WAVE Trauma Centre<\/a>, a charity founded in 1991 by women whose partners were murdered during the Troubles. Since then, WAVE has grown into an organization that helps thousands of trauma survivors heal, operating on the principles of safety, trust, collaboration and empowerment, said Paul Gallagher, the director of trauma education at WAVE.<\/p>\nGallagher first came to WAVE as a client, after gunmen entered his West Belfast home in 1994 and shot him six times, leaving him paralyzed. The psychological injuries came later, he said, but he didn\u2019t have the language for his experience.<\/p>\n
It would take years before he had the \u201crealization that what I was experiencing over the years was because of something that happened to me, and not that there was something wrong with me,\u201d he said. That launched him on a journey of wanting to understand trauma \u2014 and sharing that knowledge with others, he said.<\/p>\n
Barr borrowed that multi-pronged approach to trauma education and adopted it at LBCC, a campus that serves \u201cvery vulnerable students,\u201d many of whom have been traumatized, he said.<\/p>\n
Barr wanted to make the classroom a safer place for them. Over his career as an educator, Barr had noticed that sometimes students disappeared from class and guessed it wasn\u2019t the right fit or they\u2019d gotten busy at work, he said. But he realized there might be other reasons students stopped attending: \u201cIt\u2019s very possible that we\u2019re triggering students,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
Now, LBCC staff and faculty are learning how to avoid retraumatizing students as well as how to cope with their own overwhelm, he said. The trainings have been received with enthusiasm and gratitude.<\/p>\n
At the same time, the trauma studies program continues to grow, and students are coming from across the country to enroll, Barr said.<\/p>\n
Henry Soo Hoo is one of them. Soo Hoo spent years working as a banker in New York City and volunteering as a crisis counselor in his spare time when he realized he was tired of feeling disposable in the finance industry and wanted to pivot into a helping profession, he said.<\/p>\n
As he was preparing for a career change and speaking to friends who worked as therapists, \u201cthey all said you have to make sure that you protect yourself\u201d while listening to trauma, Soo Hoo recalled. LBCC\u2019s trauma studies courses were perfect, he said, because they emphasized that he needed to have a \u201cstrong foundation in order to be a strong provider.\u201d<\/p>\n
Yet Barr sees many applications for trauma studies outside of treating patients. \u201cI\u2019m not trying to make people clinicians,\u201d he said. \u201cWhat we want to do is make people aware of how much trauma exists already\u201d and give them the lens to begin to understand it in any career.<\/p>\n
It has become a mission for him, he said, adding that he gets energized when he sees the light go on for other people.<\/p>\n
For Angelina Larosa, that happened when she visited the WAVE Trauma Centre as part of a study abroad program with Barr\u2019s class. There, she was surrounded by people who had experienced \u201ccapital T trauma,\u201d she said, including a man who lost friends during the Troubles and said he had taken to the streets with a gun when he was Larosa\u2019s age.<\/p>\n
Despite the gravity of what she heard, Larosa left the trip with a sense of shared humanity. Trauma \u201caffects them, yes, but it\u2019s a piece of a much bigger puzzle,\u201d she said. \u201cThey\u2019re just people trying to live their lives.\u201d Understanding that can bring everyone closer as a community, she said.<\/p>\n
That\u2019s one of the pillars WAVE\u2019s work is built upon \u2014 and one that LBCC has adopted. \u201cTrauma isolates us,\u201d Gallagher said. \u201cIt\u2019s very hard to recover from trauma by yourself. You need to do it with other people in a community setting, in a social setting, and that\u2019s the beauty of this type of work.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"In the year and a half since Long Beach City College began offering courses in trauma studies, enrollment…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":485567,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[33],"tags":[131,133,132],"class_list":["post-485566","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-long-beach","tag-long-beach","tag-long-beach-headlines","tag-long-beach-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/485566","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=485566"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/485566\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/485567"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=485566"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=485566"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=485566"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/10\/tuesday-sept-292026-cafe-08-836651-kkxjayzm-350239-k0IuSEHS-1024x589.jpg\")
Professor Kyran Barr leads the trauma studies program at Long Beach City College. Photo by Thomas R. Cordova.<\/p>\n