Pop icon Britney Spears is opening up on her struggles with how her family, and in particular her father mistreated her and made her feel like a “child” and a “robot.”
The Grammy winner recalls how her father made her feel like she “wasn’t good enough” throughout her childhood and then even when she became a very accomplished artist.
In an excerpt of her tell-all memoir The Woman in Me obtained by People, she writes of her father, “Feeling like you’re never good enough is a soul-crushing state of being for a child. He’d drummed that message into me as a girl, and even after I’d accomplished so much, he was continuing to do that to me.”
She continues, reflecting how her father, James Spears, made her feel like she wasn’t an adult: “I became a robot. But not just a robot — a sort of child-robot. I had been so infantilized that I was losing pieces of what made me feel like myself.”
The singer, who broke free of her 13-year-long conservatorship under her father in 2021, recounted how it took her “womanhood” away from her, leaving her feeling like a child.
“The conservatorship stripped me of my womanhood, made me into a child,” she shared.
“I became more of an entity than a person onstage. I had always felt music in my bones and my blood; they stole that from me.”
Britney says she would have managed to recover from her famous 2008 psychiatric downfall if she had been allowed to.
“If they’d let me live my life, I know I would’ve followed my heart and come out of this the right way and worked it out,” she asserts.
“Thirteen years went by with me feeling like a shadow of myself. I think back now on my father and his associates having control over my body and my money for that long and it makes me feel sick.”
The singer then reflects on her musical accomplishments during those 13 years of conservatorship. She released four albums and headlined her Las Vegas residency during her conservatorship.
“The thing was: I accomplished a lot during that time when I was supposedly incapable of taking care of myself.”