lazy people who are very well rewarded.
In a properly-structured employment, the people who work hard get looked after better than the people who don’t. The problem comes when you assume that one inevitably leads to the other and then you are devastated to discover this is not always how it goes.
How do you get through a firing like this? Sometimes you can go after the employer for unfair dismissal but what I’m interested in here is how you as a personality can get through the experience.
The first thing to accept is that, if you have been with the company long enough to form a bond with it, you will need time to get over the brutality of this kind of firing. It is the emotional equivalent of grievous bodily harm: you have been wounded and the healing is going to take longer than a weekend.
For a period of time you will keep re-running the scene through your mind. It will intrude day and night. But when the intrusive memories begin to fade, let them go. Sometimes people think they owe it to themselves to keep re-running a scene of injustice but they’re wrong: what they owe to themselves is to avoid re-running scenes they can do nothing about.
Second, realise that your treatment says more about the jerk who fired you in that way than it does about you. Without knowing it, you fell into the hands of people who could act with brutality and they acted with brutality.
Don’t waste time asking yourself again and again how they could behave like this. You are neither their confessor, their parent nor their therapist. Let it go.
I would also urge you to notice and appreciate genuineness and decency in those people around you. It is essential to avoid becoming embittered because a bitter life is a poor sort of life.
Finally, remember that there is, and always was, more to you than the job you do. Begin to know and appreciate that person.
Getting fired by a jerk from a job to which you have a long-standing emotional attachment is nothing less than a life-changing experience.
What matters now is to allow yourself time to recover and then, out of the destruction, to rebuild in a way that aids your happiness and your relationships with good people. Work hard at that and you will be rewarded.
Padraig O'Morain is a counsellor. His book
That's Men, the best of the That's Men column from The Irish Timesis published by Veritas