The language of redundancy
There is a phrase I have never been comfortable using. People often say, “I was made redundant.” I understand why it is said that way, but it has never sat well with me. When I hear it, it sounds as though the person themselves has somehow been reduced or discarded.
When my job ended in 2015, I chose different words. My role was made redundant.
That distinction mattered to me because a role can end and a position can disappear, but a person is always more than the role they occupy.
Even so, the ending carried weight. I had been connected with the organisation in different forms for almost thirty years, holding several roles during that time and completing four master’s degrees while working. Over time, the routines, colleagues and responsibilities had become part of the structure of everyday life, so when that chapter ended, it marked the closing of something long and familiar.
Redundancy as a life transition
In some ways, the story begins much earlier.
My husband died in 1996, and experiencing grief so personally changed the way I understood loss and how difficult it can be to navigate. At the time, I was working as a court registrar in the coronial jurisdiction, a role I had held while caring for my husband during his illness and continued in after he died. He had also been a court registrar.
Working in a place where people were confronting death and loss every day while also coming to terms with my own grief was not something I had ever imagined would be part of my life. Alongside that work, I was studying psychology, and in the year after my husband died, the idea of becoming a therapist first appeared. It was not a plan then, but more a quiet possibility that surfaced while I was still trying to make sense of what had happened.
Life continued in its practical ways. I remained within the organisation for many years, eventually moving into other corporate roles. The thought of working as a therapist stayed somewhere in the background while work and study continued to unfold.
The day the role ended
When I learned that my role had been made redundant, I remember asking my husband to tell our boys before I arrived home. I didn’t want them to hear the news for the first time from me walking in the door.
That evening, I was also due to attend the inaugural Loss and Grief Practitioners’ Association event in Melbourne, so the day my role ended also happened to be the night of a professional gathering focused on loss and grief.
When I got home, my youngest son had made a card for me. It was a small, thoughtful gesture from a child who simply wanted to comfort his mother, and that moment has stayed with me ever since.
Redundancy and identity
When a role ends through redundancy, it can become a significant life transition that challenges identity. In time, I realised that the redundancy was not only about a job ending. It was also about the identity that I had held for many years.
For many years, my professional life had been shaped by the organisation where I worked. When the role disappeared, I had to ask myself who I was outside that structure.
Around that time, I often thought about the song I Am… I Said by Neil Diamond. The song reflects on the challenge of defining who we are when the places and roles that once anchored us begin to shift. That sense of being between identities is something many people experience during major life transitions.
Finding a different place
The idea of becoming a therapist that first appeared in 1997 slowly became more real over time. Eventually, I trained and became a counsellor, later a thanatologist, and eventually a psychotherapist.
With distance, I can see that the redundancy which once felt like a loss also created space. It allowed me to move more fully into work that had been quietly emerging for many years.
The film Up in the Air explores what happens when work and identity become closely intertwined and then suddenly change. Moments like these can reveal that the roles we hold do not define the entirety of who we are.
A different way of seeing
Not long ago, I came across a tree growing on difficult ground. Its roots spread across the earth in unexpected directions, exposed and gripping into the soil beneath it, yet the tree itself stood steady and strong.
At first glance, it might appear as though the tree is stuck. In reality, it has simply adapted to the conditions around it and found a way to grow.
For a long time, I thought about my own experience in similar terms. When my role ended, it felt as though something stable had been taken away and that I was being pushed into a change I had not chosen.
What I eventually realised was something different. The tree was rooted. I was not stuck.
Sometimes what feels like stuckness is simply the moment before something begins to shift. In Gestalt therapy, there is an understanding that change often begins when we recognise where we truly are and allow the next step to emerge from there.
Honour your loss. Rebuild your life. Find your place.
Experiences like redundancy can create the same emotional uncertainty people feel during other life transitions. Redundancy often forces people into a period of re-evaluation where identity, work and purpose are renegotiated.
Life transitions rarely unfold in neat stages. Loss, uncertainty and new possibilities often sit alongside each other for a time.
In my own life, grief, work, study and change were woven together over many years, gradually shaping the direction of the work I do today.
The end of a role is not always simply an ending. At times, it becomes part of the longer process of finding a different place.
It can help to have someone walk alongside you while you navigate the space between what was and what comes next.
Experiences like this are one of the reasons I am drawn to working with people who find themselves in the midst of life transitions.
