To most people, your job is your life or a very significant part of your life.  Survey after survey supports that view.  Common sense tells us it must be true.  We see that in the case of Shirley Sherrod.  Fired for no good reason as part of  a huge misunderstanding.  Her employer, the US Department of Agriculture, offered a different job doing something that would appeal to her.  Today, she turned them down.  See CBS news report.  She said she could not go back "with all that has happened."  

When that trust is gone, it is hard to put it back together.  i hear from clients all the time that they do not want to go back to their employer.  Usually, they mean no way will they go back so long as "so-and-so" is still working there.  When a person is fired, they see their employer in a new light.  At first, they cannot believe "it" happened.  Some find later that they are relieved to be away from a terrible place to work.  Many more miss their former place and the relationships they used to have.  

Bobby Bowden, former coach of Florida State, knows this.  In his new book, he tells how someone to whom he had ben close essentially fired him.  "I doubt I’ll have a relationship" with him any longer, he said.  See report.  Coach Bowden and TK Wetherell had been friends for decades.  A termination for the wrong reasons can change all that.