Britney Spears Says She Feels 'Sick' Thinking of Conservatorship: 'I Didn't Deserve What My Family Did to Me' (Exclusive)

Britney Spears is reflecting on the painful years she spent under a conservatorship and the ways in which she says the court order stripped her of her humanity.

In an excerpt from her long-awaited memoir The Woman in Me shared exclusively with PEOPLE in this week’s cover story, Spears, 41, writes that for more than a decade, she felt as though she’d been handed an unfair card in life.

“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,” she writes. “Think of how many male artists gambled all their money away; how many had substance abuse or mental health issues. No one tried to take away their control over their bodies and money. I didn’t deserve what my family did to me.”

The “Hold Me Closer” singer was placed under the conservatorship in 2008 following a public breakdown. Her father Jamie Spears was removed as conservator of her estate in September 2021, and the conservatorship was terminated two months later.

Spears' time under her father’s control has continued to face scrutiny, as she has claimed it was a traumatic period, while Jamie maintains that he was acting in his daughter’s best interest.

In The Woman in Me, Spears says she was “robbed” of her freedom during that time, and often found herself stuck between adulthood and adolescence, with the conservatorship stripping her “of [her] womanhood” and making her “into a child.”

“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,” she writes. “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.”

The singer writes that while the glare of growing up in the public eye was difficult, she had previously found ways to push back, like the time she shaved her head in 2007. But under the conservatorship, “I was made to understand that those days were now over.”

Under the conservatorship, She lost her creative spark, with her passion for singing and dancing becoming “almost a joke,” she writes.

“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,” she writes. “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.”

In an interview with PEOPLE done over email, Spears dives deeper into the most difficult moments of her life, admitting that she still finds them “hard to speak about.”

“The top things on my mind are not getting a moment of peace, the judgments from strangers who don’t even know me,” she says. “Having my freedom stripped away from me by my family and the government. Losing my passion for the things I love.”

With the conservatorship in her rearview, Spears has moved on and writes in her book that she’s since “had to construct a whole different identity.”

"I’ve had to say, Wait a second, this is who I was — someone passive and pleasing. A girl. And this is who I am now—someone strong and confident. A woman,” she writes.

Spears will release The Woman in Me on Oct. 24 through Gallery Books, an imprint of Simon & Schuster. It is now available for pre-order.

For more of the exclusive excerpt and interview with Britney Spears, pick up the latest issue of PEOPLE, on newsstands everywhere Friday.