Part 2: Your Husband Just Lost His Job: How to Respond

Tip #3: If He Needs It, Give Him Time And Space To Process The Shock 

If you are a verbal processor (which the majority of women are), and if your husband is an internal processor (which the majority of men are), there might be a clash. You may need to talk. Badly. You may have a million questions about what happened. What are you feeling? Have you talked to anyone else who got laid off? How are we going to pay our bills? Should I do more with my side hustle to bring in cash? Why aren’t you talking to me?! 

But if your man is like most, his brain needs to process through his thoughts, feelings, ideas, and fears before he can even hope to talk about it. And the more sudden the layoff, the more difficult it may be to process. Was there any inkling that it was coming? Did he have a chance to say goodbye to his co-workers? If he was totally blindsided, he had no opportunity to mentally prepare. 

Give him a chance to process what’s happened. Whether your man wants to spend some quality time with his fishing pole in tranquil waters, play pickup basketball with his buddies, or sit staring at the TV—accommodate that for a while. Even if it is making you crazy to wait.

Here’s the advice of one man who has been through an emotional “failure” situation in business:

“I think a lot of guys don’t even know what they are thinking or feeling in a situation like that. That sense of failure goes so deep it takes over his ability to even think for a while. And once his brain starts up again, he may need to go into his cave to think and process. So he needs to know his wife is there for him. 

Ideally, he would probably like to just go off in a corner and work through it by himself, make a plan, and come out with it all figured out. But he has to know that his wife needs something, too. That she’s hurting, too. So early on, she might say something like, ‘I know this must be such a blow. I want you to know, I’m in your corner. I believe in you. If you want to talk about it, I’m here. If you need time to yourself to figure things out, I’m okay with that too. But just so you know, for me, at some point, I need to talk about it with you. Because I love you, and the only way I can fully process it is with you. I need you.’”