Guiding others to wellness

When New Bern resident Dan McDaniel fell 16 feet from a telephone pole, breaking both of his arms, an elbow, wrist and his shoulder, he used self-hypnosis techniques to help heal his own injuries.

The 63-year-old now uses other mental methods to help others overcome addictions and phobias, lose weight and quit smoking. McDaniel, a certified hypnotherapist, opened a practice last week at 245 Craven St. in New Bern.

“That’s when I decided it was time — I started communicating better with my unconscious mind because I couldn’t afford any more of these tragedies in my life,” McDaniel said, recalling the incident from inside his office, which he rents from the High Tide Creative advertising company. “I thought that it was time for a change in my life.”

But McDaniel said the 16-foot fall was not the first time he used his mind to aid his own recovery. His story started in 2001 when he purchased a motorcycle, lost control of it while driving it home to transfer the title into his name, and used self-hypnosis to help with the pain from his injuries.

“By the time I got the bike under control, I was hanging out in the air in the median, and the bike went tumbling, and I went tumbling,” McDaniel said.

After the wreck, he had to wait several weeks to have surgery for a crushed ball in his left shoulder. But he didn’t want to take pain medication because of his fears of becoming groggy and losing focus at his job managing a call center in Jacksonville.

“Very quickly, I learned how to do self-hypnosis to disassociate myself from the pain,” he said.

McDaniel said he had learned some techniques, such as power napping, in the U.S. Navy during the Vietnam War. He said he also did some of his own research to learn about hypnosis.

He changed jobs, and then in 2006, McDaniel fell from the telephone pole soon after starting work as a technician for Sprint. After the incident, he said he made it his job to get well.

He spent hours visualizing characters from the children’s television show Fraggle Rock, which he used to watch with his two children when they were young. He said the characters worked around-the-clock in his mind to repair his body.

“I used a visualization technique to repair the broken bones and help integrate the replacement parts into my system,” he said. “And I had an amazing recovery.”

It was then that he decided to work at a “less dangerous job” doing something he said he had always loved — helping and listening to others.

He said he was trained in Neuro-Linguistic Programming, in hypnotherapy and in past-life regression from the Lightworks Seminars Intl. in San Rafael, Calif., and he has a license in NLP from The Society of Neuro-Linguistic Programming.

After getting his certification, he took time to incorporate some of the practices into his own life to lose weight. He said he also met with clients at reduced prices to hone his craft, such as helping a neighbor learn to drive after experiencing panic attacks when getting behind the wheel.

“I had to make sure I could help people get rid of cigarettes, remove fears and phobias and see immediate results,” he said, before he started his own business.

When he sees a client, the first thing he does is hold an interview, in which he finds out what problems the interviewee wants to work on. He also learns in the interview about the particular techniques that the person uses to understand, represent and communicate with the world—using primarily either sight, sound, smell, taste, feeling or a combination of the senses—so he can best communicate with that person.

If hypnosis is needed, he said the client enters an altered state of conciousnesses so that he can talk to his or her subconscious mind. He uses the method to get past the person’s "crticial factor," which he said is a mental filter that blocks out things that are not in line with the person’s belief structure.

“There’s always a part of you that knows what’s going on, and is aware, but sometimes you just don’t pay attention to what I’m saying because I’m not speaking to the conscious part of you, I’m speaking to the unconscious part of you,” he said of hypnosis. "I use hypnosis to bypass the criical factor to go to the basic programming, and dispel misinformation, false impressions, and traumatic emotional situations."

One of his main tools in hypnosis is “regression,” in which he has the client go back in his or her mind to the initial significant event that is the root of the problem that causes a particular emotional reaction. He said he lets the unconscious mind lead the way back to those moments.

“I help them go back and find what the problem was,” he said. “We resolve the issue at that point.”

McDaniel added that in some cases, he believes clients can go back to moments in their past lives subconsciously.

“In working with people, I have found that they have gone back to previous lives, and have given depictions of what was going on, and have found that the initial significant event happened in a past life,” he said.

Most issues can be resolved in one session, but he said that those involving addictions like smoking or weight-management, sometimes call for more visits.

“I don’t want them to be out there trying to fight this thing on their own,” he said, adding that he doesn’t see the process as fixing a client, but instead giving them a process to help them with their situation.

“I don’t believe anybody is broken and needs to be fixed,” he said. “It’s just that (something is) not working for them.”

He added that what he does is not voodoo or magic, and that he would never make people “cluck like chickens unless they want us to.” He joked that he would charge extra for such an activity.

“Our mission is to be a guide along the pathways to wellness to better life choices,” he said.

Laura Oleniacz can be reached at (252) 635-5675 or at loleniacz@freedomenc.com.

Wellness assistance

Who: Dan McDaniel, hypnotherapist

What: N-Trance for smoking secession, weight management, anxiety control and other services

Where: 245 Craven St., New Bern

Contact: www.ntrancenow.com or at (252) 259-9646.