You Got Laid Off. You Haven't Told Anyone Yet.
"We don't see things as they are. We see things as we are." — Anaïs Nin
At some point last summer, someone very close to me faced a job loss. This person was smart, accomplished, and had every reason to lean on their network — and they hesitated to tell even me. That hesitation stayed with me, because what I was watching wasn't just one person's experience — it was a pattern. And the thing underneath the pattern, I kept coming back to, was shame.
Shame is about who you are. Job loss has a way of triggering it fast, even when the layoff was company-wide, even when your reviews were strong, even when twenty colleagues walked out the same door. It just says: if you were really good, this wouldn't have happened to you.
I sat down with my friend Dr. Helen Riess — a Harvard psychiatrist, empathy researcher, and founder of Empathetics — to talk about exactly this. She has spent her career studying what happens emotionally when people lose their sense of identity and worth, and what empathy — including self-empathy — actually looks like in practice. You can hear the full conversation on Season 3, Episode 1 of the Giant Steps with Leilani Brown podcast. What she told me confirmed what I was seeing: shame after a job loss is not a character flaw. It is one of the most common, most painful, and least talked-about parts of the experience.
What shame actually does
Here's what shame does once it takes root — it doesn't stay in your feelings, it gets into your behavior. You stop reaching out to your network because you don't want to explain. You scroll past roles you're actually qualified for because you've already decided you won't get them. You walk into interviews apologizing for being in transition rather than leading with what you bring. Dr. Riess calls this pattern "shameprone" — where even neutral feedback lands as confirmation that you're not good enough, and each unanswered email or missed connection becomes evidence. Shame makes you go quiet, the quiet keeps you isolated, and the isolation feeds more shame. It is a loop that is very hard to break from the inside.
And social media makes it worse. When you're in a shame spiral, the last thing you need is a curated feed of everyone else's promotions, new roles, and LinkedIn announcements. But that's exactly where people go — because isolation is lonely and scrolling feels like connection. It isn't. It's comparison dressed up as community, and it drives shame deeper. The pseudo-connection of a feed full of other people's wins is not the same as someone who knows you reminding you of who you actually are.
What makes shame so hard to address is that it is quiet, immobilizing, and almost always experienced alone. It doesn't announce itself. It just slowly turns down the volume on everything you know about yourself — until you forget that you have a track record, that you have value, and that you have every reason to be in the room.
There is a way through it.
Naming it is the first step. And then there are four things you need to do: separate the facts from the story shame is telling you, break the isolation that keeps it alive, regulate yourself before you search, and rebuild your confidence with your own proof of performance.
The full playbook — including a tool called the STAR Story Builder that might be the most important thing you do before you touch your resume — is in this week's issue of Giant Steps with Leilani Brown on Substack.
If you're navigating a job loss right now, or know someone who is, this one is for you.
And if you haven't yet, download our free eBook — Your Next Giant Reset: A Career Comeback Guide — at resetguide.giantstepsllc.com.
Do Well. Do Good.
Leilani