When the position is gone: who you are once the power leaves

“On Monday morning I woke up at six, as always. I put on a shirt. And then I stood in the hallway and didn’t know where to go.”

Plenty of people could begin their story this way: someone whose term of office has ended, who wasn’t re-elected, who was removed by the supervisory board, or who handed over the keys after decades at the helm. On paper, something entirely ordinary has happened: a post has come to an end. People around them often say “at last you’ll have time for yourself” or “you’ve done more than enough”. Yet they have the sense that something inside them ended along with the role.

That is what this piece is about: the loss of a position — not just a job, but a role that gave shape to your day, your relationships and your sense of who you are. I wrote about retirement as a wider life transition in Retirement, the loss of a role and the question of meaning. Here I want to write about something narrower and often sharper: the end of power, influence and visibility that comes suddenly, or against your will.

When a role becomes an identity

Everyone has several roles: partner, parent, friend, colleague, neighbour. In a healthy balance the roles support one another and none of them carries everything. With people in prominent positions, though, one role often slowly outgrows the others. The hour you get up, the people you talk to, the topics over lunch, even your holidays — everything revolves around the post. Not because the person is vain, but because the position is demanding and takes as much as you give it.

In the 1980s the psychologist Patricia Linville studied what she called self-complexity: how many distinct, mutually independent parts a person’s picture of themselves contains. Her research showed that people whose self-image rests on several separate pillars swing less in mood when one area comes under stress. Whoever has built everything on a single pillar loses their footing when it falls. A position held for a long time makes that one pillar very thick — and the others very thin.

This is why, after a post ends, many people feel not only sadness but confusion. The question “who am I?” seems childish to them; after all, they are grown, experienced, successful. But when the title falls away, so do the answers it used to provide automatically. You can read more about how identity forms and changes in the knowledge base under identity.

Everything the position gave you

While studying unemployment, the social psychologist Marie Jahoda noticed that work doesn’t only give us a salary. It also gives us things we don’t notice while we have them: a structure to time, contact with people outside the family, a sense of shared purpose, status and a recognised place in society, and regular activity. She called these the latent functions of employment. In a leadership position, every one of them is amplified.

Research on job loss shows how strongly this affects wellbeing. In a large 2009 meta-analysis of several hundred studies, Karsten Paul and Klaus Moser found that around 34 per cent of unemployed people had psychological problems, compared with around 16 per cent of those in work — roughly twice as many. Someone who loses a senior position is, of course, often not unemployed in the usual sense and may have no financial worries at all. Even so, most of what Jahoda described falls away. Money doesn’t replace rhythm, people and the sense of being needed.

Elections, dismissal, retirement: different endings, different wounds

How a position ends matters. The sociologist Helen Rose Fuchs Ebaugh, who had herself left religious life, described in her book on role exit how people who leave a role by their own choice go through a gradual process: first doubts, then seeking alternatives, a turning point, and only then building a new identity as an “ex”. But when someone loses a role without wanting to leave it, the first two steps are missing. The turning point arrives without preparation.

• Losing an election is public. The result is a number everyone can see, and people often experience it as a verdict on themselves rather than on a programme or circumstances. At the same time they have to turn up, congratulate, smile.
• Being recalled or dismissed carries a tinge of injustice or shame. Even when the decision was political or had little to do with your work, the question remains whether you did something wrong.
• The end of a term is predictable, but that doesn’t make it easier. The date is known, so it’s easy to avoid thinking about it for years.
• Retiring or handing over leadership is often your own decision, but precisely for that reason it brings its own awkwardness: “I wanted this myself, so why does it hurt so much now?”

Each of these endings opens a different layer. In one, shame is in the foreground; in another, anger; in a third, a quiet sadness. Often all three are there.

A grief nobody acknowledges

When someone close to you dies, the people around you know what to do: they come to the funeral, bring food, ask how you are. When you lose a position, they don’t. Some withdraw because they don’t know what to say. Others even expect you to be pleased, since you finally have some peace. Kenneth Doka coined the term disenfranchised grief for losses like this — grief that society doesn’t recognise as legitimate. I have written more about it in The grief nobody acknowledges: miscarriage, divorce, losing a job.

For people with influence, this lack of acknowledgement is even stronger. Who is going to feel for a former chief executive with a severance package, or a politician whose term has run out? And so the person grieves alone, often hiding it even from themselves. Outwardly they are busy with new projects, advisory work, board memberships. Inwardly something is missing that they have no words for.

It helps to understand that grief isn’t only for people. We also grieve for a role, for an image of ourselves and for a future we had imagined. You’ll find a short explanation of how grieving unfolds in the knowledge base under grieving.

How the loss shows up in everyday life

Hardly anyone comes in and says “I’m grieving for my position”. Much more often the loss shows itself indirectly:

• Irritability at home. Your partner suddenly becomes your only “colleague” and receives the tasks, instructions and criticism that used to go elsewhere.
• An overpacked diary. Within a few weeks the person takes on five new roles so as not to have to sit in silence.
• Checking. Following how the successor is doing, what the media are writing, who was invited to an event you would never have missed before.
• The body. Poorer sleep, tiredness without exertion, more alcohol in the evenings now that there’s no meeting tomorrow.
• Shame at the question “so what are you doing now?” and answers that begin with “former”.

None of these signs is an illness in itself. But they signal that something important has happened that hasn’t yet been given room.

A short conversation at the kitchen table

This is how a conversation between a husband and wife might sound a few months after the post has ended (composite, not a real person):

“Tomaž rang again today. I told him I didn’t have time.”
“But you do have time.”
“I know. But what am I supposed to say? How are you? I’m at home moving things around the garage?”
“You could say exactly that.”
“He used to ring me for advice. Now he’d pity me.”
“Maybe he just misses you.”
“…I hadn’t thought of that.”

There is nothing dramatic in a conversation like this. But it holds the core: a person used to being the one who gives doesn’t know how to simply be a friend. The relationships the role carried have to learn to stand on other legs — or it turns out that only the role was carrying them. That, too, is part of the loss.

What happens in the family

In relational family therapy, in which I am training, we always look at an individual through the relationships they live in. Losing a position is not one person’s private matter. When their role changes, the balance of the whole family changes.

Their partner may have spent years living alongside someone who was hardly ever home, and built their own rhythm, friends and space. Now there is someone at home all day, looking for somewhere to put their energy. Children, even grown ones, may feel relief that their father or mother is finally available, and also unease, because they don’t know how to talk to someone who was always “on duty”.

Christian Gostečnik describes how people in relationships unconsciously repeat emotional patterns from their family of origin. With people whose position has grown into their identity, there is often an early experience underneath: that you are worth something when you achieve. If achievement was the way to get attention in childhood, losing a position can feel like losing the right to attention. That isn’t something a new hobby can fix. It is an old wound that the position covered for a long time. Anyone who wants to look at those roots can do so in a longer session built around a genogram, which I have called A Look into the Past.

Exercise: who am I when I don’t introduce myself with a title?

You don’t do this exercise to find a new identity in a single evening. You do it to see what remains once the title has gone. Take half an hour and a sheet of paper.

1. Write down five things the position gave you. Use the infographic above as a guide: rhythm, people, purpose, status, influence. Next to each, write one concrete example of something you miss now.
2. Mark which of these really meant the most to you. Many people discover that they don’t miss the power, they miss the people. Or that they don’t miss the title, but the sense of building something.
3. Write a three-sentence introduction of yourself without a title, post or institution. If you can’t, that is important information, not a failure.
4. Write down one person who knew you before you had the position. What would they say about you? If you can, ring them in the next few days — and not about business.
5. Choose one need from your list and find one small way to meet it differently. Not five new roles. One thing you can do this week.

If strong sadness, anger or shame comes up during the exercise, that’s understandable. Write down what you felt and don’t rush to fix it. For support in working with values, you can also use the personal values list.

What helps when the ground is shifting

There are no shortcuts through the loss of a position, but some things make the way easier.

Allow it to hurt. The feeling that you’re not allowed to be sad because you have so many privileges is understandable, but it doesn’t help. A loss is a loss, whatever you still have. Sadness that isn’t given room often disguises itself as irritability or bitterness.

Don’t rush into a new role. In his book on transitions, William Bridges described the in-between period between an ending and a new beginning — a kind of neutral zone that feels empty but in which you can work out what you really want. People who are used to acting try to skip it. If you skip it, you often build a new identity on the same single pillar. I wrote about transitions in general in New job, new city, new chapter: the psychology of life transitions, and you’ll find a short explanation in the knowledge base under transition.

Separate the role from yourself. This doesn’t mean the position wasn’t important. It means you carried the role, not the other way round. Knowledge, judgement, the ability to lead people — all of that remains. Only the space in which you use it changes.

Watch out for loneliness. People in senior positions are often lonely even while they hold the post, which is the subject of Loneliness at the top. After it ends, that loneliness can deepen. Relationships that don’t depend on the role are now the most precious thing you have.

Talk about it with someone who isn’t part of your world. Former colleagues are often tangled up in the same stories, and family is too close. The therapy room is one of the few places where you don’t have to represent, defend or perform anything. There you can say what you don’t dare say anywhere else — including that you’re afraid that without the position you are nothing. I also work with English-speaking clients, in person in Ljubljana.

Where this story doesn’t apply

I don’t want to give the impression that losing a position is traumatic for everyone. It isn’t.

For some it is a relief. If the position was a source of exhaustion for years, its end can be above all a liberation. Some people sleep through the night for the first time in a long while. That is legitimate too, and it doesn’t mean you are suppressing something.

For some, identity was never fused with the role. People who kept tending their other pillars all along — relationships, their body, interests outside work — often come through the transition without major upheaval. Linville’s findings support this: more pillars, less swinging.

Sometimes it isn’t grief but depression. If for several weeks you feel nothing, can’t sleep, lose your appetite or feel that nothing makes sense any more, it is time to talk to your GP. Losing a position can trigger a depressive episode that also needs medical care. If thoughts come that it would be better if you weren’t here, call the Mental Distress Helpline in Slovenia (01 520 99 00, every day from 7 pm to 7 am) or the Samarijan helpline in Slovenia (116 123, around the clock), and in an emergency 112.

Sometimes the loss was unjust. If a recall was unlawful or a dismissal unfair, therapy is no substitute for legal action. It can help you carry the anger and decide how much energy you want to put into the fight — but it can’t replace a lawyer.

What to remember

• Losing a position isn’t just losing a job, but losing rhythm, people, purpose, status and influence — all at once.
• If you have built your whole identity on one role, its end takes away more ground. More pillars mean less swinging.
• With a sudden loss there was no preparation, so it is normal to need time to walk the doubts and options backwards.
• This is grief, even if the people around you don’t acknowledge it. You are allowed to feel it.
• If sadness turns into lasting apathy, sleeplessness or thoughts of death, seek medical help as well.