Halle Berry says that she's still "full of love" for her father, despite him being verbally, emotionally, and physically abusive during her childhood. Berry discussed her upbringing in a new interview with NPR’s Fresh Air, earlier this week.
“There’s lots of abuse in my childhood. I grew up with an alcoholic father that was very abusive, both verbally, emotionally, physically,” Berry said.
She explained: “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.”
Berry says that she's tried to understand why her father became the man he did, explaining that, “He wasn’t born into the world an abusive, alcoholic man who was out of control. He became that by what he was and was not given; what he was exposed to and by what he wasn’t exposed to.”
In addition to revealing that he grew up in a similar environment as herself, she added that her generational trauma goes back further than that: “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 continued: “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.”
Berry says that viewing him in this light is what has allowed her to be “full of love” for him.
Berry's newest film, Bruised, was released on November 17, 2021.
[Via]