The Path from Trauma to The Power of Nature: An Interview with Banning Lyon

Our guest today is Banning Lyon, author of The Chair and The Valley: A Memoir of Trauma, Healing, and The Outdoors. An account of the abuse he suffered after being hospitalized in a psychiatric facility at age 15 and the long journey toward joy and awe that followed, his memoir was published this spring by Penguin Random House. He first wrote about his experiences in 1993 for The New York Times and, more recently, for the Washington Post. 

Based in California’s bay area, Lyon is an outdoor educator and backpacking guide whose engagement with nature was a key force in his recovery. His website is banninglyon.com. 

The transcript below has been edited for length and clarity. Listen to the audio of the interview here.

Amy Biancolli: Banning Lyon, thank you so much for being here today, and thank you for writing this book. I shed a lot of tears while reading it—and I tore through it. It’s a fabulous read.

I didn’t just cry during the difficult parts, and there are some incredibly tough parts. But there are also moments of profound beauty, start to finish. The title and the subtitle really convey that. You’ve got “The Chair,” representing the horrendous trauma you experienced while hospitalized—and then you’ve got “The Valley,” the healing you found in nature. The reader knows going in that’s the arc of the story: toward healing. 

If you don’t mind, if we could start with the chair—with your hospitalization. How did this story start? What was the chair?

Banning Lyon: My parents had a really bitter divorce. I went through a custody battle. I was bounced around from place to place.

During that period I became kind of this bitter, angry skate punk, and I fell in love with skateboarding and punk rock music—and that really gets poo-pooed a lot. But the value, the really deep, profound value, of having found both a community and what felt like people who understood me through the punk rock and skateboarding community, was really in many ways the first family that I found. I felt as if I belonged for the first time in my life, and people who understood the sort of betrayal of going through a divorce and being bounced around.

Through a series of bizarre coincidences or events, my best friend broke a skateboard. I decided to give him mine because I wanted to go skating with him, but it wasn’t really altruistic, because I wanted also to use it as an excuse to buy a new board. I do all this in a matter of hours, and my school counselor, who I’d never spoken to in my life, misinterpreted this along with other things that she completely misinterpreted. For example, I had written “Suicidal Tendencies” on one of my books. It’s a band, a great band, but she misinterpreted this as my having been suicidal—along with my giving away my most prized personal possession. And the fact that this woman had never spoken to me, and the fact that I also was into punk rock, and I looked weird: she didn’t understand me at all. She called my mom and said, “Your son’s suicidal because he had given away his skateboard.”

My mom confronts me when I get home, and I’m like, “No, I bought my favorite skateboard. I’m going to go out skating.” She’s like, absolutely not, we’re going to see this therapist—who I was seeing at the time to help my mom and I sort of get along. And this whole situation was explained to him. He tossed his hands up. “I don’t know what to believe.” And so ultimately through this, over the course of 24 hours, they decided to put me in a psychiatric hospital. At the time they told me it would be a two week evaluation, which in the mind of a 15-year-old was an eternity. I was like, absolutely not. But he said, “Look, we don’t want to force you.” I was like, what the hell does that mean? Because I was a minor.  I went ahead and agreed because I was like, okay, two weeks.

It turned out to not be two weeks. And it turned out not to be the hospital that I had imagined in my mind. It was a horrible, horrible experience.

Biancolli: I was flabbergasted. And yet you can be shocked but not surprised—because you shouldn’t be surprised when you hear stories of people not being listened to. But here you are, this kid. So many kids are looking for community at that age. Adolescence is a rough time, and nobody listened to you when you said that you weren’t suicidal. To me that’s one of the huge, huge points in your story—that this all could have been avoided if someone had listened to you.

Lyon: There’s a lot of reasons that I wrote the book. I could go on and on about it. But I didn’t want to write an expose. Those have been written. People have been writing about the troubled-teen industry for ages, and it’s still happening. Clearly, the attempt to try to shed light on this industry is not working, because people are doing it. I was like, I’m going to take a totally different tack and just tell my story. I wanted the reader to feel as if they were living my life with me over my shoulder. I didn’t want to interrupt them. I didn’t want to sort of break the illusion that they were in my head, sort of watching my life, living it with me. I wanted that to be the way in which I told my perception of the troubled-teen industry—through a different sort of lens.

One of the reasons that I did that is because this is still happening to kids. Kids still feel this way. They’re still not being listened to. In fact, if anything, I think it’s more of an epidemic today than it was back when I was younger, because there are so many jaded, discontent, upset, angry, bitter teenagers nowadays who just don’t feel like they’re being listened to. 

My point bringing this up is that not only did I not feel listened to, but these issues are still very much alive today, and I really wanted my book to sort of make that clear to people that this is not something that just happened in the 80s. This is still happening.

Biancolli: Right, and that was actually something I was going to bring up, this move to not just listen to people but pathologize them. Pathologize teens, pathologize people in distress. 

I’m assuming this has got to be something that’s hard for you to discuss. It was hard to read, and it’s going to be hard for listeners to hear, but if you could describe it right now, for them: what happened in that hospital, in that chair.

Lyon: My first month in the hospital began on an adult-assessment unit where there really were no other teenagers. There was one that I recall for three days, and then he was gone. Very much like you said, they just sort of pathologized me. “You suffer from severe depression, you’re not able to make meaningful relationships.” They just told me all this bullshit, and so I just kept trying to explain to them, “I just gave my skateboard away.” After a month they said, “Look, we’re going to send you to the adolescent long-term unit.”

These are locked psychiatric units—a double series of magnetically locked doors. They escort me out of that assessment unit. They walk me across what we called the rotunda, shaped vaguely like the Pentagon in a way, and then into the adolescent long-term unit.

The first thing I saw was what we called a “unit meeting,” where there’s a bunch of teenagers sitting in sort of a loose circle. In the corner of the room there was a girl who had been strapped to a bed with leather straps. She looked like a cave girl. Her hair was black, matted, and she just watched me with this very haunted look that I’ll never forget for the rest of my life. Minutes later, when the unit meeting splits up, my roommate comes in, and he’s strapped to a wheelchair. So he’s rolling around. He explains to me that night, and from what I learned throughout the weeks that followed, that this girl had been strapped to this bed for months. 

Ultimately, by the end of my stay—and I didn’t learn this till much later—she had been strapped to that bed for 18 months straight. A very close friend of mine from the hospital spent 333 days in a body net. He had to have physical rehab, and learn how to walk again.

This was standard operating procedure in my hospital. These were not outliers. This was not an anomaly. This happened all the time. We witnessed a ton of violence. One of the artistic decisions I had to make in the book was the violence that I described in the hospital—which is very graphic. It happened on a near-daily basis. I was workshopping my book, and people in my workshop said, “You have to stop bringing this in. I can’t hear this anymore. I can’t listen to this.” And so I had to make this decision to not beat the reader over the head with this, because I wanted them to get to the beautiful stuff in the book.

I really needed to tone down the hospital, to make it palatable, because normal human beings don’t understand what that place was like. I was put on what the doctors called “chair therapy.” I kept forgetting to close my door. They would give me these demerits called “30-minute chairs” where I had to sit in a chair for 30 minutes and think about why I had forgotten to close my door. It was clearly punitive. I got enough of those that they said, “You know what, we’re going to put you on indefinite chair, which means you’re going to sit all your free time in a chair.” I kept forgetting to close my door, so my doctor said, “Okay, we’re going to put you on permanent chair in your room”—without meals, which means I had to sit in my chair facing the wall. 

A good day was six hours. Seven, maybe. A bad day during summer vacation, when there was no school to keep me out of my room, was 10 to 12 hours of “sitting chair” facing the wall, feet flat on the floor, hands on my lap. I can’t make eye contact with anybody. I eat meals in my room because that was supposed to help me.

I was on “chair” until the day I left the hospital. That lasted 11 months. 

I didn’t go outside for five months. The one time I went outside was for just a few seconds. I didn’t go outside again for many more months. The hospital was, like I said earlier, not something normal people will ever understand, because the conditions were inhuman. One of the things that I try to describe in the hospital portion of the book is that I began to sort of dissociate. I began to build this wall between me and everybody else, because I saw people begin to really snap and become very violent toward themselves. They would tear out their hair, try to gouge their own eyes out. They’d bite themselves, because you just lose it, you get dehumanized and you have no dignity anymore. These were totally normal kids that ultimately are just sort of dehumanized to the point where they have nothing to live for.

This is another point in writing the book. I wanted to really communicate to people how traumatic it is not necessarily to just be abused, but in many ways it’s almost more traumatic to witness abuse—and to be powerless, and to not be able to help people that you witness being abused. So that was something that happened to me a lot in the hospital; and to this day, it’s the stuff that’s hardest for me to talk about. I just sort of became numb. I sort of anesthetized myself. I would see this violence every day, and it just sort of became a film to me. And that was how I survived. 

I still have that tool to this day, and it’s both a very good tool and a very bad tool. It interrupts my life. It made creating deep emotional connections with people very hard for a long time. It’s something I still have to really work on a lot.

When I left the hospital, I was just a complete disaster. I was a thousand times worse off than I was when I went in. I was very conscious of that. Even as a 16-year-old, I was very aware of the fact that I did not operate correctly anymore. It was very easy for me to become over-stimulated because the hospital was so quiet. I didn’t know how to relate to people anymore. I also had this massive stigma, now, of being an ex-psychiatric patient who had lost a year of his life, and I was relocated to a halfway house. So I wasn’t about to share with my peers where I was living, or what I had been through, because there was a lot of shame attached to that. I then began to internalize all this stuff and create a façade that would make me a little more appealing to other people. 

And so you begin to live this dual life, which I think a lot of people who suffer from trauma and abuse understand—that you sort of quarantine that stuff, and then create something more palatable for the everyday world. And with that comes a lot of shame. I lived that way for a long time.

Biancolli: Just your description of this supposedly therapeutic treatment, the chair—the strapping people down—it’s a horror story. How could you not turn off the switch and go numb? How else do you survive that? 

And how do you feel about other treatments like this throughout the history of psychiatry? Going all the way back to, say, insulin shock therapy—coma therapy—and lobotomies. And ECT, which is still being practiced. Then of course Mad in America writes quite a bit about the harms of psychiatric drugs. Do you have thoughts on that? 

Lyon: I was a 15-year-old. I didn’t truly understand whether the doctors were trying to help us. This was just this very painful treatment. There was no explanation in my mind for what they were doing. It appeared to me to be something that seemed designed, or felt designed, to make us sick. But the bottom line—and this is really crucial, I think, for people who walk away from this book—is something that my dad states this later in the book. 

Psychiatrists hold a really, really powerful and very precious place in society. Because you can’t really hold up an MRI or an x-ray and point at a white spot and say, “This is your depression, this is your anxiety, and in six months you will see this gone, because of this treatment that we will help you with.” You have to simply, inherently trust them. My dad was a pilot, and he told my doctor, “Look, I have no choice but to trust you the way my passengers trust me”—and because of that, there remains to this day this wonder in my mind of whether the doctors were trying to really help us. 

But then at the end of the day I’m thinking, “Who in their right mind would ever believe that sitting in a chair and facing a wall for 12 hours is supposed to help somebody with depression?” All these studies show that sunlight, spending time outside, is good for mental health—yet I wasn’t allowed to, five to six months at a time. There’s so much evidence to show that empirically, this stuff was not good for us. Yet they did it. 

No doctor was ever found guilty of wrongdoing, and none of this stuff was illegal. It’s not illegal to strap somebody to a bed for months. It’s not illegal to make the kids sit in a chair and face a wall for months, and that’s something that’s really important for people to understand as well.

I see a therapist today. It took me a long time to even consider giving therapy another chance. My therapist has never tried to medicate me. She has never tried to have me hospitalized or restrained, or anything. Therapy for us is more about just talking and meditation and other things. 

Ronald Reagan had a quote from the 80s. He was talking about the Cold War and trying to develop a relationship with the Russians, and he had this phrase where he said “trust but verify.” And so my mantra with therapy is trust but verify. 

It’s no different than dating. When you meet with a therapist, if you don’t feel some kind of chemistry, walk away. If they try to medicate you, walk away. It needs to be a relationship —and a relationship first based on trust. Once they earn that trust, and don’t expect you to simply give it to them, then you can give them little tiny cookies of a little more trust, a little more trust, a little more trust. If at any point in time, just like with a partner, they cross a line—then you back off, or you walk away. 

Biancolli: I love that. That’s the best advice to give anybody who is considering therapy—framing it in terms of a relationship. And also, you’re giving yourself agency. You’re saying, “I’m the person with control in this relationship.”

Lyon: Something I really want to emphasize—for the parents that are listening—is do not, under any circumstances, force your child into therapy with somebody that they do not really like. They’re teenagers. They’re social creatures. And if they don’t have some kind of bond or connection with this therapist, it’s going to all be counterproductive. 

If you want to get your money’s worth out of therapy for your child, find them a therapist that they love and care about, or at least like. Because then they’re going to actually speak to them and share the things that matter. Do not force your child into therapy out of desperation or anything else. It will not work, and it’s not fair. It’s cruel.

Biancolli: Doubling back right now to the hospital that you were in. Essentially what emerged, the story behind it, was that the chain of hospitals had been essentially corrupt—and kept you there until your health insurance ran out. And that was the basis for the class-action lawsuit against the hospitals, and all the horror stories that emerged in the midst of that.

Lyon: Our hospital was closed down almost immediately. It was physically torn down. Nearly all the hospitals owned by that chain were. Only one person pled guilty. Shortly after our lawsuit, me, my attorney, and one of the people that I was in the hospital with were invited to speak in front of Congress. 

This is back in the early to mid 90s. I decided to not go. I was tired of being what people laughably called me: the psychiatric poster boy. I was like this symbol of all the things that could go wrong with psychiatric care. I just didn’t want to be an ex-psychiatric patient anymore. I didn’t want to be famous for that. I just was tired of talking about it.

My attorney and my friend went and spoke in front of Congress. There’s still transcripts. This is during the Clinton era, when there was a lot of emphasis on trying to reform our medical care system. And really, nothing happened. There was a lot of good intentions, but the troubled-teen industry just continued on. 

Instead of using the term “psychiatric care,” they use terms like “wilderness camp,” or “schools,” or other things to sort of camouflage the industry and make it more palatable for parents and other people who are going to be signing kids into these places.

Biancolli: Going to wilderness and the valley, let’s dive into that part right now—your becoming a backpacking guide, and your response to the beauty of nature. And your descriptions, while you’re in the hospital, of having literal glimpses of the outside world. At one point you’re in the chair, and while you couldn’t see anything out your window, if you just kind of cocked your head a different way, you could sort of see a tree. And that was one of the best parts of your day. 

That speaks to something really profound. We are all built to respond to nature, and when we’re deprived of it, that’s huge. There’s been a lot of research into that.

Lyon: Before my parents’ divorce, my life was really idyllic. My dad was at the time really a wonderful dad, and he would take me on trips, because he was a pilot. We would go hiking in different places, and when he was home, we would go hiking in southern California or go sailing. We would spend a lot of time outside, and that made the hospital, I think, even more traumatic, because I couldn’t go outside, and that had always been my home. My happy place.

When I was on “chair,” the security screens were so dense that I had to rock back and forth to sort of see the tree out the window, and yeah, I’ll never forget those images. They still live in my mind. And the first time I went outside after five months–I spent weeks writing that part of the book, because I really wanted to emphasize what that was like. Because it was like my second birth, to re-experience the outdoors through a very different set of eyes, and as a 15-year-old.

I was 21 or 22 when I went through the lawsuit. I became a recluse and a computer-gaming addict. I wasn’t forced to work, because I would get monthly checks [after the lawsuit settlement]. I was not wealthy, but I was stable enough that I could not work. I built my sort of perfect world for a very wounded person, which for me involved no socializing, lots of games, lots of quiet time, no stimulus. I lived on three acres of land in the middle of nowhere in a huge house, a 3,000-square-foot house, all by myself. I let the weeds around my house completely camouflage the place. I was like Boo Radley [from “To Kill a Mockingbird”], and it was a dreamland for me. It was like paradise, because nothing disturbed me. I lived in that place for a long time. 

And I began to deteriorate, having severed that cord from almost all social contact, with the exception of one really good friend who made his way into my life. I began to sort of go mad, and that deterioration led me to a very, very close brush with suicide. When I began changing my life after that, I always went back to the outdoors. The one theme that always kept calling to me was the outdoors, the outdoors, the outdoors. As I slowly began to try to find a sense of normalcy in the world, and try to build this healthy relationship with society and being out amongst people—for me, the best, easiest, and happiest place to do it was the outdoors.

Ultimately, I became a backpacking guide in Yosemite National Park. I was living in Texas at the time. I hadn’t been to California in over 20 years. I hadn’t seen my dad in 26 years. All this stuff begins to happen in a very quick progression. 

I had sort of built this idea in my mind of what being a backpacking guide was. In my imagination it was a “ fake it till you make it” scenario where I imagined myself being the strong, capable guy that people really liked. I imagined guiding as being a sort of exercise in masculinity. I’d go out there and be like George Clooney or something in the mountains.

My backpacking boss—her name in the book is Sandy, the woman who hired me—turned out to be very much not like that. She identified very much with this wounded part of me and recognized that wounded part of me as a very important part of why I needed to be a guide, which was sort of surprising to me. When I began guiding, what I discovered almost immediately was that it was not at all what I had imagined it would be. It was actually this wounded side of me that would make me a good guide—because what I learned, what I discovered, was that a lot of people were being called to Yosemite and called to nature because of their wounds.

During one of our trips, it was early summer, late spring. The creeks are really high because the snow is still melting. This is a Half Dome trip, and we’re leaving from a trailhead called Sunrise Creek, which is right off the Tioga Road. In the first 100 yards is this massive creek crossing, and it’s very deep that time of year. It’s up to your chest, and I’m 6’2”. And so we’re ferrying packs across for the clients. 

And then this couple sits down. This guy, the husband, is this big rock of a dude. He’s just this mountain of a guy, and his wife is sitting next to him, and he’s kind of hunched down, and she has this arm around him. We’re at 7,000, 8,000, 9,000 feet. You can get some headaches up there. Some people get high-altitude sickness, the beginnings of it. I was thinking maybe he doesn’t feel well.

Sandy walks over to him as I’m ferrying packs across. Then I see his body kind of shuddering, and Sandy pats his back, and he’s clearly crying. I’m like, what’s going on? You know, I’ve only been a guide for a couple weeks, maybe a month or two. I finished ferrying packs across, and as I’m crossing the river to go back towards them—because they’re the only three people on the other side of the creek—they all three stand up together, and he’s clearly weeping. Sandy steps to the side, and his wife and him hold hands and walk into the river together.

I might start tearing up here, because it was just this amazing moment. They walk into the river together. They very meaningfully cross this creek together, and Sandy comes in behind them. 

They come out. They get to the other side of the creek, and get up. They’re putting their shoes and socks back on. And I looked at Sandy and I asked her, “What’s going on? Is everything okay?” She looked at me like, oh, you’re the new guy. Like, you don’t get this yet, do you? I was like, get what? She said his brother drowned crossing a river when he was young, and he booked this trip to finish crossing a river for his brother. 

Sandy just looked at me with a smile on her face, and she said, “Honey, this is what we do.”

I was hooked. I was like, just sign me up. This is the job for me. What I realized immediately was that 60%, 70%, 80% of our clients were people like that. Were people who had come to Yosemite knowingly or unknowingly in search of some sort of transcendental experience, some sort of healing—that my wounds, my past, is what made me a good guide, and that wasn’t stuff that I needed to leave behind. It was stuff that I needed to share. 

Through my clients, I began to learn that my wounds are not unique. They’re unique to me, and my experience is unique to me, but we are all, as human beings, wounded. That is the human condition. And we, as people, will never really, truly begin to heal until we open the doors of that place with someone else who really we feel like is a safe place and will understand us, and give us a community. 

My community was my clients. And so guiding became this huge mechanism of healing for me that I had never anticipated, and that ultimately is what gave me the courage to sort of give therapy maybe another chance.

Right now I’m sitting in this room that my wife and I call our study. We’ve got a closet, four walls, and a desk and a chair. This is not our home. Our home is outside. We as human beings evolved to sleep under rocks and trees on the ground. We are very new to this urban life, and our psyches and our bodies and our emotions have not caught up. We don’t evolve that quickly. We evolve physically very quickly, but we do not evolve psychologically and emotionally very quickly. I would take clients out for four days in the backcountry who are absolutely terrified, had never slept in a tent or a sleeping bag. By the end of the trip, they’re running at the lake skinny dipping, and they’re so happy, they’re sleeping under the stars. And so it was really cool, to me, to see how quickly that side of people comes out.

And so I love, I love that experience. For me, being a guide, it never gets old, because I get to see Yosemite through new eyes every trip. Every trip I get to see people see Yosemite for the first time, and that makes it new to me every time. And so the joy of that is something that will forever keep me healing, and it always provides me a community of people who sort of feel like a family.

Biancolli: Two things. One is I’ve only been to Yosemite once. It was for a week. And it is honestly the most beautiful place on earth—well, the most beautiful place on earth I’ve ever visited. It’s just astonishing. But beyond that, what really hit me was your characterization of everybody having a story. Because this is one of the things your book really grapples with: this assumption that, well, there are people who have broken parts and need to be healed, and then there are people who are whole. And that’s ridiculous, because everybody’s broken, everybody needs to heal. Whatever happened to us is different from whatever happened to somebody else. But it doesn’t mean that we’re not on some lifelong path of healing, and that’s something else you said that really hit me, really, really spoke to me. 

But beyond that, I think in terms of storytelling, it’s the intimate that becomes universal. Your story of trauma isn’t the same as someone else’s, but you tell it, and that allows them to feel less alone.

Lyon: My writing workshop was founded and managed by a man named Clive Matson. Clyde still runs a writing workshop. He’s an absolutely lovely human being. Clive, he’s an old beat poet, and he’s always quoting beat poets. In the early days in the writing workshop for me, he always said that my writing was so intimate. He gave me some writing advice that became sort of the mantra for how I chose to write my book, as I went back and rewrote it multiple times. It’s an old quote by Allen Ginsberg that says, great writing “makes the private world public.” That, for me, was so crucial, because I realized that there were parts of the book that I absolutely did not want to write about. 

It’s not until we share those things that we give other people permission to share those things, and that’s something I learned from my backpacking boss, Sandy. She said, “I hired you because you’re so good at giving people permission to be emotional about the beauty of the outdoors.” 

We’re giving people permission. That’s what our job as guides is. Yeah, we monitor their water intake, and we patch their blisters, and we make their margaritas and other stuff. But really, what we’re doing is we’re giving them permission to connect deeply and emotionally to the outdoors, and so that was really my goal with my book. 

Because I agree with you. We are all wounded. I had a good friend in high school. He wanted a Camaro for graduation, and he wound up getting like a Toyota, and he was absolutely crushed. At that time, I just got out of a psychiatric hospital. My mom abused me and my dad neglected me. I had been through a halfway house, and here’s this guy complaining about not getting a Camaro. I remember telling myself, “Don’t judge him. Don’t get upset. Like, this is his Mount Everest. This is his psychiatric hospital. This is the pinnacle of his suffering right now.”

I think that’s something that we all need to keep in mind for each other—to have this compassion, and not make suffering a contest. It’s not a contest. Just hold some compassion for other people. It’s easy to pooh-pooh somebody else’s suffering, but it’s when we really hold each other in our hands and say, “Hey, I see you,” that we all give each other a safe space.

Biancolli: Banning Lyon, thank you so much for joining us today. This has been profound—a truly moving conversation on so many levels. And thanks to all you listeners out there for tuning in to the Mad in America podcast.