DanielBenor.MD

About Dr. Benor, M.D.

We are sorry to share that Dan has passed away.

Dan was a shining light, and mere words cannot begin to capture his kindness, gentleness, generosity and his huge open-heartedness.  Keep reading below for his Obituary and Ceremony of Life videos.

Dr. Daniel Benor, MD Obituary 

By John Freedom 


Dan made his transition on Tuesday, July 19, 2022 at the age of 81. He died peacefully in his sleep at home, surrounded by his wife Linda, step-son, his cat and dogs. He was in a lot of physical pain, and so we are grateful that he is now resting in peace. 


Daniel J. Benor, MD, was a holistic psychiatrist and psychotherapist. In his later years he specialized in the treatment of anxiety, chronic pain and psychosomatic conditions. He received his BA in psychology at UCLA, and his medical degree at UCLA Medical School, followed by a fellowship at the UCLA neuropsychiatric institute. After becoming disenchanted with mainstream medicine and drug treatments for mental disorders, Dan studied alternative therapies including meditation, guided imagery, gestalt therapy, transactional analysis, hypnosis, EMDR and energy psychology. He was a true innovator, and developed a novel therapy he called WHEE: the Wholistic Hybrid of EMDR and EFT. He taught these methods at conferences and workshops internationally for over 40 years, including at CAIET and ACEP. 


Dan was blessed with an insatiable curiosity, and he loved learning. He wrote, "As a child, I thought that grownups knew everything and that one day I would be a grownup and I would know everything! There is a little part of me that hasn’t given up on this search for knowledge and understanding of life, the universe and everything...." 


Dan’s lifework was "Wholistic Healing" (which he always spelled with a “W.”) He emphasized the need to address and heal the Whole Person, including body, mind, emotions, relationships and Spirit. In his classes and trainings he synthesized Western medicine and traditional psychotherapy with intuition, prayer, and spiritual approaches, as well as EM and EP. 


Dan was a meticulous scholar, editor and researcher. He was the author of Healing Research, Volumes I-III, and many articles on health and spiritual healing. He was the founder and editor of the International Journal of Healing and Caring, the Wholistic Healing Research website, and maintained a database of "remarkable recoveries," case histories of people who recovered from chronic illness using spiritual and wholistic methods. He was a founding diplomat of the American Board of Integrative Holistic Medicine, founder of the Council for Healing, and for many years served on the advisory boards of Alternative Therapies, Subtle Energies (ISSSEEM), Frontier Sciences and the Advisory Board of the Research Council for Complementary Medicine (UK). 


His books include Wholistic Healing for the Highly Sensitive Person; Consciousness, Bioenergy and Healing; and Seven Minutes to Natural Pain Release. (This last book is, in my opinion, the finest book ever written on the psychodynamics of chronic pain and how to treat it naturally). 


Dan is survived by his wife Linda, and several children and grandchildren. He was the recipient of ACEP’s Contribution To The Field Award in 2021. An online Celebration of Dan's Life will be held sometime in the fall. 


Dan was a shining light, and mere words cannot begin to capture his kindness, gentleness, generosity and his huge open-heartedness. It would be an understatement to say that “Dan touched many people.” He will be warmly remembered and deeply missed by those of us fortunate enough to have been blessed by his love and his presence. 


Click here to Download a Copy of Obituary
BA in Psychology at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA)

He was fascinated to learn how humans and animals have inborn capacities for learning, and how our positive and negative life experiences shape our perceptions and behaviors. Stages of human development explain limitations and vulnerabilities along our paths of maturation. He was particularly interested in systematic therapeutic interventions that could change our reactions to our worlds and to recover from emotional and behavioral dysfunctions.


Psychology been enormously helpful in a therapeutic tool kit. He includes behavior modification procedures, such as positive and negative reinforcements for learning, and systematic desensitization for traumas. While similar in several ways to Cognitive Behavior Therapy (CBT), TWR is much quicker and easier to use.

UCLA Medical School and Internship at University of Kansas Medical School

Having his MD training gave him a thorough understanding of the physical body, from its chemical and cellular composition, through its anatomy and physiology, and its functions in health and illness. He was able to help people with medical problems to deal with their challenges. He also understand the contributions medications can offer, though his preference is to teach self-healing methods that minimize the need for drugs.


He helped particularly with pains of all sorts because he understood how the body and brain participate in physical and psychological pains. While he was taught in medical school that pain is treated with pain killers, he found this is often a poor choice. Self-healing methods enable us to identify and clear the roots of our problems so that pains are very often eliminated and pain killers are not needed.

NIMH Research Fellowship at the UCLA Neuropsychiatric Institute

He took a year off after his second medical school year to study psychiatric research. He wanted to contribute to a greater understanding of health and healing. Most importantly, Dan learned how to set up and run clinical trials of various treatments.


He had an insatiable curiosity to learn about this wonderful world we live in. As a child, he thought that grownups knew everything and that one day he would be a grownup and he would know everything. He never gave up on this search for knowledge and understanding of life, the universe and everything!

 Psychiatric Training

At: University of Cincinnati Department of Psychiatry, Cincinnati General Hospital, Ohio; Colorado Psychiatric Hospital, Denver, Colorado; Denver General Hospital, Colorado)


He was fortunate to train when psychiatry was all about psychotherapy and not focused, as it is today, solely on prescription of medications. He learned psychoanalytic therapy (which he found very helpful in self-understanding but not in promoting change), psychodynamic (relationship) therapy, child and adolescent psychiatry, psychosomatic medicine and community psychiatric services.


His understandings of how the mind and the body interact in health and illness has been vastly enhanced through these years of training.

Family Therapy Externship at the Philadelphia Child Guidance Clinic

He came to appreciate that each person is a piece of a family – in addition to being an individual. We carry within ourselves rules for how we relate to the world, plus cognitive and emotional residues from our experiences with our family.


In many cases, the problems individuals speak as much for the unresolved issues of other members of their families as they speak of the individuals’ psychological problems. Helping the whole family deal with their collective problems is often much more productive than working with just one piece of the family.

Here are some of the varieties of ways Dan's work helped so many people get into a better space

TWR

This practise combines all Dan learned in several decades of studies. 


TWR gives you the tools to transform your life. 


TWR teaches you to use TWR alone or with whatever with ways you are comfortable in addressing what you want to improve in your life.

Installing Positive Thoughts and Feelings

Will can show you:

 

  • How to build positive thoughts and feelings that replace whatever negative ones you release with TWR.
  • How to create a place of peace and safety and healing – a wonderful place to visit whenever you wish, and a healing place in times of need.

 

Creating an inner place of peace, safety and healing
This is a place where you can go to feel absolutely safe, nurtured and protected.
Gestalt Therapy (2-chair work)

When we are of two minds about issues in our lives, we may have difficulties in coming to decisions on how to address these. People often seek the advice of others in making their choices, including therapists. While this can be enlightening and enriching, it can also be a disempowering of ourselves. We miss opportunities to access our inner creative resources. TWR can guide you to find your own solutions. This will also teach you to become more creative and resourceful.

Inner Child Access

We all carry lessons and habits we developed from our childhood experiences. Some of responses as adults are based on these child memory residues and perspectives. Dan would help identify which inner programs are serving you well and which might be tweaked, changed or abandoned – to be more in line with your current life, relationships and situation. You can TWR away outdated habits and install new ones.

Share by: