Work or Professional Distress
Facing stressful events due to work or profession
Work-related distress can involve feelings of:
- Lack of work-life balance
- Impact of physical, mental, and emotional health
- Experiences of burnout (lack of motivation, negative feelings about work that one may have enjoyed in the past)
- Experiences of isolation and feelings of withdrawal
- Decline in work performance
- Reliance on coping mechanisms for a prolonged period of time
Work or Professional Trauma
Facing traumatic events due work or profession
Workplace or professional trauma can bring up a variety of emotional and cognitive impacts. Some of these impacts may look like:
- Anxiety due to worry or fear
- Depression due to loss of enjoyment and fulfillment
- There may an emergence of symptoms like distressing dreams, fatigue, withdrawal, body pains, and flashbacks
- May notice a change in mood when there is work/professional contact
- Impacts on ability to focus, perform, or comprehend work related tasks
- Nervous system activation (fight/flight/freeze) becomes more sensitive
- Distress in workplace relationships (especially if the source of the trauma lies in these relationships)
Grief at Work
Facing grief while working
Grief at work can occur in various ways which include death in the individual's personal life (having to return to work during personal grief), death of a colleague, or loss work/something at work that brought meaning for an individual. Some of the impacts of grief at work can look like:
- Grieving a personal loss at the workplace where there are not spaces one can express their grief as it shows up
- Grieving the death of a colleague, but not having the space of work culture to hold space for grief as the individual needs
- Having grief responses (like difficulty with focus/memory, sudden grief bursts, social withdrawal, fatigue and many others) at work and not knowing how to manage them
- Changes in mood impacting work performance
- Becoming hyper-focused in work to avoid the grief intensity or other colleagues so as to not be activated into a grief response
- Having difficulty making decisions related to work
Professional Growth and Leadership
Seeking personal and professional growth
There may be times when one has come across a non-death loss in their professional life which can be quite challenging to process. It can create confusion and an unclear vision of where one sees their professional life going. In a counselling/therapy session a client can process the loss of what they had hoped for from their profession and develop ways to find a new sense of meaning and purpose as their professional goals change and evolve with time.
