Beyond Self-Blame: Destigmatizing Unemployment

As a career-development specialist in the Boston area, I watch my clients translate who they are into what they do and then experience the satisfaction of meaningful employment. The process can be deeply fulfilling for both the job seeker and the career counselor. But I have recently come to realize that this work can also be damaging: I see now that for years I unknowingly perpetuated self-blame among those who, despite their best efforts, remain unemployed or underemployed.

Ofer Sharone’s book Flawed System/Flawed Self: Job Searching and Unemployment Experiences gave me a new framework for understanding the damaging effects of a fundamental premise behind most job search assistance: the idea that unemployment is the result of remediable failings in an individual’s job search strategy, rather than a systemic failure created by the structure of our economic system.

Sharone’s book helped me realize that I have been repeating the messages that keep job seekers in a position of isolation and distress. How often have I focused primarily on an individual’s “fit” for a job, minimizing the role that broader economic forces play in keeping many people unemployed for the long term? Using Sharone’s book as a guide, I have come to understand more clearly how the individual and the system are intimately connected, and I can work to interrupt the troubling patterns of self-blame I have been supporting in my role as a helping professional.

The Emotional Toll of Unemployment

Individuals who once thought that a college education, a solid record of work experience, and a positive work attitude would ensure economic security are finding this is no longer true. Those with limited educations or spotty work histories, meanwhile, are having an even harder time supporting themselves. Many hardworking individuals are struggling to support themselves and retire with any semblance of financial security.

While statistics indicate that the economy is improving, the long-term unemployed continue to experience the effects of being out of work for longer periods of time — effects that take a very serious toll on their emotional and physical health.

At first being out of work may feel like an opportunity, a time to take a break or explore new paths. But after about six months of constant rejection, with no positive responses from potential employers, individuals start to take it personally. They ask, “What is wrong with me that I am not getting a job?”

Sharone explores this move toward self-blame with a critical eye, showing how the career-management industry’s focus on improving individual job seekers’ strategies contributes to this problem of self-blame. He describes how the career industry conveys the idea that if only you rework your resume one more time, say this specific phrase with this tone in your interview, mention this when you follow up, and network, network, network, you will fix your problem. This mentality leads job seekers to see their individual efforts as the only problem, rather than blaming the economic system.

When caught in the grip of self-blame, job seekers can feel so isolated and incapacitated that they fail to reach out to their communities of support. Our best solutions come to us when we are fully connected. At those times, we realize our whole selves, innovate, express our best creative ideas, and discover our vocational intentions. Self-blame shuts out this vital sense of connection and possibility.

The Trap of Self-Blame

How can a job seeker feel anything other than self-blame if they do not get a job?

Sharone describes how “the same discourses and practices that produced the initial sense of control . . . lead job seekers to blame themselves for their difficulties and make it hard to continue searching.”

In the United States, he writes, white-collar workers who are struggling with long-term unemployment contend with a chemistry game, or a “game of fit.” He compares this system to the very different system that exists in Israel, where white-collar workers contend with a “specs game” (or...