As a child, when Ryan DeLena became emotional and acted on it, he was pinned to the ground.
At his therapeutic schools, Ryan was restrained by his teachers. At home, his parents were trained to do the same. But nothing, from heavy medication to voluntary commitment, helped.
Until his father, Rob, took him skiing.
“If I went to the mountain and I was out in the ski world, it was like I could do anything,” Ryan said.
In their new memoir, “Without Restraint: How Skiing Saved My Son’s Life,” father-son duo Rob and Ryan DeLena tell the story of how Rob began to question the path laid out for Ryan by professionals once he saw his son thrive on skis.
Ryan and Rob spoke with NHPR’s All Things Considered host Julia Furukawa about their experience writing the memoir. Below is a transcript of their conversation.
Transcript
Julia Furukawa: So a big part of this book is skiing. And skiing has played a huge role in both of your lives since the first time that Ryan tried it. How has your relationship changed with the sport over time?
Ryan DeLena: So I would say it began kind of as an escape for me and it developed into a passion. Skiing has become, more, a vehicle to explore the world and to see new places in recent years. You feel a whole array of emotions on the mountain and amplified beyond what I think you feel in regular life.
Julia Furukawa: What about you, Rob?
Rob DeLena: Things were so hard at home and for Ryan at school. I was just looking for any activity we could get through where he would have a good enough time and I could manage it. At the beginning, that was all it was. And then every once in a while, I'd have these moments where I'd be up on the top of a mountain and I'd look around and say, ‘you know, this is pretty good.’ To the point where it’s really the focus of my main hobby and what I look forward to doing the most when I'm with Ryan in particular.
Julia Furukawa: Rob, I'll start with you on this one. In putting this book together, both of you had to look back at Ryan's life and at your life in some pretty heavy detail. What was it like to revisit those memories together, particularly the tougher moments in his childhood?
Rob DeLena: It was hard. We wrote separately and we didn't really talk to each other during the process. When he finally had his portion done and he gave it to me, I read it and there was [sic] some eye opening things in there. There were some things that I had wished that he had forgotten that he remembered in detail. And that was pretty brutal as a parent to go through. When he read mine, he was pretty disappointed in what I had come up with as a draft because I was so angry. It was almost my revenge tour of these schools and doctors that I thought had led us down the wrong path. And he didn't want that to be the story. When he forced me to go back and look at it again, I think it was in that fourth round, you know, 50th round where I said, ‘I'm blaming the wrong people here.’ I'm angry at them, but I'm really angry at myself. I needed to sort of work through my own guilt about my role in the decisions that were made when he was younger. [When I] put him into some bad schools and made some bad choices with the medicines. And I needed to own that.
Ryan DeLena: Yeah, I think it was tricky. It's funny, it's been a long time since he's practiced law, but it was almost like he was trying to prove damages in order to prove that these schools were so terrible and that my life had gone so wrong. He needed to kind of paint me in a negative light. And I read it and I'm like, ‘this isn't what I feel like.’ I don't feel like a victim. I don’t feel like I’ve missed out on something. I feel like I learned something from it, and I grew from it, and realized what I really want out of life. So my story was a positive story. As he read that perspective, he started to look at me a little bit differently and look at this journey a little bit differently, that it was a more triumphant story.
Julia Furukawa: Ryan, I'll direct this question toward you. You wrote about the negative effects that being restrained had on you, and a big one being a lack of trust in adults, including in your parents. It seems like you have a great relationship with your parents now that you're older, but what was that process of rebuilding trust with adults in your life like?
Ryan DeLena: It was long and I don't think it was linear. I can’t point to specific milestones. I think finding adults to look up to in the ski world, where trust is really important on a mountain. When you're in terrain that's big and consequential, and somebody says, ‘go that way’ or ‘do this,’ ‘use this technique,’ and you listen to them and it works, then you get through that experience together. I think you build that trust.
Julia Furukawa: And Rob, what was it like for you regaining trust in your relationship?
Rob DeLena: It took a while, and I think even trusting myself to make better decisions. We were trained in how to restrain Ryan at home. We were told that this would help him because he was dysregulated and if we put our hands on him, we would help him get regulated. The more I did it, I realized that at the end of the day, we were having a physical conflict. I would win these conflicts eventually—I was bigger, I was stronger—and I would leave there knowing it was wrong and that it was a terrible thing what I just did. And so when I finally said to myself, ‘I'm never doing that again,’ now you have to get creative. Now you have to head off those situations. And I was able to just avoid these situations rather than getting them at all.
Ryan DeLena: Because most of the time they were really small. That's the thing. I'd been conditioned from the time I was five to think that the smallest issue was the biggest issue because they responded like it was, or it would slowly build to becoming a big issue. So a lot of the time we just had to kind of learn to let bygones be bygones. Tearing up the homework wasn't a huge deal. We can print another sheet and when I'm calm, we can finish the homework. He can help me with it. It does not need to get to that point.
Julia Furukawa: So, Ryan, you are not alone in your story. It's an honest look into the effects that physical restraint can have on kids with behavioral issues or deemed by schools to have them. I sense an answer based on the title of the book ‘Without Restraint.’ But Rob, I'll start with you. What would you like to see happen in schools when it comes to this policy?
Rob DeLena: That's the question I probably fear the most. I get it a lot now. I'm really honest in my answer because I don't know if I have the perfect answer. I know what shouldn't happen. I know putting your hands on kids and restraining them in hallways and then locking them in rooms is not the way to go. The hard part is what do you do in place of that? I can't say that a school should never put their hands on someone. I think there is a point where it's probably the only option. But we saw schools where that was the first, second and third options. You've got to get more creative right from the beginning.
Julia Furukawa: Ryan, what about you?
Ryan DeLena: I think we need to see more programs within public schools that can help kids at individual levels. And I think we just need to stop with immediately sending kids away and sending them down this irreversible path. But they're so quick when a kid is five years old to want to put them down this track. I really think we need to let kids grow up and grow out of these problems a little bit more and keep them in the public school system.
