Britney Spears breaks silence on 13-year conservatorship: 'I was losing me'

Britney Spears is speaking out about how her time under conservatorship affected her.

An exclusive extract from the pop icon's new memoir, The Woman in Me, will be found in this week's edition of People magazine.

The court-ordered conservatorship, which gave her father Jamie and a lawyer power over Spears' financial and personal affairs in 2008, is discussed in the book by Spears.

“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,” Spears, 41, writes in the book.

“The conservatorship stripped me of my womanhood, made me into a child. 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.”

Spears states that she felt ”like a shadow of myself” while under the conservatorship.

“This is what’s hard to explain, how quickly I could vacillate between being a little girl and being a teenager and being a woman, because of the way they had robbed me of my freedom. There was no way to behave like an adult, since they wouldn’t treat me like an adult, so I would regress and act like a little girl; but then my adult self would step back in — only my world didn’t allow me to be an adult,” Spears writes.

In the book, the Baby One More Time singer adds: “The woman in me was pushed down for a long time. They wanted me to be wild onstage, the way they told me to be, and to be a robot the rest of the time. I felt like I was being deprived of those good secrets of life — those fundamental supposed sins of indulgence and adventure that make us human. They wanted to take away that specialness and keep everything as rote as possible. It was death to my creativity as an artist.”