Latest / Giving Pain Purpose with Lyndsay Soprano / Without Restraints

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Without Restraints · Giving Pain Purpose with Lyndsay Soprano

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This is Your Pain Game podcast where we talk about the game of living in
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and with chronic pain and trauma, getting to the heart of how to heal.
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I am your host, Lindsay Soprano. On the show, I plan
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on discussing with doctors, chronic pain patients, ballistic practitioners, loved ones,
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and anybody that is interested in having their voice heard in the chronic pain and
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trauma world that we live in. So I've always been a bit of an
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extremist and very intense. Those closest to me might laugh at the sentiment that
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I'm a bit extreme, because I'm actually really a full extremist, and I
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have been forever. I always do everything to extreme good, bad, fun,
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and ugly and always have. And I know, as a young girl
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and a teenager, I was always a bit dark. I was extremely emotional.
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I had behavioral issues and I still have those tendencies. I was pretty
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dark, and I was kind of twisty from a very young age and super
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rebellious. And after dealing with so many hidden and unspoken traumas that I've been
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through through my life that are just now starting to come to the surface,
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you know, forty plus years later and I'm just now starting to deal with
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that darkness is starting to share with some time with sunshine now and not all
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the time and not every day, and today in particular, has been kind
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of a dark and stormy Daniel's kind of a day for me. So the
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fact that I'm smiling and laughing at this time of the day while doing this
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episode is pretty good considering how my morning started. But where I want to
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give in and give up to pain, where I want to give into the
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things that stressed me out, the things that make me sad, the things
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that break my heart, they live with me, and it really affects how
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I feel and how I react to things, and how my emotions take over
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and how sometimes I feel totally and completely out of control. And as a
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kid raised in the early eighties, you know, we weren't really taught the
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skills to manage our behavior. We weren't taught about how to manage our wandering
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thoughts, we weren't taught about managing our emotions. And I thought that that
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kind of was like that was something of that age of my ilk, But
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apparently it's just not the case. We're all a little emotional, we're all
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a little out of control. And one of the things that I always did
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to get out some of my energy was actually extreme sports. One of them
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was downhill racing and skiing. I was a solemn racer and I loved going
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top to bottom as fast as I could, out of control, out of
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bonds, triple blacks, broken bones, tree chails. A lot of those
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tree shells ended up having me land in the trees, doing extreme jumps in
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those tails and missing them more. And I've always lived a little on the
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edge, and so has my guest and his dad. So, without further
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ado, I'd like to introduce you to my guest today, Ryan Delena,
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and his hotdog dad, Robbed Helena. Hi, guys, thanks for being
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here with me. How's it going good? Good? So. Ryan,
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you're currently a junior in college at Northern Vermont University studying outdoor education, and
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you're widely known in social media as Extreme Ryan, which I love as a
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fellow extremist. And I'm not going to shout out all of your accolades of
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all of the wonderful things that you've done on the slopes until we talk about
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your story. And you're no visitor to extreme emotions and extreme detrimental methods of
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behavioral modification as you grew up. So let's talk about it. I'd like
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to roll out the red carpet for you and start maybe with a little bit
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of your early childhood and your behavior issues that were occurring that led to these
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like gnarly methods of mods in your life. Let's go from there. Yeah,
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I was just a tricky kid, you know. I like to disobey
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my parents. I like to do things that will probably you know. I
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was just the kind of kid that was going to try and hang from the
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chandelier, I was gonna climb onto the roof of the place set, I
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was gonna try and run around in the woods. Like. I was just
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that kind of kid. And when I was growing up, before I was
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in school, that wasn't necessarily an issue, and it became an issue once
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I got to school. So once I'm in preschool, which is still pretty
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young to really determine how a kid is going to turn out, because a
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lot of young crazy kids turn out to be really functional but interesting adults,
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you know. So yeah, so when I get to preschool, this stuff
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that makes me just kind of a fun, quirky kid starts to be an
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issue for them because I don't want to fall in line with everybody else.
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I'm not going to sit there and make them at a Baroni necklace. I
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would rather try and run around out or try and climb up on the table,
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like I was not gonna do these like kind of quiet, mellow activities.
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And I also just didn't learn very well by people talking at me,
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like I can't remember a single thing from preschool kindergarten, Like you know,
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it's like the teacher was just like a Charlie Brown character, just like blah
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blah bla blah blah. So when I got up, a teacher would walk
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around with me, and I never thought anything of it. You know,
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I was too young to even though what was going on. But behind the
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scenes, they were saying, yeah, this is not going to work out.
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We don't think he should enter first grade in public school. I think
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he needs to get moved to a therapeutic school. And that was where I
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started to actually face the consequences of kind of how I was acting and realized
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that it wasn't good. So when I was around five years old, I
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moved to my thirst therapeutic school, where they started restraining me when I acted
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out of line. And this was vastutely different from what I was used to
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because instead of someone just getting up and walking around with me, and then
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when I went back to class, they just sat down. All of a
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sudden, they were putting their hands on me. They were slamming me on
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the floor, they were getting on top of me, covering my mouth.
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I was yelling, and this was happening at the smallest thing, you know,
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tearing a piece of paper in half, knocking over a snowman at recess,
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you know, not wanting to sit in time out. And it was
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really detrimental to me because I was just so young, and I was getting
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taught to be afraid of school, to be afraid of conflict at such a
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young age. Yeah, you're talking about I'm thinking in my brain about like
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preschool, because I was in Monetstory School and then I was in kindergarten.
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I was always the one acting now there, I was always the smart ass
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in the class. I was always the one that was walking around and rambling
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around and didn't want to conform. I didn't want to make the macaroni necklace.
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I was cracking up when you when you said that I wanted to do
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my own thing, paved my own way, do my own I always felt
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like I was a little bit separate from everybody else. I always felt like
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I wasn't the same, I wasn't the norm. I was always this different
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kid, Like I have pictures of me when all the little silly musicals that
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you do when you're in preschool, in kindergarten, and all the kids are
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like smiling and singing and doing what they're supposed to be, and I'm the
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one like sitting there on stage with my legs like open, like in my
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little dress, or like picking my nose, like I was the kid that
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did not want to conform. Did you struggle with conform issues at such a
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young age, because I definitely identify with that, because that led down to
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some stuff with my parents that not necessarily I ended up being restrained like you're
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talking about, but it certainly was leading me down a different kind of a
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path. I don't know if it was necessarily conformity, because I never felt
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like I needed to go against the status quo for the sake of doing it.
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I felt like I was the type of kid who I just wanted to
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be authentic to, who I was, and the second I was it was
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for being authentic to who I was. Then I wanted to go against the
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status quo, like if if something I identified with was not accepted, then
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I wanted to make a point of doing it more. That was it was
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almost it was reactionary. It wasn't necessarily that I felt it was in my
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identity to riquel. Okay, I mean that's fair. I feel like from
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my side it was a little bit of both. Okay, So you get
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to you get to this therapeutic school. Where was this by the way,
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Lexington, Massachusetts. We lived in Sudbury, mass and it was it was
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a couple of towns away. Okay, Yeah, so in Massachusetts outside and
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so you're talking about in the cold, and you know, can you get
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into a little bit about what age you got in there? How long were
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you in this school? Did you bounce around? What happened? I was
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there for about four years when I was five to when I was nine,
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And eventually we just had enough, in part due to our journey with skiing
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and my dad seeing a different side of me and realizing that I wasn't this
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kid who they said I was. In part with them just sort of seeing
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the impact of restraints on me getting more formally diagnosed with post traumatic stress disorder,
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and we just had enough and told them, like, you got to
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stop restraining him. And when they were told to not restrain me anymore,
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they entrenched because that was within just their methodology. Like a lot of schools,
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it's a response to a kid who's about to be a threat to somebody
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else, but for them, it was part of their ideology. They thought
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that that was eventually going to break you. So when that was questioned,
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they were like, Okay, we'll send him home the second there's an issue,
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and they would purposely pick the smallest thing. At one point, I
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think he was ten minutes out of the parking lot when he got a call
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and it was like you got to bring him home. Like they were definitely
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trying to just make his life more difficult because they were questioned, and after
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like the first week and a half of that, he was over it,
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like, yeah, we're pulling you out of here. Yeah, so Dad,
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I'm gonna I'm gonna jump in with you for a sec because I know
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that when it comes to having a child that you don't necessarily know what to
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do with and that. And that's not a negative statement. It's like,
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what the heck, like, my baby, you know, Q, talk
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to me a little bit about like what that was like sending Ryan to a
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therapeutic school and what was really happening during those couple of years that he was
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there. From your perspective, no, I'm glad you're fraended it that way,
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because nobody starts with the expectation they're going to drop their kid off in
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a school that's going to restrain them. And it wasn't that way for us.
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I mean, Ryan was a difficult toddler. He was rambunctious, energetic,
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he was defiant, he was you know, obstinate, but he was
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really fun to parents because he was super smart. And I mean really before
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school started, he I mean, he was the star of the neighborhood.
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He talked before everybody else. He moved faster than everybody else. And I
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love that part of them, you know. But my parental expectations were fueled
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by you know, generationally, my grandparents were immigrants, while there was a
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blue collar I became a lawyer, you know, I was he was going
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to do better than I And we've put him into the fanciest private, uh,
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you know, preschool in the in the area and where he you know,
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one of those you have to put them on the list later in the
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wold. We got him into it and he was there one day when the
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director asked to see us and say, there's something about his behavior this different.
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We want to have a pediatric neuropsychologist observed him the next day, and
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you know, all of this happens really quickly, and it's this little series
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of baby steps with the neurologist observes him. She says that he'd be better
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off at an integrated preschool that has a mix of kids with with you know,
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with issues and without issues. And we think, okay, that that
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sounds plausible. We moved him Toto the public integrated preschool. He did okay
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there for a year. He struggled more in the second year. She then
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recommended the neurologist and recommended this therapeutic school. Now the therapeutic school we went
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and visited. It was kids that, you know, we're some of my
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autism spec for me, some behavioral, but it was small classes. They
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had previewing, they had transitions, they had all the things that we thought
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he would benefit from. But one part we missed is that in their materials
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they described their model as a holding environment, and they described the holding environment
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as when a kid is disregulated, especially a kid who may bee nonverbal or
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maybe can't really you know, express himself, and gets frustrated, They're gonna
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give this child a hug, hold this child, and right. And that
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was what we were told, so, you know, and we were trained
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in how to do it at home, we hired, we hired a babysitter,
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and how to do it at our house, and and so you know,
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as it it then, you know, over the four years, it
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evolved pretty quick. I mean right away I started to question it, and
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I when we would do it at home, I would say, okay,
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Ryan was Ryan acted up? You know, he didn't want to go into
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time out. I then had to tackle them and sort of struggle in this
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wrestling thing and hold him, which he tried to squiring a lout of wing,
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a lout of them, and we ended up sweating on the floor for
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a half hour. And then why did I do this again? And what
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was the reason why I started to do this? I don't even remember why
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you got in trouble to begin with? And so I started to question.
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And then when we started, like Ryan alluded to, when we started the
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question the school, they really didn't have another go to. All they really
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had was restraint when it kid acted up, so they didn't have a plan
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D and you know, at the problem and we'll fess for the story a
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little bit. Once he was in a school that restrained him and where he
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had a one to one aide, no other special needs type school would take
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him other than schools that restrained, so we were sort of stuck in this
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system of schools that restrained. We started to briefly look at other schools that
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were in the area, and they looked worse if anything, so they we
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had really no option. We started we thought about homeschooling him. Eventually,
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when it all fell apart at school number one, I literally just pulled him
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out one day I went there to pick him up. I was frustrated.
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I didn't tell my wife. I said we quit and we left. And
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then I called her and said we quit, we left, and she said,
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what are we going to do now we don't have a school. It
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was at that period where he was home with nothing to do, where his
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therapist started to question what was going on at home, and she was the
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one who advised us to put him in a mental hospital for two weeks while
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they messed around with his medications if they can stabilize them. He really alluded
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to the fact that did he might hurt himself or hurt his sister, which
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you know, I didn't think would happen. But when when you hear those
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things as a parent, you think, I don't want to be wrong about
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this, so maybe we should go to the mental hospital for two weeks.
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Again. Terrible mistake. Wish I never did it. The second worst thing
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I ever did, other than sending to a school that restrained him. So
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a lot of it's it's a long story. A lot of this happened in
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a you know, quickly, but a series of baby steps, and one
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day you wake up and your kid is nine or ten years old and it's
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completely disregulated, has PTSD, complete legal, has lost all trust and adults,
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thinks every interaction he has that it's going to end in conflict, is
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going to end with him face down on the floor. That's where the story
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we luckily scheme comes into the picture around this time. But I'll let Ran
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pick it up well, I'm actually going to pick it up from there because
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I have a question in relation to the type of restraint. When you're talking
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about dysregulation, they're talking about restraint to me, you know, I want
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to go dark and twisty on the restraint side of things, But can you
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tell me a little bit in regards to what are the things that were happening
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to you in this type of therapeutic setting, because therapy is such a broad
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word, as we've come to find out. Yeah, I think you know
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a lot of times what would happen is it would just kind of start with
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a small issue and then it would lead to a bigger issue, and then
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that would ultimately lead to a restraint. Sometimes you didn't even need to get
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to the bigger issue, but usually it involved you kind of face down on
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the floor with an adult on top of you and they have your arms,
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legs secured somehow. And then this can happen in the middle of the classroom,
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It can happen in front of all your friends. It can happen like
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in any room of the building, outside on the ground, hot out,
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hold out, raining out, it doesn't matter. And if you're screening and
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you're disrupting in the class. Then they'll cover your mouth so the kids can't
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hear you as if it's not still disrupting them somehow, And then it can
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feel like you can't breathe. You know, you already have a whole person
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on top of you, and your mouth's covered. There's not a lot of
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air flow, so that makes you panic and struggle more, which makes them
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go harder. And a lot of times the issue is that it wasn't like
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they were just trying to handle the situation. A lot of times, the
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adrenaline kicks in and they wanted to win that fight. Like you could tell,
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the more you struggled, the more it made them want to win that
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fight. They almost got mad at you and put more force into it.
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So I would have bruises, rug burns, whatever, and I would come
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home and be like Dad, they tried to kill me. And you know,
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he's thinking I'm exaggerating. I'm lying. You know, I'm like any
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other kid who just doesn't want to go to school, and it's going to
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make up a story for why I don't have to go to school. And
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it wasn't like that, you know, I was really in fear and it
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gets more challenging as I get bigger, because when I'm five, it's not
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like I can fight back very much. As I start to grow, as
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I start to be, you know, nine years old, Funnily, I
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can put up a little bit of a fight, and this turns from a
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five minute conflict to a thirty minute conflict. You know, even when I
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was when I was in high school, this still happens sometimes. And now
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I'm starting to actually, you know, go through puberty, and I'm having
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you know, I'm getting muscle tone, like these can be really physical,
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long drawn out conflicts that are happening. Yeah, I mean it sounds like
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I'm watching CNN and watching the Memphis Police like completely and my lated kid,
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and that's helpless. I'm just I'm I'm mind boggled by listening to this and
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from so many different places. And you mentioned earlier, actually both of you
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mentioned earlier about PTSD and that you're struggling with it, which I would not
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doubt that you would be. Um, are you dealing with that on a
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day to day basis right now? Or is that something? How are you
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dealing with that PTSD? Because I understand it from my perspective in the traumas
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that happened to me in my life, and I know that they pop up
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like well like randomly, like oh wow, that just popped out of nowhere.
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Great, thank you. Are you struggling with that today? You know,
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it evolves, and I was very lucky in that my trauma was very
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specific to one place. So you know, one of the things I described
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in the book is like when I got back to public high school when I
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was a junior, and I was finally in an environment where they didn't do
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restraints, Like it was the normal line of events where if you acted up,
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you would, you know, maybe get to tension, or you would
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just get a talking to if it wasn't that bad, or if it was
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really bad, maybe you got suspended. Which like it's not like I wanted
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those things, and it's not like that happened to me very much, but
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just knowing all of a sudden that nobody was going to attack me if there
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was an issue, I relaxed so much, Like you know, people thought
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I was like some stone or kid like because I just gave off this relaxation
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vibe for that like first month, and it was just I just let go
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of all of this tension, and at that point, I'd kind of just
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assumed that was fine. I'm like, oh cool, So I don't have
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this thing anymore, like I can just ignore it. But while I may
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not have been immediately afraid of that conflict resulting in a restraint anymore, I
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still like when I have arguments with people, I get intense sometimes because it's
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almost like a little reflex like when somebody yells at me, it's my natural
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instinct to yell back, you know. It's almost like it's almost like how
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you fight a bear, you know, like if you have a bear that
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is approaching you, you want to throw rocks in the air to make yourself
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look bigger, Like I want to raise my voice to make myself seem bigger,
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you know. And it's not that I'm even conscious of that. It's
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that my body reflexively when I sense conflict, like what puts up that defense
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mechanism. And for a while, and I've gotten better at this, like,
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you know, I just a lot of the trauma wasn't even just from
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the physical side of things, but the mental side of things, of just
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for years and years and years being like okay, like you know, you're
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getting moved to a different school, but we promised this one will be better,
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and then I get there and it's the same shit, or it's worse,
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or there's less opportunity. And I developed this really fatalistic outlook that like,
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whenever things were going wrong, it was my natural inclination to think it's
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just gonna go wrong forever, like there's no such thing as a good ending.
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And as I've gotten more positivity in my life and I've taught myself to
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think more positively a lot through outdoor sports, I've changed that a lot.
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And I would say this went from happening, you know, every day,
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to maybe once a year, once every two years. But you know,
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you can tell the body holds onto that stuff. It's like it's in there.
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It doesn't come out the same way, not as violently, not as
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scary, but it's in there somewhere. Yeah. There's a book that I
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want you to read if you haven't read it, it's called The Body Keeps
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The Score heard of it? Really it really aligns with what you're talking about,
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that your body holds onto stuff and we don't know where it's going to
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hold on to, Like for me, the stuff that happened to me,
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and excuse me when I was a little girl, and early in my adulthood
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in college and so on and so forth. I and Ryan, you didn't
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get to meet me. But I'm in a wheelchair for fifty percent of my
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life now, and I believe wholeheartedly that fifty to seventy five percent of it
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is all trauma that is stuck in my body. And it's the reason why
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I started this show, because I was absolutely desperate to find people that have
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been through trauma, that are healers, that are people that are vulnerable like
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you, that can talk and be open about it. And you're so awesome.
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I'm not going to use the word brave because people use it all the
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time. You're awesome and that you're talking about it at such a young age,
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because if you don't and you wait until you're old, it's been sitting
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in there longer keeping score. And so I'm proud of you for being the
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man that you've become throughout all of your trials and tribulations and what you've been
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through to be such a badass that you are right now. And I want
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to move into the extreme sports side of it, into this skiing side,
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And there's a book that these two put together. The books written in two
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voices. It's called Without Restraint as a joint father son memoir that basically talks
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about struggle and strength and adventure and heart and misunderstandings of poor mom and dad
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not knowing what to do and poor son not knowing what to do, and
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now together this unbreakable bond that you guys have created throughout this journey and this
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adventure together. So it's books called Without Restraint, How Skiing saved my Son's
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life. And I want you to talk a little bit about how you got
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into skiing and what is WOL has played in your healing through a lot of
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everything that you've been through for both of you have, like to start with
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Ryan, you know, it's interesting that you led up to it this way
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because I remember they had me, they as and mom and Dad. They
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had me read my first three chapters that I wrote aloud just to see what
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I was working on. And I remember the first time I read it,
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my body started shaking for like no reason, and it was just because I
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hadn't even talked about this more than twice, since it didn't happened like all
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like the last like twelve years of just what had been going on. I
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just I had never spoken about it. And now that I've done a lot
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of these podcasts and explained this book a million times that I've talked about it
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maybe a thousand times, it doesn't feel that way anymore. And I think
23:41
that it's been cathartic to write it, which has been really a positive side
23:47
effect of putting this really personal thing out there is that I've maybe done some
23:52
healing and processing just by going through this book. Well yeah, I mean
23:56
talking and being vulnerable and being organic about it and not like my whole thing
24:03
is no filter and because filtering is terrible outside of like your drinking water,
24:08
I don't want any filters because if there's one person that we can touch today
24:12
with our episode together, then there's one person that we've touched, and the
24:17
vulnerability and the filtering of that, like you've got to just beat you and
24:21
share your story and be out there because the other option is not and you're
24:27
not helping anybody by doing nothing, you know, So I applaud you for
24:30
being here that what are you What are your thoughts about this? Dad?
24:34
I think it's interesting, you know, to hear the first skiing story.
24:37
You know, let me step the scene a little bit. I'd only skied
24:41
a little bit as a kid. I hadn't skied in twenty five years.
24:44
It wasn't like it was part of our daily conversations. Ryan had never skied.
24:48
I just had this fully traumatized kid who was home for Christmas break when
24:52
he was seven years old. You know, whenever he would get into conflict
24:56
with his sister, my wife and I would divide them. I would take
24:59
Ryan the car. We would go to home depot. We'd walk around home
25:02
depot. Who would make me buy some giant wrench that I would never use?
25:04
And we would fight about why I didn't need a seventy dollars wrench.
25:07
And so, for forever reason, I just had filed skiing away, maybe
25:11
as a possibility. And he gets in a fight with a sister. I
25:15
throw him in the car. I stick his bicycle helmet on him, his
25:18
gloves and a coat, and I said, you want to try skiing.
25:19
We drive forty five minutes this little local hill. You know, the whole
25:23
time, I'm thinking this is never gonna work. He's never gonna get through
25:26
the rental process. He couldn't wait for anything. He was you know,
25:27
he just was so impulsive. And somehow we make it through the rental process
25:32
and we get on the magic carpet and we you know the magic carpets like
25:34
this airport people move over that goes up a little bunny hill and we get
25:37
to the top of that and I all of a sudden, it hits me,
25:40
like I haven't told him anything about how to ski or what to do,
25:42
and I don't even remember what to tell him. But I stopped him
25:45
for a second and I said, Ryan, you know, this is how
25:47
you snowplow, and this is how you turn. And I even fell down
25:49
in the snow, and I said, if you fall, this is kind
25:52
of how you used the leverage to get up. And he just looked at
25:53
me and he shot straight down the bottom of the bunny hill and he made
25:56
this big turn back to the back to the magic carpet, and I said,
26:00
I looked at him. I was like, wow, he knew how
26:02
to do that, like I don't even how to do that. So,
26:03
you know, we we ended up, you know, reconnected, and we
26:07
did it a few times. We went up the lift, and you know,
26:08
it wasn't a perfect day. But we you know, I remember driving
26:11
home and thinking that wasn't terrible, Like that was better than really anything we'd
26:17
done. And it was just this glimmer of I took this kid who was
26:21
traumatized, and I put him in an environment where I couldn't restrain him,
26:23
where there wasn't any teacher that was going to restrain him. There were weren't
26:26
a lot of rules where risk was rewarded, where it was free, and
26:30
he free was free to express himself, and he just looked a little different.
26:33
And so we went back the next day and we got got him instructor
26:37
and she took him to the top of the mountain and he did he did
26:40
a black diamond run on this like second hour of skiing, which is incredible.
26:44
And then the next week we went to a bigger Massachusetts mountain, and
26:47
the next week we went to a new Hampshire mountain, and then we went
26:48
to Vermont and he did a double black diamond and we went up in Bail
26:52
that year, and it's just all of a sudden, we had this day
26:56
that he loved and ill and I had a kind alike because he got so
27:00
good so fast, And now I see my hobby and it just I don't
27:07
know, we had this little moment of that winter where he was just a
27:11
different kid. And then unfortunately I had to drop him back off at school
27:15
on Mondays and enough to go back to the same thing again, and it
27:17
was really all of a sudden his life was trying to described in the books
27:21
Parallel Tracks. He had this really positive experience away from school on the mountain,
27:25
and you had you still had this really awful school experience. But what
27:27
it did was it changed our our outlook at home like that. That was
27:30
what convinced me, no more restraints at home. We wouldn't let the babysity
27:34
restraint him a home. And then that was when we really started to fight
27:37
to school. And I can't say it was perfect, and he read it
27:38
in the book. I mean, there was still a lot of trauma he
27:41
went through. It wasn't as simple snapping my fingers and getting them back in
27:44
public school. It took ten years. It took two other school, three
27:47
other schools. Each one was progressively a little better, but really wasn't great.
27:51
And it was kind of like better, worse, a little better best,
27:55
you know, that was sort of how it went. Yeah, for
27:57
sure. But we bark on this journey over ten years just really ski the
28:02
planet and that's a big part of the book. We just want to some
28:04
really interesting, crazy places. Yeah. I mean, you guys have been
28:07
all over the place, and I know that there's outlets, right, I
28:11
mean a lot of people when it comes to dealing with I don't even care
28:15
what age you are. We have to have an outlet. We have to
28:18
go do something. We have to get rid of this negative whatever our stresses,
28:22
our life or this or that. Shit happens to everybody every single day
28:26
and we have to figure out a way to get through it, damn it.
28:29
And so when you have an outlet like skiing and outdoors specifically, because
28:34
when you get out in nature and you look at our world and how grateful
28:38
we all need to be for what's around us and the beauty and the quiet
28:42
and the piece. And I don't know if you identify with that, Ryan,
28:45
I know with me with skiing, it's like, oh my god,
28:49
I can hear just the sound of my skis and the snow. I can
28:52
like hear when I'm going through trees and snow's fallen down onto the ground below.
28:57
Like I hear the bombs in the background. For Blanche is like,
29:00
I love that piece and that quiet and that stillness that came with it,
29:03
even though I was moving fast, even though I was being extreme, even
29:07
though I was going out of bounds and doing breaking all the rules and getting
29:10
my lift. My pass is pulled from me because I was dumping off of
29:15
share lifts. I love that that piece and that silence, and I wonder
29:18
if some of that had something to do with that with you. Yeah,
29:22
you know, there's there's a lot that goes on with outdoor sports, and
29:26
I think there's sort of two things. You know. One, humans were
29:29
meant to be in nature. I really think that, like a lot of
29:33
the anxiety and the depression in the world is just the brain so confused.
29:37
It's the environment it's in because it's light out, but you're not feeling sunlight
29:41
when you turn the fluorescent light on. It's winter and you have the hours
29:48
of daylight, but it's seventy degrees in your house. Like some part of
29:51
you has to be really fucking confused about what is going on, and just
29:56
going outside is connecting with your ancestral roots in a way, like we were
30:03
meant to be outside and live off the land, and I think it's easier
30:07
to connect with that with hiking, backpacking, you know, places where you
30:11
can get a little deeper into nature. Sometimes skiing you're out on a crowded
30:15
Saturday at the resort can be a little bit like going to Disney World.
30:21
But the fresh air, the cold like Christmas of it, the sunlight that's
30:26
important. Skiing in the woods is great, you know. When you were
30:29
talking about it, it literally just brought me to this image of my mind
30:32
of this run called Mike's Way at Loud Mountain where it's a hemlock forest and
30:36
it's super tall and the branches, you know, block out the sunlight and
30:40
it's just so peaceful in there. I've always loved that run. I think
30:42
the other thing with outdoor sports that is really cool is just realizing your human
30:51
capabilities. When you have an individual sport where you can put effort in and
30:55
that effort results in progress, all of a sudden, you start to realize
30:59
that it's all in your hands. You know, anything in your life,
31:02
if you put enough effort into it, you can get to where you want
31:04
to be. And then you look back over that journey of you know,
31:08
things maybe ten years ago you dreamed about and now they're easy for you.
31:14
They're just things you do on a usual weekend. And having that perspective really
31:19
helps me out. So that's what I think the benefits of skiing are.
31:22
I think that's important. So what are you doing, like, go forward?
31:29
What's your what's your go forward plan? I want you, I want
31:30
your twenty year plan placed in front of me right now. Now, what
31:34
are you doing from a skiing perspective and from talking about the book and talking
31:38
about your journey? I know there's I mean, you're still young, and
31:42
I don't want to throw that in your face, but you are still young.
31:45
So you're lucky. But I am too, and so is your dad.
31:49
None of us are dead on this goal. But now, what do
31:52
you want to do when it comes to skiing? Are you wanting to just
31:55
like take this? Are you wanting to be in the Olympics? Like,
31:56
what do you want to do with all of this? Because you're pretty remarkable
32:00
kid, dude, I'm not gonna lie. I never like the competitive side
32:05
of skiing. I want to stay individual, but I love having challenges that
32:10
forced me to adventure and take a really long time to chip away at,
32:14
and even if I don't finish them, like I just am always somebody that
32:20
loves to have something to chip away at, something to work towards. It
32:23
just kind of keeps the fire burning. So right now, Ice ski Tour
32:29
in the Presidential Range of New Hampshire, which if you're not from here,
32:31
you look at the elevations on the mountains and you think they're probably pretty small,
32:36
But we have a pretty fickle mountain range here. The turrain is all
32:39
very steep. You're frequently skiing in forty fifty degree terrain. You're frequently skiing
32:46
on kind of wind affected, wind packed snow. There's a lot of ice
32:51
that flows just because of the water in the system. And we just came
32:54
out with a guidebook. There was this dude, Kurtneeler, who wrote a
32:58
guide book called Presidential Skiing. So I've been trying to ski every single line
33:02
in the book. And part of what makes that a unique challenge is that
33:06
it's not a highlight book. It's not the fifty best skiist sense of New
33:09
England. It's a guide book. There's literally things in there that say not
33:14
recommend it on there. It's just a list of everything that exists. So
33:17
it's the first of its kind kind of challenge as far as I've heard,
33:22
nobody's done them all yet. And it's fun because a lot of these lines,
33:28
you know, some of them have sixty foot ice cliffs in them,
33:30
and you need to bring a rope and repel off of a cliff with skiing
33:35
above it and skiing below it. Some of them are incredibly rare, and
33:39
there's some that face in the direction of the predominant wind, so the wind
33:44
strips all the snow off of it, and then you'll get a storm one
33:47
day with no wind or wind that's blowing the opposite direction for some reason,
33:52
and it'll fill it in and you just have to drop everything and put yourself
33:55
there and go ski that line like it doesn't matter if it's like thais day
34:00
and you have three classes and you're like in a different state, like it's
34:04
go time. So it's a very it's a very hard challenge, but it
34:08
just gets me so fired up because every time you get another piece at it,
34:12
you're like, WHOA, I'm getting good at this. I'm getting to
34:15
be a wizard of these weather windows. So you know, oh my god,
34:21
I love it. Dad he inspires me too, you know, sometimes
34:25
not by choice, but I've I've been inspired and I've been forced. You
34:30
know, sometimes in life you're forced outside your comfort zone and it preys a
34:32
skier. I mean I was mediocre at best for a long time and I
34:36
was in way over my head. And then even when I got pretty good,
34:38
you know, I was doing things that you know, required you to
34:42
be really good. And that's good. It's a good feeling to be a
34:45
little scared, and even happened to be this. We were just in Montana
34:46
and this is run called Big Kular, which is a really tough run.
34:51
You need to sign out, you need to avalanche, you know. Gear
34:53
and I had done it a few times, and we jumped into it the
34:57
first round of the trip with a guy called Ben Brussel. And Ben is
35:00
a huge part of the book. He was the first guy who really believed
35:02
in Ryan. He took Ryan down Big Kolar when Ryan was twelve years old,
35:06
and then he took him down this other run called Little clar that almost
35:08
nobody can do, and Ready took ran down it when he was sixteen years
35:12
old. And Ryan. His relationship with Ben is as a mentor Mentee's a
35:15
really instrumental heart of the book. But Ben's become a friend, you know,
35:17
to both of us. And we're in big kolar and and it's flat
35:22
light and the conditions are really tough. And I get in about you know,
35:24
third of the way in, and I kind of stopped, and Ben
35:27
was behind me, and he said, what's wrong. I said, I'm
35:28
a little I'm a little afraid, like this is scary, and he just
35:30
kind of looked at me and said, Okay, what are you gonna do
35:32
about it? I mean, you really don't have a choice. You're right
35:36
here. I know. I've been in those spots where I'm like, okay,
35:39
I'm like my little ego hops and I'm like we're dropped down and end
35:43
and I'm like, wow, wow, Lindsay, that was not the best
35:47
and now what are we gonna do? Yeah, And it's it's like accepting
35:52
challenges, it's getting through obstacles, it's figuring it out. It's popping out
35:57
of your bindings and carrying your skis down because you're like, I'm gonna die
36:00
if I don't like Yeah, I've had those moments for sure, And it's
36:05
but you know, in the end, when you get to the bottom,
36:07
you think, all right, I wasn't pretty, and I wish I'd skied
36:08
it better, but I did it. And I think, you know,
36:12
i'd a lot a lot back from Ryan because Ryan just you know, he
36:15
never quit, you know, in school or in life or you know,
36:17
it's certainly not on the ski slope. But and there are times when I
36:21
would watch him ski and it's like it just seems so natural and so easy
36:23
for him. But you know, some of the stuff he's done takes incredible
36:28
couradge, and and it's it's not easy. It's not being easy. And
36:30
don't forget a lot of what Ryan does in the back country. You got
36:34
to get up the mountain, not just ski down there. You know.
36:37
Oh yeah that so it's that's a big part of it. And that's part
36:44
I like the least. But I have learned to embrace it a little bit.
36:46
And I was much better on the second Antarctic trip. It really I
36:51
got in shape for it. And and you know, part of going up
36:53
can be fond. If you're enjoying it, you're having a few laughs,
36:57
and you know, it's it's a perverse, you know way of look think
37:00
it'sking because you go up for hours and hours and hours and you ski down
37:02
for minutes and minutes and minutes. But you know, in the end,
37:06
it's it's it's all worth it. You can have that moment at the top
37:07
when you're looking down and think, I got here there on my own,
37:10
and oh, by the way, isn't this the most beautiful fucking thing you've
37:14
ever seen in your life? Exactly. I think backhntry skiing really it brings
37:19
out the best in the skier. I think you can make it through a
37:22
whole life of resort skiing and have it not changed you very much. I
37:27
think you can do pretty minimal back untry. You don't have to try very
37:32
hard, and you're gonna figure out who you really are out there. You're
37:36
gonna figure out your strengths and weaknesses, and it's going to teach you a
37:38
lot. And you know, it's it's the tricky thing. You know,
37:42
when you're walking up, you have a lot of time in your head.
37:45
There's a lot of wow, this is really hard. Wow, I don't
37:47
know if I can do this. And you gotta confront those voices and acknowledge
37:52
them and try and figure out how to work with them and try and convince
37:55
yourself you can, and you know, the backhuntry game, it can just
38:00
be so tricky. You know, there's sometimes the conditions just aren't what they
38:05
are, you know, you know, or that's that's that's probably wrong.
38:08
They aren't what you want them to be, um and you have to acknowledge
38:13
what they are, and you're like, this is not the day. You
38:15
know, we gotta bail on this. You know, we're not going to
38:17
ski this line and we're gonna have to do this whole approach with bush whacking
38:22
and river crossings and misery all over again and maybe get turned around again.
38:28
If we really want to do this? How many times is going to take?
38:30
And then one day it does come together and you learn that optimism from
38:36
that, like okay, like yeah, we we did fail on this,
38:39
but the next time we got it. Or you know, wow, I
38:44
really didn't think I was going to be able to climb that, but I
38:45
did. And you learn that patience, you learn to value it more.
38:52
So you know, he looks at me like, you know, why would
38:53
you Why would I do that to skiing for twenty seconds? And it's like,
38:58
because that twenty seconds is a way, I'll earned twenty seconds. You
39:00
really feel like you deserve that twenty seconds? Would you when you get it?
39:06
I love that so much, especially for this show, the Pain Game
39:09
podcast, and it's very specific and deliberate in the word game when I played
39:15
the Pain Game, because pain is not physical pain on this show, I
39:19
mean, it has something to do with it, but it has something to
39:22
do with trauma, It has something to do with past regret, It has
39:24
something to do with obstacles that we have to face all these things in life.
39:29
And I love your visual about climbing up there and all the obstacles that
39:31
you have to put through and you get there and you're like, yeah,
39:35
great, now I did all of this, and I have to turn back
39:37
again as a chronic pain patient and somebody that deals with it on a day,
39:40
a minute by minute basis, I am doing that exact same thing.
39:45
And then I wake up like mornings like yesterday where I was like, I'm
39:47
I'm not going to be able to make it to the summit. This is
39:50
as far as I can go. And I had to be okay with that,
39:53
and I can't guarantee that every time I'm going to be okay with it
39:55
because it hurts. It's like, oh my god, I can do that.
40:00
I can do it. I've proven it to myself time and time again
40:02
that I can do it. Today I just can't. And we have to
40:06
give ourselves grace. And I'm using that more in my show because I think
40:08
that giving ourselves grace and giving ourselves the opportunity to fail even when we succeed,
40:15
because that is such a huge part of getting through pain and trauma is
40:20
wake up another day, get out there, get on the slopes again,
40:22
guys, you know, get out there. If you can only go halfway,
40:25
you did halfway. It's better than no way. And it doesn't mean
40:29
that every single time you're going to only get to go halfway. Row.
40:32
That's just what it was, That's right, absolutely, And I just I
40:36
love you. I wish I was close to you so I could like hug
40:37
you and smoke you. So when it comes to I'm your next steps in
40:44
life, Like, what do you have going on? You've got your junior
40:46
in college, so what are you doing after this? Getting into the guide
40:50
where world? Really? You know, I've realized one of the biggest helps
40:55
to me when I got into this. You know, when I realized that
40:59
I wanted to start climbing mountains and skiing them. I went up to the
41:01
White Mountains, which is just such an inspiring place because you can see almost
41:06
everything from the road and you can see things that are like only done by
41:12
the best climbers and skiers in the world just by driving by. So it's
41:16
a very inspiring place to go see. And I knew nothing, and I
41:22
had no partners, and I just went there and I just started trying,
41:27
and I was able to get some things done, but not very efficiently,
41:30
you know, not often very safely. And there were some really key people,
41:36
you know, people who were guides and climbers and skiers who have stepped
41:40
in and showed me things and helped me gain progress. And these are people
41:45
who have so much knowledge that you spend one day with them and then for
41:49
the next year you climb better, you ski better, you approach these things
41:52
better. So I realized, like, you know, you can do a
41:54
lot of impact by being a mentor for somebody or them the way. So
42:00
that's kind of why I want to get into mountain guiding. You know,
42:04
take people rock climbing, take them skiing, and teach them skills to do
42:07
these things they want to do, and sometimes that means you're hired to take
42:12
them on the thing they want to do, or sometimes it means you're teaching
42:15
them skills so they can go do it on their own. But either way,
42:21
you're giving people the tools for their dreams. So that takes a lot
42:24
of training. It's almost, you know, going through medical school except Mountain
42:30
version, trying to do the AMGA stuff. So's it can. Honestly,
42:35
it can bog me down sometimes how hard it is to do this stuff.
42:37
Sometimes I'm pulling my hair out, wondering why the hell. I'm like,
42:42
actually, yeah, doing this. I understand that. I remember that,
42:46
Why do the hell am I doing any of this? Just let me do
42:51
what I want to do. Believe it or not, it ends up coming
42:53
back and it ends up being worth while. Yeah, most places it actually,
43:00
as I hate to say it, but it's true. So um,
43:04
I know that we're clipping up here on time. So Dad, I want
43:07
to ask you how you're feeling right now about your boy, because I am
43:09
pretty stoked on him. He's the best. I mean, Ryan has been
43:15
an inspiration not just to me but to so many people, and and the
43:19
courage that he displayed in writing this book. And when I presented the idea
43:22
to him to write this book, I mean, Ryan had to disclose to
43:27
everybody that he was on two anti psychotics and anti you know, several anti
43:30
depressants, spent a week in two weeks in a mental hospital, therapeutic schools,
43:34
and all this stuff. And you know, he could have let all
43:37
this go. I mean, once he got to college, nobody would have
43:38
known any of this happened. He would have moved on with his life pretty
43:40
quickly and easily, and at the point where he was free of all this,
43:45
it would justn't been part of his past. But in writing the book,
43:47
we all, you know, I always thought, and I think he
43:51
came to realize there were people out there that we could help, and there
43:53
were parents we're going to make similar mistakes for the ones we made and hope
43:58
to God maybe we can we can had that off. But also there are
44:00
kids out there, and not just kids would the issue special needs on as
44:04
inspect r with mental mental health issues. Everybody wants to be accepted. I
44:08
mean, in this world right now, there's so many kids who feel alone
44:10
and isolated and feel different, and they don't fit in. And Ryan was
44:14
all of those. And in this book you will you will live all of
44:16
that through his eyes and say, somehow he made it. And maybe it's
44:21
the ailing power of nature, maybe it was just the belief in himself.
44:23
But he found a passion, he found himself in a situation where he could
44:28
be happy, and he carried that over into his everyday life and it affected
44:32
me. I mean, I was I didn't have any of these issues.
44:34
I was just a lazy dad sitting on the couch, and all of a
44:37
sudden, I gotta get forced up that mountain too. And I learned the
44:39
hard way that you know, when you look at the top and say it's,
44:42
you know, two thousand steps at the top, I'm never gonna make
44:45
it. I learned that. It took me years to look and say,
44:46
I know, I can't do those two thousand steps, but I could do
44:50
one step two thousand times, and I just do the one step and the
44:52
one step and one step, and all of a sudden you're at the top
44:54
and it's and it's I think that he's such an inspiration. And I think
44:59
he whether he knows it or not, he's he has a big influence on
45:02
not just people in his own generation, but even the grown ups I think
45:05
that have read the book, and I've gotten so many texts and emails and
45:07
I don't even tell him about half of them, but but people are just
45:10
blown away by what he went through, what he accomplished, and the person
45:13
he is today. He's a great writer, he's a great blogger. If
45:15
you've read any of his stuff or you see him on video, he's incredibly
45:20
honest. Everything he does comes right from the heart, different than a lot
45:22
of what you see out there. A lot of what we do on Facebook
45:25
and Instagram, and we, you know, we send this little snapshot of
45:29
our life after we take seven thousand pictures to make it perfect, and we
45:31
don't really see what goes on behind closed doors. Ryan gives it to y'all,
45:35
and I think that that's pretty spect well. And I think that that's
45:37
a huge part of building any brand, if you will, is to be
45:44
real and raw and not be you know, the Kardashians, even though they
45:50
are Row and Rio, which is gross when you think about it, because
45:52
that's their reality. Well, thank you guys for being here so much.
45:59
I want to applaud both of you guys, and I well, I fell
46:02
in love with your dad instantly and then you my god, I just want
46:06
to like, I want to hang out with you guys big time. And
46:08
I love the name of your book without restraints. Wow, it is powerful
46:14
title Housekin Saved My Son's Life. You can get it on Amazon. Like
46:17
I mentioned, it's written in to two different voices with the two of these
46:21
characters. I'm about the struggle of strength and adventure and heart and the things
46:24
that we talked about today. Is there anything else that you'd like to leave
46:28
your listeners with or our listeners with today, Ryan oh Man, I never
46:34
have a closing, I swear, but yeah, of y'all find the book
46:38
and read it and enjoy it. But you can find me on Instagram Extreme
46:44
Underscore Ryan Underscore Delana. My stories are what I do on a daily basis.
46:52
I'm on YouTube too as just Ryan Delane. I do narrative style edits
46:57
where you see like a fifteen minute worry of what it took to do a
47:00
certain adventure. You know, the good, the bad, the ugly.
47:04
Feel free to reach out to me. I usually answer my direct messages within
47:07
a couple of days, and I reply to everybody. I'd love to connect
47:10
with all of my listeners and people who are into this story. Thank you
47:15
guys both for being here and for being troopers and man, we guys got
47:20
through it, and you know we're always going to be going through stuff.
47:22
Guys. You know that's what life is all about. We do play this
47:25
pain game. We do play this uphill, downhill slalom course with ourselves throughout
47:30
our lives. And it's nice to have young guys that are on here,
47:36
like yourself, Ryan, that can give a little bit of hope to people
47:39
that are younger, because a lot of us get jaded and we get old
47:43
and we're lightly and it is a reminder of our youth and how we still
47:47
have it in us. Right wrong, we still got it. I thought
47:52
you're including me with the young guys. I mean we're not. You and
47:54
I both aren't totally old. I know. Look great, we do.
48:00
We're holding both of you can't see us on video. Take our work for
48:02
it. Yes, we're all three absolutely beautiful people here today. Thanks again,
48:07
guys for being here. I really appreciate your time with us. You
48:13
are exclusively invited to share this cathartic extreme VIP pain journey together. Let's get
48:17
to the heart of how to heal with you by my side. Do you
48:22
know someone who is living in and with chronic pain or has a similar story
48:25
to Ryan and Robs. If you do, send them our way here to
48:30
the Pain Game Podcast. I would love to connect with them and hear your
48:32
heartful stories of strength and wisdom and awesomeness. Please follow the Pain Game Podcast
48:38
wherever you digest your podcast content. We will be there and before you jam,
48:43
please be sure to leave the show. Review and rating on Apple and
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Spotify really does help us grow. Whether you believe it or not, it
48:49
does. Visit us at the Pain Game podcast dot com and follow us on
48:52
all those socials. Thanks for listening, my little VIPs. Catch you on
48:55
the other side.