It’s Not Personal, or Is It? Redundancies, Attachment Styles, and the Workplace
Ryan Campinho Valadas is a specialist psychotherapist, educator, and public speaker working in the areas of relational health, sexuality, identity, and organisational culture. He is based in the UK and works with a diverse range of individuals, community groups, and organisations.
Redundancy can feel deeply personal, bringing grief, uncertainty, and a sense of betrayal. By exploring attachment and workplace relationships, this article examines why job loss affects us so profoundly and how we can begin to move forward.
Betrayal at the office
Towards the end of 2021, I found myself supporting an organisation through its restructure and redundancy process for the first time by providing psychologically informative workshops and talks, as well as individual therapy.
It was during one of those workshops that I heard someone say for the first time that they felt betrayed by their employer. I remember feeling stunned by the strength and intensity of the feeling being expressed, and the impact it was having on this person. Many of their colleagues agreed, and I realised then that redundancies can be extremely destabilising events in someone’s life. I’ve never forgotten that moment in all my years supporting companies and employees in similar circumstances. But like many things in life, it all felt somewhat theoretical, because it wasn’t happening to me, and in fact, I fully believed that it wouldn’t happen to me.
And so, in 2025, when I was made redundant from a job role that I created in a company that I helped build, I knew exactly how that feeling of betrayal felt. After some negotiations, I kept my role in a different capacity, only to be made redundant again a few months later. The feeling of betrayal was pronounced and absolute. I couldn’t believe it. It activated some of my worst fears and shame, and left me in a state of shock and helplessness.
The last few months have been marked by important reflections on my personal and professional lives, and I couldn’t help but think about attachment and relationships when considering the impact of my redundancies, and when expanding my understanding of the impact on all of those individuals I supported through redundancies in the last few years.
In the beginning, unrememberable and unforgettable
The influence and depth of our early experiences are so profound that neuroscientist Doug Watt describes the early years as “unrememberable and unforgettable” (as cited in Gerhardt, 2015). We can’t remember what happened in a conscious capacity, but our bodies and brains do, and this dictates many of our emotional responses to people and life, as well as our behaviours.
In fact, much of the work that therapists undertake is in seeking and gaining clarity about the potential reasons that drive our lives. It may be a cliché, but explorations about how we relate to our parents revolve around a type of emotional archaeology of a person’s life: which events led to what behaviours, which words led to what beliefs, which relationships created what patterns.
Who we are is deeply connected to how we relate, communicate, cooperate, and regulate with others and the world around us. It’s why, no matter what the popular workplace trend may be, “bring your full self to work”, “join a work family” or “leave the personal outside the office”, the relational is always there. It’s there when feedback from a manager feels daunting or hurtful; when we may feel anxieties around having lunch in front of our colleagues; when we avoid saying what we are really feeling and send a passive-aggressive email instead; when we are made redundant and feel betrayed by our managers and excluded by our colleagues.
Attachment patterns
Attachment theory proposes that our early relationships with our caregivers greatly influence our internalised views on self, others, and the world, and that some of these patterns, values, and core beliefs follow us into adulthood. They are the difference between being cooperative or distrustful with colleagues, managers, and organisations. They determine how we manage impulses, emotions, and responses to workplace dynamics.
Attachment styles develop through experiences and interactions in those early years that we don’t remember, and can also be influenced and shaped all the way through adolescence, and even beyond. They can be defined as secure or insecure, the latter with the additional subcategories of avoidant, anxious, and disorganised. They are not fixed, however, and they can evolve over our lifetimes. We can also have secure attachments to some people and places, and insecure attachments with others.
Our specific attachment styles and how they show up at work can influence whether we experience an unexpected change in work circumstances as challenging or catastrophic, and whether we experience relationships with colleagues as comfortable or anxiety-inducing. It is ultimately the difference between having an inner confidence and certainty that you can work your way through a challenge, or not.
Securely attached individuals typically develop better emotion regulation, sense of self, social skills and mental health, which may translate into supportive, cooperative, resilient behaviour at work. Insecure attachment histories (anxious, avoidant, disorganised) are linked to hypervigilance for threat or rejection, difficulties trusting others, and problems with closeness and boundaries.
The workplace as a parental dynamic: Identity, grief, and moving on
In Organisational Attachment Theory, employees project needs and expect them to be met by the workplace, in the same way that children need and expect their parents or caregivers to provide safety, predictability, and validation. I find this a helpful framework for understanding many of the complicated feelings I experienced and for helping others navigate them.
When an organisation then initiates a restructuring process and makes roles redundant, this is not experienced by employees from a business perspective. It is experienced as an attachment and relational rupture, sometimes in very profound ways, triggering deep relational grief, identity collapse, and an overwhelming feeling of systemic betrayal. It is during this process that the psychological and emotional contract we have with work can shatter as we realise that work never really “cared” about us, because its relationship with us was predicated on specific transactional conditions. Furthermore, due to traditional and legally minded HR procedures, employees may often feel harmed by the cold and indifferent way in which they are spoken to and by losing access to the work and systems that were part of their daily life.
The crisis that can be triggered by this kind of event relates to the deeply intertwined dynamics between our personal and professional selves. Because we spent so much time at work, and have spent so much additional time working towards the different careers that we all have, and have built so many interpersonal relationships along the way, it is inevitable that there will be some confusion as to when one part of us ends and another begins. Without our job, who are we? When something gets taken away from us by a superior force, what kind of response gets activated? For some, this question presents exciting opportunities to look beyond what they’ve known or imagined, but for others, this sometimes constitutes a complete collapse of the Self. How do we move on, when we don’t know what’s next or feel paralysed by the change? How do we process this sense of loss, not just of the job or role, but the identity attached to it? The company, people, and systems are still there, but we’re no longer part of it. This kind of ambiguity can be confusing, destabilising, and can trigger our worst attachment wounds.
Importantly, this life event can have very serious consequences for people whose financial stability is precarious, for people who have experienced trauma which is connected to relational and emotional ruptures like the ones in a redundancy, and for people of different marginalised social groups who may already have experiences of distrust, hypervigilance, and anxiety towards systemic discrimination or harm. It may not be a personal process for businesses, but it is deeply personal for the people who experience it.
The case for discernment
It is notoriously difficult to acknowledge different truths at once when we are overwhelmed, or feeling threatened by a sudden change in our daily stability and routine. In the event of a redundancy, we might be thinking about practical solutions such as finding a new job, determining if we need to make any budget adjustments in the short term, whilst experiencing intense emotional confusion and anxiety. It is often not a time when we can exercise discernment without great focus and intention.
However, one of the reasons why so many people find themselves in this situation is because a real, harsh truth is that businesses are businesses. They are not part of the so-called village that is required to raise a child, even though we probably confuse them quite often with that. Work is not there to always provide emotional comfort and meet our personal needs, because that’s not its function. We hope we can rely on work to not aggravate or create emotional distress, but surely, expecting work to resolve our emotional experiences might need some rethinking?
It’s important to consider the roles, responsibilities, and limitations of the workplace in attending to our personhood. Perhaps how we counteract some of our attachment style traits at work is by focusing on our professional development of skills in certain areas: managing difficult conversations, giving and receiving feedback, managing and maintaining boundaries, resolving conflict, and developing better, clearer communication styles and frameworks.
Then we can take what remains and feels more personal to more trusted relationships and spaces of personal development, such as self-study and reflection, reaching out to loved ones and practising vulnerability with them, going to therapy and healing attachment wounds through a consistent and boundaried relationship, and attending workshops and talks with topics that resonate with the areas of life we want to explore.
Growing up and developing discernment mean accepting what life is presenting to you, rather than fighting or resisting it. It’s not about what should have been, but about what is and what can be done about that in each moment. It’s understanding that we have different needs and that they require different people, places, and contexts in order to be met.
There is no shortcut through the grief and rupture of a redundancy. What we might need in these shattering life moments is something of a quieter and more demanding nature than what we want in a fast-paced culture or when there are very real life decisions which require imminent attention. It’s not about a LinkedIn post filled with platitudes about new chapters or lessons learned, or performing some kind of resilience to the world. What is often required is the willingness to sit with uncertainty long enough for something new and genuine to emerge from it. This takes an undefined amount of time. Ultimately, for many people who have come through it, this is the beginning of understanding something about themselves that the security of the role has quietly diminished or hidden away.
Read more from Ryan Campinho Valadas
Ryan Campinho Valadas, Therapist, Educator & Trainer
Ryan Campinho Valadas is a specialist psychotherapist, educator, and organisational trainer based in the UK. With 10 years of experience in psychotherapy and almost 20 years in public speaking, community organizing, and advocacy, he is interested in how social, cultural, and global dynamics influence our daily lives. Ryan specialises in psychosexual and relationship therapy, LGBTQ+ wellbeing, male mental health, and relational health in organisations. The main intention is to help people build stronger connections to their identities, desires, relationships, and life journeys.
References:
Gerhardt, S. (2015). Why love matters: How affection shapes a baby's brain (2nd ed.). Routledge.
Harms, P. D. (2011). Adult attachment styles in the workplace. Human Resource Management Review, 21(4), 285-296.
Hazan, C., & Shaver, P. R. (1990). Love and work: An attachment-theoretical perspective. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 59(2), 270-280.
Rousseau, D. M. (1995). Psychological contracts in organizations: Understanding written and unwritten agreements. SAGE Publications.
Yip, J., Ehrhardt, K., Black, H., & Walker, D. O. (2018). Attachment theory at work: A review and directions for future research. Journal of Organizational Behavior, 39(2), 185-198.
