Complete Recovery: An Expanded Model of Community Healing

There are few people better equipped to facilitate, guide, and inform the healing process than Michael Picucci.

From a childhood of abuse, loss, abandonment, and continuous uprooting, Michael reached his teens already addicted to alcohol and drugs. By the age of twenty, he had lost a wife to cancer. By the age of 30, he had worked successfully in printing, as a policeman, and in advertising. He had wrestled with and resolved his sexual orientation, achieved a measure of prosperity, and nurtured his addictions to full bloom. Then, at 32, after beginning psychotherapy and losing his job, "he made a conscious and deliberate decision to recover" from those addictions.

It soon became clear to Michael that putting down the drink and drugs and joining a recovery community were not enough in themselves to bring him the serenity and self-actualization he was seeking. Impelled by the strength and focus of his intent to heal he addressed physical, emotional, spiritual, psychological, sexual, cultural, economic, and historical issues as they presented themselves, making use of whatever healing modalities, both conventional and alternative, seemed best suited to the need.

In 1983, Michael was diagnosed with a fast growing lymphoma, now recognized as an AIDS-classified cancer. From this, as well as the two years of grueling chemotherapy, the resulting suicidal depression, and a near-death experience, he also healed.

Having healed himself sufficiently, Michael resolved, with the same clarity and determination he had brought to that task, to help others heal. He went back to school, earned his counseling credentials and then a doctorate in psychology, and began to find ways to fuse, formulate, and make available to others what he had learned in the course of his own eclectic and somewhat miraculous recovery.

Today, Michael carries his 51 years - and the magnitude of his vision - lightly. As well as being a long-term survivor of HIV, he has endured the deaths of two life partners, countless friends, and a recent heart attack. When a friend joked, "Won't anything kill you?" Michael replied. "Not till I'm done."

Michael has founded a number of institutions and organizations concerned with recovery and related issues. He has published widely and presented workshops across the country. In 1993, he founded The Institute for Staged Recovery to support those in recovery and to provide a psychoeducational training and certification program for those wishing to facilitate tht process. Fundamental to all of Michael's work, both personal and professional, is the unshakable conviction that healing is more efficient and more thorough when undertaken with the support of a like-minded and educated community.

That Michael has survived at all is remarkable, a testimony to a fierce determination. That he has survived to live a life he now calls "blissful," one that fulfills him both personally and professionally, speaks of something more, a courage and a commitment to living well. But that he has survived to dedicate his life to helping others toward the fulfillment that he has achieved, and that he is able to articulate and transmit - as well as embody - this healing process as passionately and effectively as he does, speaks of vast resources of knowledge, talent, and skill, and most of all of his love.

If in these complex times there are heroes, if some are chosen to lead, to cut a path for and hold the hands of those who will follow, Michael is one of those.