When I transitioned from a decade-long engineering career and moved into product, I chose to go. And it was still one of the hardest things I'd navigated.
I can only imagine - and I've since witnessed in the people I work with - how much harder it is when the choice is made for you. When a restructure arrives without warning, or a role you'd built your life around is eliminated, or a company you gave everything to decides you're no longer part of the picture.
The professional world doesn't have a script for this kind of loss. We casually talk about 'career transitions', 'exploring new opportunities' and ‘roles being made redundant’. This language skips entirely over the grief of what's actually happening. And because we have no script, many professionals white-knuckle through it, updating their LinkedIn status while quietly dismantling inside.
Why Career Loss Is a Form of Grief
For many high-performers, professional identity isn't separate from personal identity - it's fused with it. And why shouldn’t it? After all, you spend most of your waking hours doing the job. Your role is your routine, your social world, your sense of purpose and contribution. When it's removed, the grief is real and layered through not only loss of income, but also loss of status, structure, community, and a story you'd been telling yourself about who you were.
Grief researchers, including Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, describe loss as non-linear - cycling through shock, anger, bargaining, sadness, and eventual integration.
What art therapy offers this process is something unique- a non-verbal container for experiences that are too large and too complex to simply think through.
When you can't find the words, especially while going through high stake transitions, making something gives the experience somewhere to go. You don't need to understand what you're creating. You just need to create.
Finding Yourself Again Through the Creative Process
What I've observed, in myself and in the people I've worked with through transitions, is that the creative process doesn't just processes loss - it actively reveals what's still there to be processed.
Professionals I've worked with during massive transitions have described the experience, in retrospect, as a difficult doorway into a more authentic version of their working lives. Not because the loss wasn't real, but because the creative process gave them the space to grieve it fully and then ask clearly - what do I actually want now?
A Gentle Practice
Take a piece of paper and draw two images –
One that represents who you were in that role, and
One that represents what you're moving toward.
Don't force the second one. Let it be unclear, partial, unfinished.
That's honest. That's where you are.
At Venus Art Bench, I work with individuals navigating the emotional landscape of career change, redundancy and identity rebuilding. My one-on-one sessions offer a safe space to process, reflect and begin to reconstitute with gentleness, awareness and self-identification, leading to clarity & true confidence going forward.
If you're in the middle of this, know that the ground beneath you is more solid than it feels right now.
And that rebuilding is possible - creatively, and on your own terms.