When you meet someone new at a party, you may open the conversation with “What do you do?”

There’s a reason for that. This question reflects how deeply a person’s job and career is tied to their daily life and, often, their sense of self. This is one of the reasons why losing a job (or retiring) can have a profound psychological impact. And when that job loss happens unexpectedly, it can be particularly difficult.

In order to recover psychologically from the loss of a job, it’s important to understand what it is about the loss that is affecting you. Then, you can begin to move forward.

Dealing with grief and shame

When you first lose a job, you will be hit with a flood of emotions. Some of those are caused by the grief process. As I discuss in my book, Bring Your Brain to Work, any event that causes a tear in the fabric of your life story will trigger a grieving process. The loss of a job can fit that mold.

You’ve probably heard of the five stages of grief that were originally described by Elisabeth Kubler-Ross. She initially described these stages (Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression, and Acceptance) from people who were struggling with a diagnosis of a terminal illness. These stages are descriptive. A person grieving need not go through all of them, may go through them in any order, and may go back and forth among them.

A key element of grieving is developing a story to help you understand the situation as well as your path forward. Essentially, you are re-weaving the disrupting event back into the tapestry of your life. So, coming to understand the job loss and charting your path forward will help you regulate your emotions.

A complicating factor with job loss is that you may layer shame on top of the typical emotions associated with grief. Shame is an emotion you experience when you experience a bad outcome and believe that it reflects an aspect of yourself that is hard to change. When you lose a job, it’s natural to assume that there is something about you as a person that caused the job loss. You may not want to admit that you lost the job to others, for fear that they will also recognize your limitations.

It’s important to recognize that job loss happens all the time. It is common for people to have more than 10 jobs over the course of their career, and they do not leave all of those jobs because they wanted to. When you let others know you have lost a job, you will find many sympathetic ears out there, and will discover lots of people who have been in a similar position in the past.

Reconnecting with your values

As you chart that path forward, it’s important to take a step back and consider your values. What is important to you? Often, when you start on a career path, you do so, based on what you hope to achieve given the values you have at that time. Your values may shift over the course of your life, and so the path you’re on may no longer fit with your values.

A job loss provides you with a chance to reconsider where you’re headed. (You can assess your core values with an inventory like this one that is based on the research of psychologist Shalom Schwartz.)

Looking carefully at your values provides you with input that may be helpful in thinking about your relationship to your work. Early in your career, you often value achievement, which reflects the desire to be recognized as successful by others. As you move forward, you may recognize that there are other things you care more about. If so, then focusing on the impact you want to make with your work and the rest of your life can play an important role in determining the next step of your career.

Recalculating your work-life balance

Reflecting on your values can help you to reconsider the balance of work and other elements of your life. One reason why losing a job can be so devastating is that you spend a lot of your waking life at work. Even with 40-hour workweek—and an additional hour for commuting and decompressing from work—means that 40% of your awake time each week is spent at work and in work-related activities. For many people, that percentage is even higher if you work a longer workday or spend time on nights and weekends checking email or thinking about work-related problems.

When you suddenly don’t have those looming tasks, you have a chance to reconsider how you are spending your time. Perhaps doing more volunteering and less paid work is a good option. You might want to pick up a hobby (or re-engage with something you used to do). Maybe you want to spend more time with family, friends, or community.

Often, when you lose a job, your first goal is to create some stability by finding something else as quickly as possible. Instead, think through what you are hoping to accomplish with your work life. Perhaps you might choose to allocate your time differently when you are faced with a chance to redesign your life.

Finally, you don’t have to make all of these decisions alone. Not only should you include family and friends in your discussions, but consider working with a therapist or career coach to help you understand yourself and your goals. Sometimes, just saying something out loud is enough to get you to think about it differently. Having someone with training to help you achieve your goals can also add value to your quest to reclaim your identity.