What’s in a name? (spoiler alert: for me, there’s always a lot!)

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You may have noticed that I’ve renamed my practice from Pippa Counselling to Therapy with Pippa - and you deserve to know why!

It’s something I’ve been thinking about for a while. Pippa Counselling was dreamt up when I was coming to the end of my training and working on placement for a counselling charity; it felt right at the time and it continued to fit for the first couple of years after qualifying. But, over time, I realised that it doesn’t quite reflect my working identity.

The terms counselling / counsellor and therapy / therapist were often the topic of discussion during my training and later with my peers and supervisors… considering what these different words mean. Whether the distinctions matter, where one ends and another begins, and whether, ultimately, it makes any difference at all.

Perhaps technically it doesn’t make very much difference. But to me, it does.

Just before we graduated, one of my peers and a very dear friend said something to me after one of our triad sessions. Simply:

“You’re a therapist.”

Those words really landed.

I don’t know whether she would even remember saying them, but it was the first time I realy felt the value of being able to say what I do for work with real pride and a sense of self worth. From then on, that was how I thought of myself. I’m a therapist.

And so, eventually, it started to feel strange that the name of my practice didn’t quite reflect that.

There’s that famous line from Romeo and Juliet: “A rose by any other name would smell as sweet.” I’ve always disagreed with that.

My actual name is Philippa. It’s my birth name, my christened name, and yet I’ve never really felt like a Philippa. Only a couple of people have ever consistently called me that; whether they knew I didn’t like it, I’ll never know.

I’ve always been Pippa (or Pip or Pips to my friends and siblings). I have nothing against the name Philippa, in fact I think it’s a very elegant name; it just doesn't feel like my name.

My middle name is an inherited name from my father’s side and traditionally given to boys so the less said about that the better.

But to me, this matters. Words hold value. Names hold value. They affect how we understand things and, sometimes, how we understand ourselves.

Perhaps the difference between counselling and therapy is only a nuance. But it’s a nuance that makes a difference to me — to the way I think about the work I do, my identity and even, in some small way, to how I think about myself when I’m sitting with someone in a session.

So Therapy with Pippa feels more like me.

If you noticed the change, there’s your probably entirely unnecessary explanation.

And if you didn’t notice it at all, you now know far more about it than you ever needed to ☺️