Petra Raspel Borzynski on Origin Stories ES62
In this excerpt from the Every Sing podcast, host Nancy Bos introduces Petra Raspel Borzynski, a vocal, somatic and cognitive‑behavioral coach who works with artists, Google speakers and university performers. Petra frames personal narratives as "origin stories"—the deep‑seated stories that give meaning to our lives, much like superhero back‑stories. She explains that reactions to life events fall into three emotional "brackets": neutral, distressing, and liberating/transformative, and that people tend to gravitate toward one bracket based on their worldview and community of origin. The discussion moves to how early family and cultural conditioning shape attitudes toward midlife, perimenopause, menopause, gender roles, health‑seeking, and the "starving artist" myth. Petra then uses superhero archetypes (destined heroes, chance heroes, and post‑traumatic growth heroes) to illustrate different origin‑story pathways. She highlights experiential avoidance and fusion—defense mechanisms exemplified by Black Widow’s denial and rationalization—and warns that over‑use creates a vicious cycle that limits quality of life. Petra distinguishes "clean discomfort" (healthy worry, fear, sadness that can motivate action) from "dirty discomfort" (secondary emotions that amplify distress). She advocates staying with clean discomfort, using exposure‑like techniques when appropriate, and cultivating self‑compassion through simple practices (hand‑on‑heart, breath, pet cuddles). The segment ends with promotional information for the Celebrate Singing Spring Summit and a closing wish for joy in singing.
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Hello and welcome to Every Sing. I am your host, Nancy Bos. The focus of this season of Every Sing is personal narrative or personal stories. Personal narrative is a big topic, and we will try to cover it from loads of different angles, both here in Every Sing, and you can learn more about it by reading my articles that are on my blog at lifestorydesign.blogspot.com. That's lifestorydesign.blogspot.com. And I also publish all the same articles on LinkedIn each day, so you can follow me there for updates as well. Every Sing! is made possible through the support you give my publishing work at Studio Boss Media and my events company, Celebrate Singing. If you're listening to this episode before April 23rd, 2022, you can attend the upcoming Celebrate Singing Summit. If you're listening to this after, you can attend one of our regular online education and community events, and you can purchase recordings of past sessions. The website is celebratesinging.live. As for my books, just go to Amazon, type in my name Nancy Bos, B-O-S, and they should all pop up. I really appreciate your support. Today's guest is a second-time guest for the show, and that's actually a pretty big deal. There are so many great people to interview that I don't often have the luxury of bringing a person back for a second time. And frankly, they're often too busy for a second time. But here in this case, episode 62 was different because what you're about to hear is an excerpt of a presentation that Petra Raspel gave. Hold on to your hats kind of experience. Petra is such an amazing resource. Her blending of psychology and singing is rare, and her mental powers are even more rare. And then when you add her charming accent, it's pretty much over the top. So when you're listening to this episode and you find yourself thinking, "I need another go at this just to catch everything she's saying," you have a choice. You can listen to it on the audio podcast here again, or you can go to YouTube to the EverySing channel And there you'll actually see some of the slides that she references as well. I don't— oh, and everything on YouTube, two different, two words. So I don't know which one you're on now, if you're on the podcast or if you're on YouTube, but just know that some of the episodes you will have that choice. As often as I can, I'll put it on YouTube. It'll always be on your podcast player. So if you watch it on YouTube, you'll get to see her slides. So Petra, Petra Raspil-Borzinski. Is a vocal, somatic, and cognitive behavioral coach and accredited therapist with special expertise in helping artists and creatives to perform better and despite their fears or their personal narratives that aren't working for them. She is currently one of the solo performance specialists for the University of the Highlands and Islands in Inverness, Scotland, and works as a cognitive behavioral coach for Google, helping performers and speakers all over the world sustain careers and find professional and personal fulfillment. What you are about to hear is her interpretation of personal narratives using a metaphor of superheroes. Appropriate— appropriately, she hits origin stories really hard because anyone who knows comic book superheroes knows that origin stories are a big part of each superhero's why. If we don't know why the superhero acts like they do, then we just don't trust them, she says. It turns out that origin stories are a big part of why for all of us. That's where personal narratives take seed. And if those personal narratives— or you could also say the stories we accept as our truth— are left unexamined, we might not know how to authentically act on our own why in our own life stories. Like I said earlier, this excerpt is from Petra's presentation to a Celebrate Singing audience. Celebrate Singing holds several online international events every year and a big spring summit. Again, if you're listening to this before April 23rd, 2022, then you can get in on this conference and Petra will be there. I'll give you a discount code in a minute. But even if you're listening after April 23rd, 2022, you can still buy the recordings. You can buy Petra's recording and you can attend all future Celebrate Singing events. I don't want to take any more time talking about that for now, but that's not because I'm not super proud of it. It is changing the world and I'm excited to share it, but it's because I know your time is valuable and I want to get to the content from Petra. So let me leave you with this: if you like this episode, you'll like Celebrate Singing. Go to celebratesinging.live, and if you decide you want to attend or purchase anything, use the coupon code EVRYSING. 2 words, and you'll get 15% off your entire cart. All right, so let's get into an experience. So if something happens, what are the different stages of processing that one might go through? She calls the stages brackets. Those brackets are neutral, distressing, and liberating and transformative. Neutral or distressing, or liberating and transformative. When something happens to you, say you forget your words in a performance, would you be reacting with a neutral perspective? Some people can do that. It would be maybe for some of us distressing. Ah! Or would you find it to be liberating and transformative, like, well, I got through that goof and it didn't kill me, so I'm all in now. So that's where we're starting. Here we go. Here's Petra jumping in with how we experience our reactions.
And can fall into different brackets, and they're not, um, yeah, exclusive of each other either. So it doesn't matter that, um, at times things can be distressing, and then all of a sudden, a while later, we feel liberated and transformed in a way. So we can go through all of them, or we can We gravitate mainly and mostly towards one. And why that is the case and what applies to us in particular is, yeah, basically our worldview, our community of origin. So your family, the community your family primarily socializes with and has socialized with, has a big, massive influence on how you will perceive midlife. We're obviously not talking about extreme physical symptoms. That goes without saying, that they always need to be looked into by a medical professional. But how we relate to all these changes in our bodies, in our voices, and so on and so forth, that has a lot to do with, yeah, let's call it our formative years. So we've been taught certain belief systems, we have value hierarchies, we tend to obey certain, maybe even religious or cultural norms. So basically this is really rooted very often in your childhood or in your very sort of experiences that you made that had a very, very big impact on you. They can obviously happen later in life, but the community we moved in in our formative years has a really, a really big impact on that. So you're taught a lot about gender roles, you're being taught a lot about what success means, what career would possibly be the best for you, and a lot of us maybe have also been brought up with this idea of the starving artist or something like that, so that is sometimes also a thing. Also attitudes towards Drugs, for instance, and I'm not specifically talking about recreational drugs here, but also how we potentially think about things like hormone replacement therapy, how we think about taking painkillers, how we relate to seeking out a health professional or not, how we relate to, yeah, I should just battle through this on my own. This is nothing I'm talking about because my mother, my grandmother, whoever else has never talked about these things either. So whether we feel shame or guilt around these subjects, how we dress, if it's all of a sudden inappropriate, if there's a magical cutoff at age 45 where we should be wearing our hair short or have a perm or only wear certain clothes, if you know what I mean. So all of these things, they can be really rooted in your community of origin, and we tend to interpret midlife through these filters that we had for a long time already, and that also determines the emotions that we feel linked to entering midlife. And unfortunately, emotions that are linked to pleasure and good experiences, they tend to fade faster. We all have an inherent negativity bias. So memories that maybe weren't so pleasant or that were quite distressing for us, they tend to linger on longer. And that's a bit harder to sort of, yeah, reframe beliefs around these experiences. Nevertheless, reevaluating a belief is really the only way to reduce these feelings that we have around it, or maybe not even reduce them, but just making peace with them essentially, and getting, or coming to the conclusion that it's actually okay and all right to feel this way and that there's no guilt involved. Now, where do the superheroes come into play here? And I don't want to bore you with a lot of origin stories here in general, but I tend to like to group them into your three big groups. You have your superheroes that are obviously, yeah, they're destined to be heroes, if you know what I mean. You have your superhumans in it, or even the non-human ones. So they all are destined for the superhero life, and I won't even talk about those people that much here. So for instance, Wonder Woman falls a bit into that bracket as well. Then you have the superheroes who end up there by complete chance, and this is already getting a tiny bit more interesting. So being in the right place at the right time, or being in the wrong place at the wrong time. I gave you Sue Storm here, the Invisible Woman, merely because she has something that a lot of other superheroes don't have or have sacrificed. She's also a mother, and I think that sometimes falls a tiny bit short, and it has a very, very big impact on our lives as well. Also, once we go through midlife, whether we have children or not. So we get maybe to that a tiny bit later, maybe also in the Q&A. And then the psychologically most interesting origin stories tend to be those of post-traumatic growth. So that's not equivalent to PTSD, although one could think that a lot of superheroes maybe have PTSD, but logically speaking, they actually don't because of course, they hardly ever fulfill the criteria for that in clinical terms. So you very often have your reluctant superhero there, the reluctant crime fighter like Batman, for instance. So basically, they react to a quite horrific event. And through that initial helplessness they feel and all the questions they have, that sets them onto a path, path of stress-induced growth. And this is something that's psychologically really, really interesting in terms of developing resilience and sort of keeping on going despite having all these uncomfortable feelings and fears and worries around perimenopause, for instance, or menopause, and not really truly knowing what awaits us there. So it can be a very stressful time for a lot of people, and that is absolutely valid. So I'll come back to you. For a little second. And I'd like to talk about this in a tiny bit more detail, about these defense mechanisms that we often have around these subjects. But before I do that, I'd already like you to think, because we talked about the origin stories there and how all of these things potentially influence us, that you maybe— you don't have to do this now, but that you do that for yourself, maybe later Or if you feel so inclined that you already want to pop a couple of thoughts in the chat window, that's also absolutely fine. But I know that these things are very private, so no one needs to share what they don't want to share. That goes without saying. But you think about what these formative moments, so to speak, these moments around how you at the moment perceive entering perimenopause or being menopausal, so to speak, so maybe you're already through the change. So wherever, at whatever stage of your personal journey you are there, maybe think about how in your community of origin these subjects were dealt with. What is your own origin story there? How do you tend to handle everything that's related to this? Do you tend to talk about it? Was it a taboo? How do you feel about your body changing? Do you think it's important to keep on looking a certain way? How does it change your voice? How do you feel about the way your voice changes? Because I can say that about myself. I'm 48, so I'm right there with you. I'm not the monk on the mountain, if you know what I mean. So I'm experiencing all the same stuff right there with you at the same time, so to speak. And I noticed the changes. It it makes to my voice. And I also notice the thoughts I have about it, essentially, and also how my body changes, how my face changes, and how that ties in with how my relatives talked about these things, and so on and so forth. So maybe just spend a little, yeah, moment to think about your origin story. Where are you there? Okay, and while you may be doing that, or as I said, if you want to do that at a later stage, that's absolutely fine. We are going to look a tiny bit further into, yeah, what sometimes tends to hold us back. So what creeps up on us and actually, yeah, makes us stop doing the things we used to enjoy or makes us feel bad about the way we change, essentially. And in that context, I like to talk about something that we as psychologists call experiential avoidance and fusion. So I'd like to give you the example of Black Widow. Even if you don't know her, that doesn't matter that much. It's enough to know that in a way she seeks redemption, right? So she knows that she committed certain actions that she feels guilty about, and so in a way she's racking up good deeds until they outnumber the bad. So redemption in her View has to be earned. And I always like to say at this stage, for all the stuff that Freud got wrong and that we look at today with big question marks in our eyes and go like, no, seriously not. He does deserve credit for identifying ego defense mechanisms. So that's really something that we have to credit him with. So the tricks we play on ourselves to protect ourselves, our self-esteem, to shield ourselves from stress, and from, yeah, going through tricky periods in our lives. And Natasha Romanoff demonstrates denial, so she always refuses to admit the way she feels about things. There's only very few situations, yeah, here and there where she actually would talk about them and admit them. That's what we call experiential avoidance because the feelings are uncomfortable for her, and rather than confronting them, she pushes, pushes them aside. And then she's also very good at rationalizing things, so she always has an explanation for everything. So there's always some rational-seeming reason for why she does what she does, or why other people do what she do, instead of really reflecting on what could be the actual underlying reason for what's going on. And that's down to the reason that she's fused or very attached to a certain image of herself. So, um, to say that straight away, um, when appropriate, these are all mechanisms that are okay because in stressful situations they often help us to just get through the stress. So we sometimes tend to block out stuff, and that's just our nervous system trying to protect ourselves. But if we start to overuse them, and if we're using them all the time, and if they turn into a pattern, they keep us locked in a sort of vicious cycle. And that really doesn't help with our quality of life. And so basically, how does it work? I always like to give this example. Yeah, if you think of experiential avoidance a bit like, yeah, the villain in your superhero story, so to speak. So yeah, in a way that prevents us from succeeding in our quest, from doing all the things we used to enjoy, all the things about ourselves we used to feel good about. And on the surface, it might actually sometimes look good to sort of give into that. Yeah, let's call them the internal villain's demands, if you know what I mean, because it feels more comfortable in the moment, right? And we think like, yeah, that uncomfortable feeling and all these thoughts related to the way I feel about myself at the moment. They will go away. But through that process of giving in, we actually start to engage in negative reinforcement. So negative, something is taken away, in that case the discomfort, and reinforcement as in we're more likely with every time we engage in that to keep on doing it in the future, whether we start avoiding to sing because we don't like the way our voice sounds, whether we start avoiding just, yeah, wearing the clothes we bodywear like, if you know what I mean, because we enjoy wearing them, but we feel like, no, it's inappropriate for some stupid reason. So all these things, no matter what that is in our individual case, in the long term, they turn into a pattern. And at some point we will actually start to feel the paradoxical effect on that. So the safer from all this discomfort and all these thinking patterns we try to be. And the more rules we start to make up about them, the unsafer we actually start to feel, and the more we start to engage in them, and the more it starts into a, yeah, let's call it vicious cycle. And at this stage, I'd like to, yeah, give you a question again. So Do you think at this stage in your life, are there any situations, any things, anything at all that you are actively avoiding right now so that you can steer clear of the worry or the discomfort or the maybe sort of negative feelings? Although I'm always very loath to say negative feelings because they're just feelings, so they're not— and they don't have moral value. They're not good or bad as such. But let's call them uncomfortable feelings. So is there anything there related to menopause or perimenopause that you avoid? To give you a couple of examples, could be avoiding certain foods. And we're obviously not talking about foods that really make you feel bad. So we're not talking about, don't know, if you have real gluten intolerance or are celiac and that makes you feel horrid. That you keep on eating bread. That goes without saying. So this is really not what we're talking about, but maybe things you heard through the grapevine without actually knowing what it does, without actually knowing at all if it has any positive or negative effect. So, oh, it's this vitamin you should be taking, or it's this and that you should be trying, and so on. And I think we're all doing it. So it's nothing bad or not normal or so. I think we all start to do that sooner or later. It just gets interesting when when it starts to impact on the quality of our life. So, for instance, if we don't like the way our body changes, are we starting to, I don't know, exercise excessively? Are we starting to count calories, for instance, because we notice like, oh, I'm starting to put on more weight all of a sudden, which is very often just a byproduct of hormones changing? Do we stop making plans that we used to make? Because we don't like going out with the same people anymore. That sometimes can be a good thing. So sometimes we just have to remove people from our lives. And without wanting to be too frank, I find that with many women at that particular stage in their lives, the BS meter, let's call it that, tends to ping more loudly, and they just cut some people loose. And that can sometimes be very liberating. And that's totally fine. But if it's something where you feel, I'm actually enjoying it, but something tells me I shouldn't be doing it— leisure situations, especially singing— because you feel like, I'm feeling not good about my voice right now, so I'm not going to go to choir rehearsal right now, or I'm not going to record that session that I wanted to record, or whatever it might be. So it could be linked to your voice, as I said. So avoidance of things that you used to do Is there anything there? And then in the next step, does that impact on the quality of your life? So it might give you temporary relief in the moment. It might make you feel better, but does it make you feel better in the long term? That's the much more important question. And we tend to divide these things around feelings and emotions into, yeah, let's call them two groups. That might sound a bit Strange to you, but sometimes we call them clean discomfort and dirty discomfort. And with clean discomfort, we mean certain emotions, certain feelings around our body, around our voices, around the way we change, and so on and so forth, around getting older. They are fine. Worry is fine. Not knowing what awaits us is totally fine. And sometimes that can be even beneficial because it points us towards either our value systems or or it makes us finally go to the doctor's appointment because we are worried about something not feeling right. And instead of just pushing it, keep on pushing it aside, it's better to get clarity about it, right? So that worry has a purpose, obviously. So that's the clean discomfort, that type of worry or fear or sadness or whatever it might be in that individual case. And that's not inherently dangerous or bad, and that also usually resolves if we don't resist it, because I tend to say that in one of my other talks, what we focus on expands. So the more we try to push it aside and the more we try to get rid of it, the bigger it becomes, essentially. But it's in our nature to do exactly that because no one likes discomfort. No one likes uncomfortable feelings. Right. And so we start resisting them and we start to avoid them essentially. So we're unwilling to experience them. That's what it boils down to. And then we start to avoid secondary emotions. So the dirty discomfort, we get fear about the fear, we get sadness about the sadness, we get fear about the sadness or sadness about the fear. So it's not the first sort of impulse, the actually quite healthy discomfort that has a purpose, but it becomes sort of a secondary emotion. So this feeling of, oh, here we go again. Why do I always have to feel that way? Or sort of this sort of sensation that we start to sort of, yeah, get anxious about the feelings themselves, or we start to worry about the way we feel, essentially. And that's obviously a difference. So what we don't want, we don't want to engage in that experiential avoidance, essentially. And this is something, for instance, if you know a tiny bit about the Batman story, with all the flaws he has, that's one thing he does get right. So he doesn't engage in experiential avoidance, especially when it comes to confronting his fear of bats. That's why he becomes the Batman. So he essentially engages in in vivo flooding, essentially. So I wouldn't recommend that, um, to go, um, yeah, into a bat cave when you're actually scared of bats and just expose yourself in that way. That is like exposure therapy, and you should really only do that, um, when you have a therapist, um, at hand, so to speak, and it's very well planned. So it's not that common anymore that we still do these things today, but sometimes it can make sense actually. But that's one thing he definitely gets right. So he stays with that clean discomfort until it passes, or until he at least recognizes he's okay. So nothing bad is happening to him. It's not life-threatening. And that obviously requires willingness to stay with that emotion. And that's something that needs to be developed, and that needs to be sort of, especially if we're already a bit in that cycle, that we have a pattern like that. That's something we need to start working on, and there's a lot of help out there if you feel lost in that way. But if we're staying with that, this sort of post-traumatic growth that he has there, for instance, also comes at a price, obviously, because he's the poster child for hypervigilance. So while that serves a purpose for a while, especially after sort of a traumatic event, it will eventually start to hold you back, of course. So he looks at everything through hypervigilance glasses because he knows that letting down his guard makes him vulnerable. So it would mean endangering himself or people near and dear to him. So he always has to be in control. Out of all the superheroes, he's probably the one with the most severe control issues. So he has to be in control. Of his feelings, of his senses, of his environment, also of other people. And he's also a bit afraid that if he loses that control, because there's a bit of pent-up anger there and a couple of unresolved issues, that if he lets down his guards, he'll stop exercising that control that's so important for him to hold on to, and he will turn into this rage-fueled monster. That has no control whatsoever. But that's obviously the difference between a villain and a hero. So he doesn't give in in that way. So he is fused to rules and conditions. But the most important superpower of them all, and that's something before we wrap up that I always want to send people on a journey with, is self-compassion. So no matter what sets you alight and no matter what your values are, practicing self-compassion is really one of the most important ones. And that includes brief self-care practices, like just something very, very simple. And when you feel you need that time for yourself, like placing your hands on your heart and just really staying with yourself. Or if that's something that works for you, it doesn't work for everyone, to connect with your breath or hugging yourself. Or cuddling with your pets. So these are very, very sort of easy self-compassion practices that we sometimes don't even think about, but it's worth taking a minute for them here and there.
Well, that was something, right? Is your head swimming? Remember, if you want to listen to it again, you have a choice of the audio podcast or the YouTube recording on the EverySING channel. Every Sing is two words. Petra is speaking at the Celebrate Singing Spring Summit on April 23rd and 24th of 2022. If you like this episode, you will like the conference. Register at celebratesinging.live for 15% off. Use the code "Every Sing." You can even buy the recording after the event has happened. And you can find Petra on her website, singingsense.com. That is singingseense.com, S-I-N-G-I-N-G-S-E-N-S-E dot com. Or if you're lucky enough to be in Scotland, you might want to find her in person. Thanks to Stephen and Shannon O'Bent for the music. I love the theme music for this show. And let me leave you with this thought: may you find joy in singing. May you feel the blessings of singing in your body and soul. May you share your voice without judgment, and may you sing with love in your heart. I'm your host, Nancy Bos. Thanks for joining me. See you next time.
Oh baby, if you got the time.
