The Outhouse Moment That Changed Everything

Stephanie Riseley Hypnotherapy & Past Life Regression Therapy

The Outhouse Moment That Changed Everything.

How hypnotherapy, neuroscience, and one very large rock helped a furious 72-year-old finally rewire his brain and his life.

He walked into my Los Angeles hypnotherapy office like a man carrying the weight of the world. Tall, handsome, 72 years old, and absolutely smoking mad at life. Let’s call him Ray.

Ray had lived big. He built a car dealership in Orange County from scratch. Then flipped into real estate and made a mint. He had the houses, the lifestyle, the whole beautiful mess of success. And then, like a lot of people who suddenly find themselves with everything, he found other things to fill the time. High living. Drugs. And eventually, none of the above.

By the time he sat down in my chair, Ray was earning $20 an hour as a caretaker for an invalid. Three ex-wives behind him. And a brand new love, a warm and lovely 65-year-old widow with a ranch and a good heart, who kept getting the sharp end of his tongue because he just could not stop snapping at everyone around him.

He wanted two things from me: to quit smoking and to stop being so furious all the time. Two things that, as it turns out, were coming from exactly the same place.

Here is something most people do not know about smoking cessation and anger: they are both deeply rooted in the brain. Not just in willpower. Not just in habits. In the actual neural pathways your brain has spent decades reinforcing.

This is where hypnotherapy and cognitive behavioral therapy become so powerful together. By combining hypnosis with CBT techniques and the principles of neuroscience, we can go in and gently interrupt those old patterns. Change your thinking, and you begin to change your habits. Change your habits consistently, and you literally reformat the brain. New neural pathways form. Old ones fade. The science calls it neuroplasticity. I call it the most hopeful thing I know.

With Ray, we used these techniques to begin loosening the grip that smoking had on him and to start examining the anger underneath. But it was not until the regression work that everything cracked wide open.

Before we went anywhere near a past life, we traveled back to something simpler: his childhood in Texas. Good old boys. Tough men. And Ray, who was musical and artistic and did not fit the mold one bit.

Growing up tall, handsome, and naturally charming in that world had given Ray something else, too, something he had never really examined: a bone-deep sense of entitlement. He had always moved through the world assuming it would open up for him. And when it did not, or when the people around him were not as successful, as driven, as polished as he thought they should be, he dismissed them. He had been doing it his whole life without realizing it. To business partners. To wives. To the sweet woman with the ranch who deserved so much better.

Then a particular memory surfaced. Ray, as a young boy, furious about something, the way kids get furious, completely and totally. He stomps outside. And there, sitting in the yard, is a massive rock.

He picks it up. He walks to the outhouse. And he throws that rock straight down into the hole.

You can probably guess what happened next.

Ray stood there. Covered. In Poop!

And then something cracked open. He started to laugh. The kind of laugh that shakes your whole body and clears something out of you at the same time.

“This explains my whole life,” he said, still laughing. “I keep going out to the outhouse and throwing rocks in, and every single time I am shocked when I end up covered in poop! I have been doing this to myself, haven’t I?”

That one moment of recognition was worth more than a hundred hours of talk therapy. Because once you see the pattern, you cannot unsee it.

Ray no longer needed to blame his ex-wives. He did not need to blame his parents, his luck, the market, or the universe. And for the first time, he could see how his entitlement had been its own kind of outhouse rock. His habit of dismissing people who were not as successful, of snapping at the people who loved him most, of assuming the world owed him a second and third and fourth chance, without him doing the inner work. He saw all of it.

So we kept going. Using meditation and awareness practices alongside the hypnotherapy and CBT work, Ray began to rewire his thinking. Meditation is not just relaxation. It is one of the most well-researched tools we have for changing the brain, building emotional regulation, and developing the kind of moment-to-moment awareness that lets you catch yourself before you pick up another rock.

Ray became, over the following weeks and months, a kinder man. A better human. He quit smoking. He let go of the rage. He stopped walking to the outhouse.

He went back to that woman with the ranch. He built a life of love and genuine happiness, not because everything magically got easier, but because he had done the real work of changing his brain and changing himself.

So, here’s my question for you to think about today:

Where are you throwing rocks into the outhouse? What is the pattern you keep repeating? The relationship you blow up, the opportunity you talk yourself out of, the habit you know is not serving you, and then you act surprised when you end up covered in the consequences?

The good news is that your brain is not fixed. Neuroscience has proven that. With the right tools, whether that is hypnotherapy, cognitive behavioral therapy, past life regression, meditation, or some combination of all of them, you can change your thinking, change your habits, and reformat the brain that has been running the same old program for decades.

That is the work I do here in Los Angeles, and remotely with clients around the world. And it would be my absolute honor to do it with you.

Ready to stop throwing rocks? If so, please visit me at StephanieRiseley.com and let’s get started.

Sending you love and hope,

Stephanie

P.S.

And if you want to go even deeper into the mysteries of past lives and soul survival, my book Love From Both Sides: A True Story of Reincarnation and Soul Survival is available now, with a fully updated new edition coming August 2026. Find it at StephanieRiseley.com.