Part 3: Your Husband Just Lost His Job: How to Respond

Tip #5: Comfort Him As He Grieves The Loss—Which May Take Time

If you’ve ever lost a dearly loved one unexpectedly, you may know the feeling that you have lost time as well as a person. Where did those two months go? I thought to myself a few months after my father passed away. It wasn’t that I was sitting on the couch so deep in grief that I could do nothing—but I certainly wasn’t as effective as normal at accomplishing things either.

A similar time warp exists when your man loses a job. And in this case, because of the emotional “confirmation” (in his mind) that he is indeed a failure, it can be paralyzing. In research interviews for our books, many hundreds of women told me examples of a husband who initially seemed okay on the heels of a job loss . . . but who grew more and more lethargic as he tried over and over again to get another one.

In other words: from the point when he loses his job to when he secures another one, a man is emotionally feeling the pain of failure over and over again. He is essentially feeling new grief with every rejection, every time he hears “They decided to go a different direction”—or when he simply doesn’t hear anything at all. At some point, it may become so excruciating that he prefers not to try. To stay numb.

One of the few things that will help to pull a man out of that excruciating sense of failure is the overt sense that his wife believes in him. Bottom line: this is not the time for bracing words like, “What are you doing moping around? You won’t find a job from in front of the television! Get out there!” This is a time for stating in many ways that you are in his corner. We may think that the “get out there!” words will stir a man to action . . . but in most cases, they don’t help, because they don’t address the underlying problem: that he no longer believes in his ability to accomplish what he has set out to do.

So what is one key thing that does affirm his ability to accomplish things? Well . . .