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A Life Full of Color and Light:
Interview with Dr. R. Layla Salek
By Carin Chea
After training others in psychology techniques that help children with behavioral disorders, Dr. R. Layla Salek has retired and entered the arena of writing.
Dr. Salek’s work is exceptionally vivid and effective; her writing jumps out from the page to the heart. Her expertise in the field of mental health and psychology is readily apparent, though it never presents itself as clinical or pedantic.
Dr. Salek’s new book, Chaos in Color, paints a heartbreaking picture of what it was like living with a parent struggling with severe mental illness.
She leaves no stone unturned and bravely opens up the painful catacombs of her past in hopes of helping those with similar trauma. And, as the title of her book indicates, Salek sees people in color – her father green, her mother brown – adding that “when words fail, color speaks.”
In that respect, Chaos in Color is anything but a failure, as Salek’s prose is all-at-once enchanting and heartbreaking. And, while the author has unearthed painful memories of the past, she also points out an important distinction mentioned in her prologue: “None of these stories are who I am – they are merely glimpses into a faded past.
Today, I am only concerned with my present joy. My present shadows. The present breeze on my cheeks. Everything else, I have released.”
It is such an honor to speak with you. You’re an amazing writer. I love your style of writing, especially the verbal economy you practice.
I had to fight for that style of writing. I tried to write about this experience 10 or 15 years ago, and it didn’t come out right. It was very forced, and it wasn’t my voice.
In 2018, while I was sleeping and even throughout the day, the stories would just come to me as they wanted to be told. So I started transcribing. It came out exactly as what you read in the book.
The only downside was that my publisher had a tough time with the short sentences.
I personally enjoyed that. How did you come to adopt that style of writing?
Thank you. I always want to write the most impactful sentences in the most succinct way possible. It just came out that way.
Trauma, when you describe it, doesn’t come out in nice, beautiful sentences. It sometimes comes out in one or two words. Your mind isn’t trying to log in your experience in a beautiful way. Thankfully, my editor loved it and was very good with the transitions, but didn’t touch the writing.
Also, my favorite authors are pretty succinct. But, it really just came down to writing about trauma and the things I wanted to be explicit about. I wanted to be as true and honest as I could be about my experience.
If people saw that I could forgive after all that, maybe they could forgive as well. I wanted the reader to experience that journey with me and, when they get to the end, find freedom as well.
What made you want to write a book at this juncture in your career?
I wrote these stories for my mom. I wanted to have these conversations with her, conversations which we had never actually had. I wanted her to know what it felt like.
She’s bipolar and unmedicated, and raised me as a single mom without money. I wanted her to know the impact of that.
When I started, the stories weren’t in order, but as I was writing it, I would give different people “their” chapter. As they would read it, everyone collectively told me I needed to publish it.
Did your mother ever get a chance to read any of your chapters?
Well, what I can say is that the end of the book is shocking and incredibly surprising, and it’s something I don’t talk about very often.
I talk a great deal about mental illness, a broken mental health system and forgiveness. I needed for the readers to feel like they were there with me. I wanted them to see that if I went through this and could forgive, then they have the ability to forgive as well.
Going back a little, what was your PhD in and what made you want to pursue that career?
I am in the field of behavioral psychology. I worked with the most severe cases of children with behavioral disorders. I love that population. It’s personal to me because I also acted out and had behavioral issues in school.
I felt that, as a psychologist, it was a calling and that with every child I helped and healed, I was helping my mom.
Since some families can’t afford help, I started a foundation that would pay for the services. Many times, I would take cases pro bono just to help them.
I am a firm believer that everyone needs access to mental health care. In a country as wealthy as we are, I’m blown away that it all comes down to affordability.
I also wanted to help children over adults because I felt like I was changing their future. It was so sad that my mom never got help. Where I’m located right now, many people call me The Child Whisperer.
Tell us about Chaos in Color and your ability to see people in color. What does that mean exactly?
I had no idea I had this ability; I thought everyone could do what I could. I didn’t learn that it was an anomaly until grad school. One of my autistic children has the same ability, which is when I came to the realization.
For most people, I see a light that outlines their body. There are a few people in my life, however, that I see a color.
My mom was brown, my dad green, my daughter yellow, my husband is a rainbow. He’s the only one I’ve ever seen that way. As their mood changes, their color gets darker or lighter.
For Chaos in Color, if I didn’t have words to describe what was going on, I let the colors speak. When my mom was manic, she was jet black. It felt like her eyes and everything would turn black.
But, again, not everyone has a color. One of my favorite people on the planet, my grandfather, did not have a color. In fact, the last person who was presented with a color was my daughter, and she’s now 21.
Is there a term or diagnosis for that?
Yes, it’s called synesthesia. It’s when your senses get mixed. Like, most people will hear music, right? But, I see the music.
If you could go back in time and say something to five or six-year-old Layla, what would you say to her?
“You’re okay. You’re going to be perfectly fine. Not only that, but you’re going to help thousands of other children.”
In my spiritual daily practice, we are always evolving to a better place. Children are not able to understand this. I feel for children when they get in that place [of contemplating suicide], they don’t know that it really does get better.
When I was young, I knew that (to my mom) doctors equaled valium. Valium equaled sleeping constantly, and sleeping constantly led to suicide attempts. It’s very important that people get treatment. When she got older, she got worse.
I failed the eighth grade, you know. I was absent from school for 89 days. I was in my trailer watching TV and talking to God. Nobody helped, nobody called CPS…they didn’t do anything.
I remember once the school said, “Layla, we really need to get in touch with your mom,” and I replied, “Well, when you see her, tell her I said ‘hi’.”
Sometimes, I feel like I became a dichotomy in so many things. A failure who got her PhD. A professional who feels like an amateur.
Your book is intense, but it’s never dark or heavy, and I think it’s because you come from a place of forgiveness.
It’s something I’ve struggled with, regarding my mom. Oddly it was easier for me to forgive her than it was to forgive myself.
I left home when I was 15, then eventually got my PhD and didn’t come back to help my mom. That’s why I’ve included these Five Steps of Healing Forgiveness in the book.
One of the things I emphasize is you don’t leave people behind. You help your loved ones. You put your oxygen mask on first, but you help them. You forgive everyone for everything so that you’re not freezing in time on this one event.
People who are hurting or ill, they unintentionally and unconsciously hurt people. They don’t mean to do that. It’s their hurt spilling onto you.
The more you help yourself, you more you need to look around and help those around you. You shouldn’t leave them; you should help them.
Do you have any upcoming projects you’d like us to know about?
My second book is Dear Caregiver and it’s a diary of sorts about all the different things caregivers go through. I write from a mental illness standpoint. Being a caregiver is lonely and it’s a thankless job.
I also want to have a call for other caregivers to write in and put that in a book as well. That one’s almost finished.
The third book I started about three months ago. Following the pandemic, we’ve found that suicide has become the leading cause of death in America. Around the world, it has increased significantly across all age groups and genders.
Being around my mom who was suicidal, I grew up with that being modeled. I thought that was just another solution to problems. I have made attempts myself. Third grade was one of them, and that was simply asking my friend if she had a knife.
My third book is called, Flush My Head: A Continuous Ideation. It addresses the topic of “How do you go from the state of suicide to a place where you can thrive in this world?” How did you get in this hole? I talk about my own experience just so people know I’ve gone through it myself.
For more information, please visit DrSalek.com.
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