Vocational Grief
When it hurts to be good at your job
How many of us have had the axiom “Love what you do, and you’ll never work a day in your life” thrust upon us by a well-meaning but wildly unhelpful friend or boss? This idea that investing deeply in your career—the education, the credentialization, your invisible labor and work outside “business hours” (whatever those are in our world of immediate demands and instant gratification)—will lead to deep contentment and happiness.
And wouldn’t that be great? Your job is an enormous part of your everyday. Your friend groups, the ability to take part in and enjoy life, not to mention your sense of purpose and direction, are often direct products of the work you do.
So what happens when it feels as if that job is swallowing you whole?
What Is It?
The idea of vocational grief, of the emotional burdens carried as a byproduct of doing your job, is often associated with service roles that demand heavy investment in doing for others, such as:
Educators
Healthcare workers, particularly frontline staff
Community organizers
Nonprofit workers
Spiritual or faith community leaders
For example, educators are tasked with so much more than caring for the intellectual development of their students, but doing so has become that much more difficult on the other side of the pandemic. Documented behavioral changes, shaped by remote learning and increased screen time, are exacerbated by the over 1.5 million students who cannot afford to eat at school. Kids are indebted before they are in first grade. How many times has a teacher slipped an extra bag of food into a student’s backpack on a Friday afternoon? Or bent over backwards for the person disadvantaged by social/political/economic systems? Simply put, the demand on teachers and schools to grapple with student well-being continues to compound at an alarming rate.
Concerns over the mental health and fitness of frontline medical staff persist: nurses and physicians both contemplate and complete suicide at higher rates than the general population. A 2022 study revealed a 25% uptick in nurses seeking a career change, citing pandemic burnout and the perpetual demands of an overtaxed system. At what point can a nurse no longer quickly bounce back from the traumatic death in one room to be fully present with a fresh patient minutes later?
Entire industries tasked with caring for others are increasingly populated with “distant mourners”, those who have heavily invested in others but are rarely given space to grieve for those they have tried to help.
I would argue that this definition of vocational grief is good, but incomplete, because the price of working well goes beyond the above roles.
Vocational grief shows up in the executive whose work provides a great life for their family, though the demands of the job leave them unable to spend time with those very people who matter most. Other forms of vocational grief include:
The parent who returns to work after the birth of a child
The dreams you had and the compromises you made
The unmet expectations of the job or role
Shifting relationship dynamics, which may include breakups or divorce
The time you lost doing something you never genuinely enjoyed
Vocational grief shows up in two primary ways. It’s in the emotional weight you carry because of the care and compassion you have given your position and the people you serve. Likewise, it emerges in the realization that you cannot continue doing this any longer. Something has to change.
What Does It Look Like?
The reality is many of us never give the emotions associated with vocational grief a chance to breathe. It’s easier to ignore what is going on inside us, to put our head down and keep working until the job is done. We expend increasing amounts of energy caring for everyone else until we burn out, giving ourselves over to the anger and frustration of not getting the support we desperately need.
We try to self-soothe, we try to take care of ourselves, but how often is self-care ignored until some crisis pops up? In that way, self-care becomes part of our emotional triage, meant to stem the flow of whatever is happening, but never addressing or fixing what it is that wounded us in the first place. “Grinding it out” is not a sustainable practice.
We try to convince others (and ourselves) that we are handling things well, but our handling of it begins and ends with ignoring or compartmentalizing those feelings.
Even worse, sometimes vocational grief culminates in outbursts and actions that hurt both you and others. When these feelings surface, they show up in:
Our increased unwillingness to spend time with others, choosing to isolate ourselves
The unannounced feelings of frustration and anger occurring more regularly
That increased longing or yearning for something else or something more
Feelings of inner turmoil and emptiness, as you have given yourself to a job or company whose concern does not extend beyond your productivity
Moments of panic or increased anxiety
What Do I Do?
You have three options:
1. Ignore it.
2. Compartmentalize it and try to shove it down deep.
3. Acknowledge it, confront it, and conquer it.
You are not going to reason your way out of vocational grief. Rather than piling on distractions, give it space to breathe. I cannot tell you the number of times I’ve sat with a client as their tears flow, and they keep saying, “I don’t know where all of this is coming from?!?”
There is such delight when I see a client recognize the freedom and joy that comes when they finally begin paying attention to their own needs and experiences.
Vocational grief asks the one thing so many of us high-achievers dread: it asks us to stop.
The anger tells you about your boundaries and what is important. The exhaustion asks you to recognize that your willingness to ignore what is inconvenient and numb what hurts will cut you off from the life and joy that await you on the other side of what brought you here.
If you’re numbing yourself to pain, you’re numbing yourself to joy as well.
Confronting vocational grief looks like this:
Pause to acknowledge and process what this is.
Protect what’s important to you.
Perform in ways that reinforce, and do not rob, your sense of self.
Achievement and success are not calls to martyrdom. Give yourself a chance at the life you want. You’re worth the effort.