Dorothy Rowe’s Guide to Life. Dorothy Rowe

and with that some sense of being a stronger, more competent person.

      Thus for you being late means disorder, chaos, annihilation.

      Now if this isn’t ringing bells for you it’s because if I had asked you, Why is it important to you to be punctual?’ you would, like the other half of the human race, have answered differently.

      You might still have talked about not wasting time and being efficient but when we got to your needing to achieve there would have been no sense of having gone as far as we could go. Instead there would be a further, more important reason.

      Thus, when I ask you, ‘Why is it important to you to achieve?’ you start talking about other people, how, when you achieve people notice you, admire you, like you, even love you. When you don’t achieve people ignore you, scorn you, dislike you, even hate you, and that means rejection, abandonment, annihilation.

      By looking at the reasons which lie behind an apparently trivial decision like, ‘I don’t want to be late,’ you can reach a reason, a meaning within your meaning structure, which lies behind every decision and every interpretation you make.

       This part of your meaning structure which influences every other part is concerned with how you experience your sense of existence and how you see the threat of annihilation of your meaning structure.

      This sense of existing as a person and the threat of being annihilated as a person we each experience in our own individual way. However, as I have just shown, this infinite number of ways falls into two groups which can be defined in very general terms.

       1. Experiencing your sense of existence as developing, organizing, clarifying, achieving; seeing the threat of the annihilation of your existence as disorder, mess and chaos.

       2. Experiencing your sense of existence as being in relationship to other people; seeing the threat of annihilation of your existence as rejection and abandonment.

      Each of these definitions of two kinds of meaning structure runs to 25 words. A simple shorthand reference for each definition would be useful, but immediately there is the danger that this word would be seen as being one of the fictions in psychology which confuse and mislead. This is the notion that there are personality types.

      Personality types are no more than ideas invented by psychologists in order to measure the characteristics of people in the way that zoologists measure the features of animals or geologists measure the composition of rocks. Personality types do not explain why individuals behave as they do.