It’s not a childhood trauma thing. I had a decent upbringing. I’ve been like this all my life. I’ll talk about people using their name to others when the named person isn’t around, but I avoid using their name as a vocative to their face.
Same thing with people using my name. I don’t mind people summoning me by calling my name, but I cringe when people use my name as a vocative in front of me. I also get irritated when people I don’t know and have no intention of establishing a relationship with use my name.
I worked in a call center and we had the usual opening “thank you for calling _____ my name is early_riser, how can I help you?” I assumed the unspoken rule was that I’m giving my name so the client can later refer to me in complaints or commendations, not because I want to establish anything more than a client-employee relationship. Also, I always use “sir” or “ma’am” when addressing clients, and hope they reciprocate that respect.
Edit:
Yes I know what names are for. Also “angry” was too strong a word. I don’t lash out at people when they do this. I understand that people are trying to be friendly when they use my name and that the irritation is unwarranted, but it’s there and I want to know why.
I suspect that blindness changes the rules and expectations by quite a lot, so most of my advice would fly out of the window.
However, I do personally have a problem with remembering names, and so I have one bit of advice that I think is relevant.
My advice is that, if you think you have, say, a 60% chance of getting their name right, just say that name. If you get their name wrong, they’ll probably correct you, but if you’re anything like me, when you think it’s 60%, the odds are actually much higher.
That is actually what I do, personally, as a person who is bad with names. I realized that I used to mentally punish myself when I messed up a person’s name, but conversely, when somebody else messed up my name, I didn’t care and immediately forgave them. Basically, I was holding myself to an insane standard that I didn’t hold anybody else to.
So, instead, if I think I more likely than not know the name, then I say it. I’ve only had one person get upset with me in all the time I’ve been doing this. It’s a person who I used to run into fairly frequently, like once every couple of months, but I seemed to have a mental block on his name specifically, and I simply couldn’t remember it no matter what I did.
My only other advice is to be careful about letting people know you can identify them by odor. It depends on the odor and the person, but some people could probably be offended by that.