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 -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 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 and 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, 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 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. So the people who can step in and support the survivor DON’T because they can’t see, or DON’T want to see, the larger picture at play.
As a result, 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 onetime 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 do was test them. During this testing period, he learned he had a younger brother named Benjamin, whom 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 who 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.”
