When we see all the glitz and the glamor in the lives of celebrities, it’s easy to forget about what many of them had to overcome to get where they are.
And for a surprising number of them, those struggles started at home as the sad reality is that a lot of people grow up realizing that their parents put them in some disheartening situations. We often hear stories of child stars being taken advantage of by their parents, but some of those who found fame later in life can also recall being abandoned , discouraged , or worse.
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And while it’s clear that Halle Bery suffered some sad experiences in her childhood, she has recently opened up about how she came to forgive the man responsible for them.
On December 8, Halle Berry appeared on NPR’s “Fresh Air” podcast to discuss the themes of abuse in her directorial debut “Bruised.”
And as People reported , the star revealed that her character’s experiences with abuse weren’t so far removed from what she went through in real life.
In her words, “There’s lots of abuse in my childhood. I grew up with an alcoholic father that was very abusive, both verbally, emotionally, physically.”
She touched on this dark past in an Instagram post on Father’s Day of 2019, in which she said, “Addiction robbed us of the relationship we were meant to have.”
However, that post also saw her state that she missed her father Jerome Jesse Berry deeply and that her heart was “full of love” for him.
And as she shared on Fresh Air , that perspective could only come after a long period of therapy following his death in 2003.
Berry said she found the counsel of an unspecified “spiritual healer” particularly helpful as this person apparently helped her realize that her father’s own home life had a significant influence on the kind of man he was.
As she put it, 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.”
She further stated that she believed “he wasn’t born into the world an abusive, alcoholic man who was out of control.”
And while that’s indeed what he became, Berry attributes that transformation to a complicated web of generational trauma and a lack of love and guidance in his own upbringing.
In her words, “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.”
So when Berry started to see her father’s memory from that perspective, the anger she felt gave away to empathy and sadness at the life he had lived.
As she put it, “So, looking at it that way, I’m full of love for him.”
h/t: People
