I call my T by her first name. The other day I heard another client call her Dr X, and it felt really weird. It never occurred to me to call her Dr- it feels far too formal and medicalised, and I'm surrounded by people with PhDs (e.g. my partner, my friends, I'm doing one) who I'd never think to call 'Dr'.
I never refer to her as 'my T' except in here- the few real life people who know I'm in therapy know her name. She and I sometimes refer to her as 'my [firstname]'- e.g. 'I can't be your mother but I can be your [firstname]'- which feels like a good way to recognise that this is special and important but doesn't fit any of the traditional labelled relationships (mother/lover/friend).
Actually, I feel uncomfortable even thinking about her surname because it reminds me that she has a whole other name (she seems to use her husband's surname in her personal life) and a whole other life and it makes me worry that I don't really know 'who she is' (and then how do I know if I can trust her etc). I also went through a phase of feeling anxious about her first name, after my partner told me that in the country my T is from, she wouldn't have been baptised with that first name. I think I felt that we know so little about our Ts and if they've made up their names, we really know nothing about them, and it felt like quite an untrustworthy thing to do. I asked (or accused her, more like!) one day and she said it was a nickname but she'd only ever been called that by everyone.
There is something very powerful about naming someone and being named. Perhaps because it's the way we are first 'claimed' by our parents? I feel no connection to my name; my partner never uses it and people who know me even a little shorten it when they do use it. My T uses my name a lot- in nearly every text message she writes, and I found it very uncomfortable and hard to hear at first (as if I was in trouble?), but now I love it. I sometimes feel that my name only came to life- became real to me- when she began to call me by it. It feels 'right' when she says it.
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