Halle Berry spoke candidly about her abusive childhood and her father in a recent interview.
During a recent interview for NPR‘s “Fresh Air” podcast, she said that she still loves her father despite his abusive actions when she was growing up.
“There’s lots of abuse in my childhood. I grew up with an alcoholic father that was very abusive, both verbally, emotionally, physically,” says Berry.
After his death in 2003, the “Bruised” actress opened up to a healer about her relationship with him.
“When he died, I was given a gift of talking to a spiritual healer and someone that took me through some spiritual exercises to sort of heal my wound with my dad,” she recalled.
“He wasn’t born into the world an abusive, alcoholic man who was out of control,” Berry said. “He became that by what he was and was not given; what he was exposed to and by what he wasn’t exposed to.”
After time in therapy, Berry was able to trace her family’s dysfunction back generations—helping her to see her father through the lens of understanding and empathy.
“Going back another generation, they came from slavery, where my great-great-grandmother saw her daughters ripped away from her and the trauma that caused,” she further explained. “When I keep tracing it back, you realize that this was just generational trauma. That my father was just trying to survive. He was trying to find himself, find his manhood. And he was doing the best he could, and while he failed me and my family miserably, he really was only working with the tools he had been given.”
“I felt sad by the life that he lived,” Berry continued, adding that she “realized he was turning to alcohol as a way of numbing his experience and numbing the fact that he felt like a failure.”
