On the woman’s finger gleams a beautiful, showy wedding band. The jewel has spirals ending in tiny diamonds. Five of them add unique characteristics to the piece. It turns out that what looks like a wedding band is not one. It was. Today, the ring represents the end of a long-lasting marriage.

Two wedding bands melted into one. It is at once a tombstone and a birth certificate. It represents a new marriage, this time to oneself. It symbolizes a decision of loyalty to oneself and to one’s purposes. It definitively buries the surrender of one’s essence in exchange for crumbs.

In the molten molecules of the gold rests a complex story of symbiosis, of a relationship with heavy emotional debts, paid off with dangerous doses of overadaptation.

The mimicked violence of a “difficult temperament,” mediated by whoever inherited the wedding bands, was dodged thanks to abundant volumes of battering of self-esteem.

The story itself, banal and predictable, has few charms. It is a script repeated in different locations with different characters. Two incomplete beings in search of a pseudo-completeness, of a provisional stabilization and a temporary guarantee of acceptance and validation. A sad end (not that of Policarpo Quaresma) to a predictable story.

In the wake of the separation, blood and viscera of an exclusion so extensive it includes children and friends. Again, a banal script repeated on stages on every continent. So much so that, beyond the (deep) pain and the anger (that growls), shame prevails, sovereign. How could I? How did I not see? Where did the sagacity of such an intelligent person hide?

What is interesting here is the possible reflection: the understanding that can make it possible to grasp and read the signs and, who knows, to light the awareness of at least one more person.

The symbiotic relationship is born amid much joy and the celebration of finding the “half,” the “soulmate” and, finally, the sensation of “I feel complete for the first time in my life.” It dies to the sound of weeping and gnashing of teeth.

Weeping from pain, gnashing of teeth from great anger. Throughout a relationship with these characteristics, people give up parts of themselves to make the whole work. Thus, much of their potential, pleasure and fullness is sacrificed in the name of a possible coexistence.

This renunciation generates discomfort, which in turn demands a movement of overadaptation to get through the days. Disqualifying aspects of oneself, of the other and of the different contexts is a survival action. The dampening of sensations, needs and even expectations allows the anesthesia necessary not to come into contact with pain. Many camp out in overadaptation and spend a whole life there. Gradually switching off their vital lights, they go gray toward the end, often hastened by emotional malnourishment.

Others progress in this spiral of survival to exasperation, the exact moment to recontract or leave the relationship, since the escalation can lead people to explosions or implosions with consequences ranging from complex to irreversible.

Transformation

Discomfort detected, it is time for decisions. It turns out that the time of arrival at this place is different for each of the partners entangled symbiotically. One opens their eyes earlier. Wakes from the anesthesia sooner. And perceives the absence of free-moving space, the shortness of breath that this emotional imprisonment generates.

If generosity and honesty still resist in the frame of reference, they will talk with the partner to organize the next step. That is a rarer case. The more common one is to turn their back on the relationship, abandoning it without looking back.

For those who stay, pain and anger: a desert journey presents itself. Like the anesthesia, this stage can turn into a dwelling place and a motto for life, leading people to gnash their teeth for the rest of their lives, chewing on hatred, embittering each day until they are consumed completely.

But it can also generate the phoenix moment: recovery of the dampened parts of the self, the return of brightness and the vitality of a life intensely lived. For these phoenix people, rebirth opens wide avenues of possibilities that can be explored with autonomy.