Healing from Trauma: Why Your Life Is Not wasted and You Are Entering Your “Second Prime”

I remember the ah-ha moment very clearly. I was at the gym, working out. I told my friend that I don’t think I’ve ever been this strong, not even in my 20’s. And my friend jokingly told me that I’m in my second prime.

That really stuck with me. And I think about this interaction very often.

For a lot of my therapy clients, they feel like they have lost so much time to trauma. They feel sad and resentful of the time and experiences they have lost. And they feel angry for the pains of trauma they had endured.

And you know what? All these feelings are legit. It does suck.

The truth is, healing from trauma often involves a grieving process. If you’ve experienced some of this, you’re totally not alone.

So how do we take care of the part of ourselves that is grieving for lost time and lost experiences?

1. Giving Ourselves Permission to Grieve

First, validate this part of you. Don’t ignore those feelings of sadness or resentment. Let yourself acknowledge, “This is painful, and it’s okay to grieve what I missed out on.” Give yourself permission to feel what you feel.

When you do this, you are showing compassion and understanding to yourself. Often times, part of our trauma is due to the lack of compassion and understanding from the people around us. Instead of judging ourselves for how we feel, we want to re-parent ourselves with compassion and understanding. This moves onto our next point.

2. Helping the Inner Child Heal

The compassion and understanding we give ourselves is part of the process of healing our Inner child. To take it further, we can offer it symbolic gestures of care, to show our Inner Child that they matter.

To do this, check-in with your Inner Child, and ask them what they really want at this particular moment. Some examples include:

• Getting cake for your Inner Child because they really want it.

• Buying a small, inexpensive gift for yourself. This can be as small as an anime sticker or a small ornament for your home.

• Creating intentional time to engage in activities that bring you joy. This might be art, sports, watching shows, reading time, naps, blanket fort, building snowman, decorating your home with monthly themes, etc.

When you do these things, it is important to mentally set your intention. You are doing it to care for your Inner Child, and allowing them to safely enjoy the moment. By doing this, we communicate to our Inner Child that what they want matters.

By doing this regularly, we are practicing our agency on creating the experiences that we want in our life. This sense of agency can counteract the sadness and resentment of missing out on things in our past. This creates feelings of empowerment, which heal us heal from the traumas of powerlessness. It also helps us focus on the present, and focus our energy on creating intentional experiences for ourselves.

3. Embracing Your Second Prime

Honestly, I don’t think my second prime will ever end. I feel that I never stop learning about myself, because I am constantly changing and shifting as a person. And as such, I am constantly getting better at being myself.

Part of healing from trauma is gaining intimate knowledge of ourselves. We build the skill of radical honesty. And through this, we truly embrace and pursue the life that we want.

Of course, we’ll have setbacks. Situations may come up where we get triggered, or get stuck with certain emotions. But our skill of radical honesty, and our abilities to be self-aware, will always be with us. And our abilities to constantly learn more about ourselves and pivot in our life and decision-making is what defines my “prime" – the project of continuously getting better at being myself.

Continue Exploring How Childhood Experiences Shape Your Healing Journey

Many people who are healing from trauma carry a deep grief for the parts of themselves that were never fully seen, understood, or supported. Sometimes, what we are grieving is not just what happened to us, but what we never received: emotional validation, safety, encouragement, and the freedom to simply be ourselves.

If you want to explore how these early experiences shaped your relationship with yourself, my guide on Signs You Grew Up With Emotional Neglect (Even if Nothing Traumatic Happened), explores how emotional neglect can impact your self worth, relationships, and ability to care for yourself as an adult.

Healing does not mean pretending the past did not happen. It means learning to provide ourselves with the care, compassion, and understanding that we needed all along.

Your second prime starts when you decide it starts. And it only ends when you decide it ends.

Hi, I’m Harry, a psychotherapist in Toronto. I work with 1.5 and second generation Asian Canadians navigating trauma, identity, and the emotional patterns shaped by family and culture.

If you recognized yourself in this article, I created a free guide called The Invisible Pressure to Be the “Good One” to help you understand why you overthink, people please, and feel responsible for everyone else, and why these patterns have been so difficult to change.