Britney Spears, Survivor of Narcissistic Abuse?
Back in early 2004, when Britney Jean Spears was twenty-two, she’d go on to marry her childhood friend on a whim while in Vegas. This was the catalyst, I believe, for her future conservatorship just four years later in 2008. In short, Britney was becoming a loose cannon in an attempt to loosen her parents and handlers’ vice-grip on her life and career. This was normal teenage rebellion behavior albeit delayed as she was in her early twenties by now. Britney had missed out on her teen years as she was too busy earning a living as a global teen pop star for not only herself, but for her family and a bevy of industry people on her payroll. She then got married to the wrong man, K-Fed, had two back-to-back baby boys, and may have been experiencing postpartum depression as her brief marriage was in free fall. Who wouldn’t crack a little under those circumstances, especially with the pressure of paparazzi?
But instead of quietly getting Britney help under the radar, her parents would set her up to control the collective “Britney is crazy” narrative with the awaiting ambulance to the psych ward, an army of flash-bulb paparazzi, and taking away her baby boys literally from her arms. Britney, unknowingly at the time, played right into their trap. The whole take-down was to get control of her finances and her life. They drugged her with heavy psych meds like lithium, for example, perhaps to make her more compliant, and her father allowed her no privacy, not even a door to her bedroom. Everything she did was under a watchful eye. She was verbally abused by her father, and told she was fat and worthless.
They worked her for years, making her shake her money-maker on the Vegas strip during her four year residency, from 2013 to 2017. How could someone who was mentally unstable — crazy, do show after show, remembering complex dance routines, and be on point night after night while bankrolling payroll for family and handlers for four straight years?
Britney was akin to a human trafficking victim, and the people who put her in that position were none other than her mother and father while her older brother and younger sister had nothing but apathetic, cliched, hollow-sounding replies to outsider inquiries. No one on the inside fought for her freedom, or sounded the alarm because they were all reaping something for themselves in return.
In a July 17, 2021 Instagram post, Britney Spears writes:
“How dare the people you love the most say anything at all…did they even put a hand out to even lift me up at the TIME!!!??? How dare you make it public that NOW you CARE…did you put your hand out when I was drowning???? Again…NO.”
She continues:
“My so-called support system hurt me deeply. This conservatorship killed my dreams…so all I have is hope and hope is the only thing in this world that is very hard to kill…yet people still try!!!!”
Britney’s blind love and trust of her family was her ultimate downfall. She should have taken a page out of Madonna’s playbook, and been the big, bad bitch from the beginning instead of being conditioned to be the sweet, trusting childlike persona that would become her deep-rooted pseudo-personality to only be exploited by those closest and dear to her.
Britney Spears, in my opinion, is a survivor of extreme narcissistic abuse that entailed severe gaslighting, severe control — including financial, lying and manipulation, triangulation, betrayal, abuse by proxy, imposed isolation and exploitation. She had even expressed that, at times, she was in fear for her life.
Britney writes in another Instagram post:
“I was a mother f***ing Saint who was scared to move or my father would put me somewhere if I didn’t cooperate….even in America, the land of the free!!!!!”
She said after her father still put her in a psych ward, ‘not one mother f***ing person stood up for her.’
Look at her eyes. This is what narcissistic abuse does to its victim. They appear broken, livid, lost, lack self-care, crazy, fearful, and the light and sparkle that was once behind their eyes — gone. They are often left isolated, paranoid, and unbelieved. This is what soul-murder looks like.
What’s really sick and twisted about this form of hidden covert abuse is that the survivor ends up a real mess, which then reinforces the abusers’ false narrative that the survivor is mentally ill, crazy, or dangerous. And make no mistake: Being exposed to narcissistic abuse over a long period of time can cause mental illness, or, at the least, emotional imbalance. The people who can step in and support the survivor DON’T because they can’t see, or maybe DON’T want to see, the larger picture at play.
Narcissistic abuse has a multigenerational pattern-like effect that often stems from familial trauma. I’d venture to guess that the pattern most likely derived from Jamie Spears’ own parents, Britney’s paternal grandparents. It’s a family fact that Jamie’s father, June Sr, had committed his wife, Emma “Jean” Spears, to a Louisiana mental hospital against her will after the traumatic loss of a child, three days after giving birth. The mental hospital had a poor reputation in regards to the mistreatment of its patients. There, Jean was forced to take lithium, an eerie foreshadowing of the same medically abusive treatment received by her global, pop-star granddaughter, and middle namesake. However, eight years after the death of her child, Jean Spears would take her life at the same cemetery where her baby was buried.
June Sr was the family bully, who’d abuse Britney’s father and aunt as well as their mother, Jean. Her aunt, Leigh Ann Spears Wrather, would go on record with New York Magazine during their 2022 investigation, accusing her father, Britney’s grandfather, of sexual abuse: “I hope he’s burning in hell,” she told the publication at the time.”
In her bestselling memoir The Woman in Me, Britney writes the following regarding the Spears’ patriarchy:
“Even in my family, it was said the Spears men tended to be bad news, especially in terms of how they treated women.”
June Sr was a severe disciplinarian when it came to Jamie, who’d then repeat the same hard-ass pattern with his own son, Bryan — Britney’s beloved older brother. And Jamie would have Britney committed against her will just as his father had his mother, and forced to take lithium just as her grandmother before her. Narcissistic abuse doesn’t occur in a vacuum. Narcissistic abuse is not a one-off, not a my bad situation. It’s usually covert and pattern-based, spanning several generations.
Britney, in my opinion, seems to be the family scapegoat — the kind, loving, generous empath, who once held and comforted her older brother, Bryan, in bed after one of their father’s severe beatings back when they were children. It’s also of my opinion that Jamie Lynn, her smug-faced little sister and father’s namesake, is the untouchable golden child of the family, who was rumored to be a big bully of one of her castmates, Alexa Nikolas, on her Nickelodeon show — Zoey 101, which aired from 2005 to 2008.
And then there was that time when Jamie Lynn triangulated her famous sister and co-star by pitting the two against each other, projecting her own bullying behavior onto the latter, prompting a “very pregnant” Britney to yell at Alexa on the set of Zoey 101.
Britney had always seen her little sister as a quasi-daughter because of their ten year age gap, and Jamie Lynn knew this, and had manipulated her older sister to lash out in her defense, even though she was the purported bully in the situation.
Britney would later apologize to Alexa in her memoir The Woman in Me after realizing that she’d been triangulated and played by her little sister for the purpose of throwing her pop-princess weight around in an effort to intimidate an innocent young actress into silence. Alexa was touched by Britney’s apology shout-out, enthusiastically voicing her feelings on X that was later included in an article for US Magazine, dated October 23, 2023:
“Oh my god I’m in shock! WOW! Apparently Britney Spears mentioned me in her NEW book and apologized to me AGAIN! She is beyond an inspiration! Seriously,” Nikolas, 31, wrote via X, alongside a screenshot from an outlet quoting Britney’s alleged apology to “that young” actress from Jamie Lynn’s show. “I am gonna say this a thousand times over! She is absolutely incredible! What a beautiful soul. Thank you Britney!”
Nikolas would respond to Jamie Lynn in the same US article, writing:
“Typical move for a bully to play the victim card/gaslight others while straight up lying. I responded to her and said ‘Please do not send me anything and please stop contacting me.’”
As a result of the abuse she suffered for well over a decade in silence, Britney seems to be in a state of perpetual arrested development, locked in a time when she was only valued for her youthful good looks, sexy-sleek dance moves, and hot, smokin’ body hence the endless nude Instagram photos and videos of her dancing in circles. It’s the only world she knows — perform, and be sexy. It’s like she’s in a continuous self-fulfilling prophecy loop that resembles the lithograph print “Relativity” by Dutch artist M.C. Escher. She’s going to have to rebuild her life from the bottom up, hopefully in a new and empowering context.
Britney Spears, a one time self-proclaimed born-again Christian, has recently announced she’s an atheist. I can see her losing her faith in God over this. Where was God? Does God even care?
The story of Joseph comes to mind. He was sold into Egyptian slavery over the jealousy of his tribe of older brothers to only rise to the ranks of consigliere to Pharaoh. Joseph’s gift for interpreting dreams saves Egypt and the surrounding area from a seven year famine. This famine would bring his tribe of brothers to Egypt, looking for siloed grain. Joseph recognized them, but they did not recognize Joseph, their own brother. He could’ve immediately put them to death right then, but he didn’t. Joseph also didn’t immediately embrace them like a fool, either.
What he did was test them. During this testing period, he learned he had a younger brother named Benjamin, who he’d never met. They would eventually confess to the evil that they did to Joseph, and showed true repentance not knowing it was Joseph whom they were confessing to all along. It was only then that Joseph forgave and embraced his brothers, when he saw sincere remorse.
Genesis 50:20
But as for you, you meant evil against me; but God meant it for good.
Matthew 10:36
And a person’s enemies will be those of his own household.
Finding meaning in suffering is never easy. In the succinct words of Neil Gaiman’s Coraline:
“Be wise. Be brave. Be tricky.”
A poem inspired by Britney Spears, included in my debut book BEFORE THE BIG BANG MAKES A SOUND.
No One is Immune
Baby, don’t you wanna dance up on me?
— Britney SpearsA pillowcase stuff full
of cold cash is dumped
over the head
of a buxom blonde
naked atop an unmade
bed in a hot mess motel
the color of puke
somewhere south
of Rio Grande.Later, in a convertible
he carjacked, she’ll take
the wheel — and do donuts
where a lake used to be,
stirring a dust-bowl the size
of Dallas as he fires off
his gun into the air
for no other reason
than crazy.Their door mat reads:
My Consequences Don’t
Live Here Anymore,
and for a while, this is true.But a house built on shot
glasses, pill bottles
and ash trays will age
a body strangely —
broken biology,
Freakonomics,
the way a fresh face
can turn into a catch-all
mitt, weathered before
its time; the way a delicate
voice can turn into the bark
of a seal, while the body,
from the neck down,
remains preserved
much longer.The buxom blonde will rock
those daisy dukes, tank tops,
and cowboy boots
just like her favorite, aging
pop-princess, who shakes
her money-maker
night after night
on the Vegas Strip,
singing the same old songs;
dancing the same old
hip-hop moves
she did when she was 18
as her fans, who have aged
along with her,
scream her name in ecstasy
in the encore.No one sees those swollen
joints she ices after each
show, cursing the
crookedness
that is her industry.But the body, like time,
continues to keep score
on all of us, and no one
is immune.
