Halle Berry forgave late father after speaking to spiritual healer

Halle Berry has opened up about her experience talking to a spiritual healer and working through trauma.

During her interview on NPR's Fresh Air, the 55-year-old actress connected her latest film, Bruised, to the turmoil she faced in her personal life.

"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 of her father, Jerome Jesse Berry, who died in 2003.

When asked how she was able to heal from the experience, she explained that she went through "a lot of therapy" and consulted a spiritual healer.

"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," the star shared, noting that the process helped her understand her father's behaviour, which she believed was a result of lacking "love and guidance" as a child.

"He wasn't born into the world an abusive, alcoholic man who was out of control," she continued. "He became that by what he was and was not given; what he was exposed to and by what he wasn't exposed to ... (I) 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."

Berry continued to look at her father through a wider context, looking at his life through the lens of intergenerational trauma.

"I had empathy for him. I felt sad by the life that he lived," Berry concluded, stating that she "realised he was turning to alcohol as a way of numbing his experience and numbing the fact that he felt like a failure. So, looking at it that way, I'm full of love for him."