Healing the Wounds: Overcoming the Trauma of Layoffs and Revitalizing Downsized Organizations

5.2. Insecurity, Anxiety, and Fear

The symptoms of insecurity, anxiety, and fear also continued. There was an attempt to understand and accommodate a state of permanent job insecurity, but it was not always successful:

• "One thing none of us have come up with is a model of how to behave in a situation like this. We grew up with [the] model that our parents worked hard and they didn't have as much as we do, but it seemed, in the eyes of a child, [to have] more safety in it. Now we're adults; we're fifty years old, and we don't have an example in our life to follow as to what to do when you're fifty and the rug is totally pulled out from under you. It's a little more difficult at a mature stage to go back and act like a teenager and say, 'Oh boy, ...