Halle Berry is opening up about her father.
The 55-year-old actress has been open in the past about her difficult relationship with her dad, referring to his alcoholism and troubling behavior a number of times.
She followed suit in a recent interview with NPR’s Fresh Air podcast, and discussed how she came to be “full of love” for her father, despite his being “abusive” toward her.
“There’s lots of abuse in my childhood. I grew up with an alcoholic father that was very abusive, both verbally, emotionally, physically,” the star said, per People magazine.
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Halle Berry opened up about coming to understand her “abusive” father after speaking with a “spiritual healer.”
(Getty Images)
The “Bruised” star said she went “through a lot of therapy” to get to a place of forgiveness for her father, who left her family when she was just three years old.
“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.
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She noted that her father’s troubling behaviors came about “largely because of the love and the guidance he didn’t receive as a child.”
“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.”
Halle Berry said that she realized her father’s generational trauma contributed to his behavior.
(Axelle/Bauer-Griffin/FilmMagic)
As she began to work through her feelings about her father, Berry said she “started to look at him as an innocent little boy who got raised by an alcoholic father and a mother who was so broken herself” before learning that her family’s trauma had even deeper roots.
“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,” shared the star. “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.”
Halle Berry ‘s directorial debut, Netflix’s “Bruised,” also depicts and abusive relationship.
(Netflix)
She said that seeing her father in that light made her “full of love” for him and gave her “empathy” for him.
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“I felt sad by the life that he lived,” the Oscar winner explained, noting 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.”
