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

8.1. The Burden of a Heavy Bag

Gunnysacking is a term for storing up hurt feelings, anger, affronts, and unresolved conflicts. Organizations are filled with employees carrying some pretty heavy rocks in their bags (Figure 8.1). It is hard for employees weighed down with the burden of these bags to muster up the energy, creativity, and commitment necessary to help organizations rebound. When the weight of the psychological gunnysack becomes too heavy to bear, as inevitably it must, survivors create even more problems for themselves and others by unloading it, usually to an inappropriate degree in an inappropriate context, and in response to what is often seen by others as a trivial issue.

Figure 8.1. The Survivor Burden

We all gunnysack to ...