Mountain control: After everybody else failed Ryan DeLena, skiing saved his life

Ryan DeLena and his father co-authored “Without Restraint,” which is set for a March release. (Rob Delana)

Robert DeLena was out of ideas. He was baffled by the responsibility of taking care of his his 8-year-old son, Ryan, who had difficulty controlling his emotional outbursts. 

Even as a toddler, Ryan’s inner intensity and defiance prompted Robert and his wife, Mary Beth, to seek professional help “to nudge him onto the traditional pathway for success.” Thus, Ryan’s affliction led to his placement in therapeutic classrooms at a very early age, schools that utilized detrimental methods of behavior modification. 

That included physical restraint and the constant threat of it. 

It was a process that the DeLanas shied from using at home in Sudbury, Mass., even as officials at a handful of local schools and programs would insist it was the only way to try and control their son’s behavior. Away from school, Robert instead tried to keep his son’s mind open to new activities, keeping him active and interested. He would plan frequent trips to Boston’s Museum of Science, the Children’s Museum, or the New England Aquarium — activities that killed time. It wound up being the quiet ride to and from a destination — while his son watched a DVD in the back seat of the car — that often was the most enjoyable aspect of the trips, Robert said. 

Ryan’s behavior in public places often ranged from challenging to humiliating. Robert was having a difficult time trying to channel his son’s outbursts into something productive. Nothing — from a team of doctors to heavy medication — seemed to help Ryan. By 2010, he even was voluntarily committed to a mental hospital. 

Robert had gone skiing only a handful of times in his life, so he’s not exactly sure what made him think to bring Ryan to Nashoba Valley one cold January day in 2009. But what he and Ryan discovered that day was the spark of Ryan’s true passion in life. That obsession soon would bring father and son to ski together in the days and winters that followed at places like Wachusett, Stowe and Loon, then Big Sky, Park City and Vail, all the way to Portillo, Chile, and Antarctica, all while trying to prove the experts wrong about where Ryan could head in life. 

“If not for skiing, I don’t know if I ever would have reached the conclusion that they didn’t know him as well as I did,” Robert said. 

The unique father-and-son journey is now the basis for a new book co-authored by Robert and Ryan DeLana. “Without Restraint: How Skiing Saved My Son’s Life” is scheduled to be released in March via Globe Pequot/Falcon Guides and details how Robert, once he notes the power that skiing had on his son’s behavior, questions the path the professionals had laid out for his son. Written in both Robert and Ryan’s voices, it is the story of “a misunderstood boy, a father’s growth, and a shared love of the outdoors that formed their unbreakable bond.” 

The book also is an eye-opening look at how Massachusetts establishments dealt with behavioral problems prior to 2016, when children being injured, or even killed, by the use of physical restraint forced the Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education to issue new guidelines. It is a broken system of which Rob rarely holds his criticism over 282 pages. 

“The Applied Behavioral Analysis is such a big part of how they manage kids,” Robert said. “It’s really this reward-punishment system, no different than prison or any situation where you have an authoritarian structure and you have to force compliance on people.” 

The ultimate result of restraining Ryan over the years, Robert said, was his son’s PTSD and a lack of trust in adults.

“I have to answer for that,” Robert said.  

Re-creating those episodes in detail were, for Robert, the hardest parts of writing the book. “Because I wish I could go back and do that over again,” he said. “I get that question a lot from parents saying, ‘What should I do?’ And I’ve already gotten some emails when people hear about the book and they start asking about their kid. All these kids are so different, and all schools are different. But the only way I know when it’s wrong and if somebody is at a school where they’re being restrained or isolated, I would tell them to get out.” 

Skiing opened a new world for Ryan and his father, one completely without the restraints he despised. It gave them something to do together, a lifestyle that would begin to help Ryan dedicate his emotions to something more productive than an outburst. Eventually, channeling his emotions would land him back in public school at Lincoln-Sudbury Regional High School, where he began his junior year. 

“One of the hardest parts about going through what I had to deal with was that I could never be a normal person,” Ryan said. “Even when I finally got back to public school, I didn’t tell anybody where I was for 12 years. But they knew I wasn’t there. And I couldn’t just pretend that I hadn’t been in Sudbury for 12 years. I had to kind of just make my way through. So when I was contemplating being in college, and everybody’s from all over, and nobody really cares so much what your story is, I was kind of ready to just bury it.”  

That didn’t mean he was ready to let his past die, either. He and his father both realized the potential their story might have and what retelling it might mean for other families going through similar situations. “I always had that lingering feeling of (asking myself), ‘What if the story’s important?’ ” Ryan said.

It was after the DeLanas’ trip together to Antarctica in 2018 when Robert and Ryan began to trade notes about how the book might read. “When we finally compared notes, I was blown away,” Robert said. “Honestly, there was stuff he wrote that he remembered as a kid that as a parent, I just wanted to crawl under the desk and die because I was responsible. And I guess I hoped he forgot, or it didn’t stick with them. And it did. That was hard.

“In my version, I was so angry with what happened to him from the doctors in the schools. It came through in my writing. When Ryan read it, he didn’t want to do the book. He said, ‘I don’t want this to be my story. This isn’t a revenge. I ended up OK. I want that to be the message.’ ” 

What “Without Restraint” eventually turned into was a tale of a father’s frustrations combined with the reality that skiing provided Ryan with an outlet they, especially his doctors, had never considered before. The book also makes sure to recognize the central role that Ben Brosseau, a ski guide from Big Sky, Mont., played in Ryan’s skiing prowess and confidence, somebody who finally listened when Ryan told him that he didn’t want his skiing skills to progress with the same delays as his schooling. 

“Without Ben, I probably would have always had this chip on my shoulder that nobody believed in me,” Ryan said. “Ben was the first person to look at me and, regardless of me being a kid, regardless of me not being from Big Sky, he was just like, ‘you can ski.’ And he believed in me, and he gave me opportunities to prove that. 

“There were some times when I was even a little nervous about things and he would talk me through stuff. It was probably the first time I had trusted an adult with my life, really. Like if Ben told me, ‘You can do this or you should do it this way,’ I listened to him because we just had that close working relationship where I knew his judgment and he knew my abilities. We took that a lot of places.” 

These days, Ryan is a junior at Northern Vermont University, studying outdoor education. The backcountry season has been a bit up and down in New England this season, but Ryan has taken up ice climbing to stay busy when the snow is low in the hills. You can follow along with his outdoor adventures at his Instagram account, @extreme_ryan_delena. 

In the epilogue to the book, Ryan wrote with a maturity that can be difficult to unleash in college, appreciating his struggles for where they have brought him. “If I was offered the chance to have my childhood over again, growing up like a normal kid, I’d say no thanks,” he said. “Despite all the pain and hardship, I now appreciate that I’m strong enough to handle anything.” 

That’s much in thanks to his father, who wrote a few pages earlier, “There was one aspect of my life that I knew, with certainty, had mattered. My refusal to give up on Ryan changed his world, and that was plenty.” 

“Without Restraint” will be released March 1.