Alice Noles has found a way to help many clients of the Johnson County Children’s Advocacy Center overcome much of the trauma associated with abuse. Noles, a licensed master social worker, engages her clients through a type of therapy called Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing, which helps them to process events.

EMDR involves having a client think about either positive or negative thoughts while focusing on the therapist’s hands. While the client recalls a memory, the therapist either makes passes in front of the client’s eyes or taps on alternating knees. Noles said these passes force the client to use both sides of the brain.

“The muscle movement behind the eye causes the brain to process the client’s thoughts,” Noles said.

She said clients pick what part of the disturbance they want to focus on, and process it while she makes the passes with her hand.

“They don’t even have to talk about their thoughts,” Noles said. “They just have to think about them.”

Noles equates the effect of this thought-processing to the domino effect.

“It’s like dominoes going down,” she said. “When you process back to the original incident, it’s like the whole stack goes down.”

EMDR therapy allows for constant communication between the left and right hemispheres of the brain by way of the corpus callosum, Noles said. She explained that the right side of the brain can process imagery and emotion while the left side processes logical thought.

For one-incident trauma, EMDR can reconcile processing for children in three to four sessions compared with 30 to 35 sessions of play therapy, Noles said.

“Some kids come in after two to three sessions and say, ‘I’m fixed,’ and they never come back,” Noles said.

Tammy King, executive director of the CAC, said Noles brought her a notebook about EMDR, which she read over a weekend.

“After reading about EMDR, I talked to my younger brother, who is in the military and suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder,” King said. “Come to find out, the veteran’s hospital is using EMDR to treat veterans with PTSD when they return from the Middle East.”

King also said EMDR is becoming common at other children’s advocacy centers to treat clients with PTSD.

“For PTSD clients, it has been amazing,” King said. “One girl’s complete transformation really sold me on it.”

Noles said she worked with a clinical social worker in Fort Worth for 15 years and learned how much this type of therapy helped railroad personnel who had witnessed accidents, emergency medical workers and abuse victims.

“I saw the clients’ progress,” Noles said, “and I knew it worked.”

Noles went to level-one EMDR training in September and has since gone to level-two training. Although she still conducts play therapy, Noles said she consistently uses EMDR.

At the CAC, Noles works with abuse victims and secondary victims, such as parents, usually conducting therapy with 20 to 25 clients each week.

A therapist can even teach parents to work with small children by tapping on their shoulders while they are drawing or painting, Noles said.

“I don’t have to interject,” she said. “I just let individuals’ minds take them where they need to go.”

The therapy that Noles conducts is one of many services CAC offers abuse victims and their families. The center videotapes forensic interviews for law enforcement departments and offers parenting classes and resource information for families who contend with abuse. CAC also participates in the Baby Moses Project and the Therapy Dog program.

The Johnson County Children’s Advocacy Center will host its 10th annual Cowboys for Kids Benefit on Friday and Saturday to raise money for programs that assist child abuse victims and their families.

The sold-out Roping the Stars Dinner will be held at 7 p.m. Friday at J.J. and Bobby Norris’ Johnson County ranch. Tickets are available for a children’s stick horse rodeo at 1 p.m. Saturday and the steer saddling, professional bull riding and celebrity team roping at 7 p.m. Saturday. Events Saturday are held at the Sheriff’s Posse Rodeo Grounds on South Main Street in Cleburne.

Tickets can be purchased from the Children’s Advocacy Center, the Johnson County Sheriff’s Office, the Cleburne Chamber of Commerce and Lee’s Western Wear. Adult tickets cost $10. Tickets for children ages 5 to 10 and seniors age 65 and older cost $8. Entry fees for the kids’ stick horse rodeo are $10 and include a stick horse, T-shirt and entry into four events.



Misty Shultz can be reached at 817-645-2441, ext. 2336,

or reporter2@trcle.com.