The Institute for Authentic Process Healing

The Living Map

RCSP Keynote Address

This Keynote Address was delivered at the Recovery Community Support Program (RCSP) semi-annual gathering to over 250 people from more than 20 grass-roots recovery organizations from around the country funded by the Center for Substance Abuse Treatment (CSAT), Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA), U.S. Department of Health and Human Services on July 22, 2002.

Note: While this address was delivered extemporaneously, the draft below is what shaped the 45 minute talk and most of the points were expressed. You may enjoy printing this 17 page document out and reading it as if you were part of the community. In either case, enjoy!

Recovery and the Power of Wholeness:
The Five Powers of Staged Recovery

My name is Michael Picucci and I am in recovery, I am in recovery not only from alcohol and drugs, but I am in recovery of my emotional, spiritual, and sexual wholeness. These have become groundbreaking distinctions for me.

I want to acknowledge a few people who made it possible for me to be here today. First, Dr. Barbara Warren from New York's SpeakOut Community. Barbara has been a cornerstone in my development for the last 15 years, and without her, the work I am presenting today would probably not exist. John McCormack, our community's elder who has been a guidepost in my sobriety for 25 years. June Gertig and Tom Hill, your technical assistance people, who have shared a wonderful welcoming and co-creation process with me. I also thank Cathy Nugent, your project officer and CSAT, for making it all possible and lasting. Finally, I also honor each of your communities for what it takes to be a grantee and acknowledge the respect bestowed to you for your stewardship by CSAT. You certainly have my respect.

I will start with an awareness and a story about the past 18 years of my life. This story is how I got here today and I am going to condense it into 45 minutes and hopefully make it meaningful, concrete and relevant to you. This is the first opportunity I have ever had to tell this story. You are the first ones to hear it, and you are the perfect audience. I feel like I am in the absolute right place at the right time; I'm where I am supposed to be. I hope some of you have had a similar experience.

This awareness began back in 1983, when I was diagnosed with and struggling with AIDS-related lymphoma and basically being told that I was not going live, receiving chemotherapy and preparing to die. I was five years into recovery at the time, and I was a good recovery student, I had read all the right books. So good, I was now reading on learning how to die. So, I am dying the right way and I realize that it's okay, because I have had a good life. I was a good person. I was sober, but I had a bad deal at five years in recovery in that instead of getting healthy I got sick and was dying. In the bigger picture, it was all okay. Except for one glaring regret. It came to me clearly that in my life I had not even come close to living to my full potential. Though, I wasn't sure what this meant, I felt a palpable regret.

There were many traumas around that illness and years of experience and somehow, obviously, I got through it to everyone's surprise, including my own. And then I realized that I had learned to live life to the fullest and I have mysteriously been doing that ever since. I am glad to share a part of that with you today. Being here is beyond my wildest dreams. I never thought I was going to get a Ph.D. I was not a good student in school. I was dissociated for most of my school years and for those who don't know what dissociated means: I wasn't there. My body was, but my attention, psyche, and emotions were in overtime survival turbulence. I was on codeine-based cough medicine for a good part of high school. I am a butcher's son from Astoria, Queens, who spent Saturdays raking the sawdust on the butcher shop floor and delivering meat. Education in my world was not a priority.

Then something happened in 1985; I had just starting to get well from cancer and withdraw from treatment and John McCormack invited me to lead a retreat for a rehab called Veritas Villa. The ground underneath me shook at that retreat. I had another awareness that catapulted me in such a way that the whole meaning of recovery changed for me. And I began to look and discover a whole new frontier of recovery that I am about to share with you.

I want to take a minute to refer to the slide that you see here, most of you have probably read it by now.

This quote was very powerful to me because as I was scrounging in this new frontier it informed me I was on the right track. One of the things that the text says is: "That is why I think of addiction as the sacred disease. Very probably, God created alcoholism in order to create AA, and thereby spearhead the community movement which is going to be the salvation not only for alcoholics and addicts, but of us all." All of us!

In the paragraph before look at "the beginning of the integration of science and spirituality at a grass-roots level." In my talk today, you will hear a lot about the integration of science and spirituality, so much so that we will see the lines blur between them.

Cathy Nugent talked earlier about when your communities received grants in 1998, a new paradigm slowly emerged that the originators weren't expecting. Instead of focusing on treatment, you were all more interested and grounded in the concept of recovery. Your projects have now been mandated to shift from advocacy to peer-driven services. Your Technical Assistance team and CSAT use the term paradigm shift. I really think they came up with the right expression. You folks, I believe are already in it, but may not have really acknowledged it, and one of the interesting things when you are in a paradigm shift is not only that the ground shifts underneath you but it keeps moving because you're constantly finding yourself on new ground. Once you let go, relish the fun and aliveness this movement brings!

So a paradigm is a set of assumptions that we live by, a set of beliefs, a set of agreements that tell us how are problems are to be understood.

A paradigm shift occurs when an individual steps out of the existing framework and proposes new possibilities, like I started to do in 1985. This shift fuels a process of successive transition from one framework to another.

Any paradigm determines the questions we ask and the problems we consider important. Paradigm shifts are triggered when we realize that our current frameworks are in conflict with increasingly detailed and refined understandings of nature and our surroundings. And that is what happened to me in 1985. I was leading this retreat for singles on spirituality in recovery. It was sponsored by the alumni association of a pioneering rehab center. We were pretty forward thinking back then by having a gay man lead a retreat for heterosexual singles in recovery. But, everybody was totally cool with it. It was pretty neat. And at the retreat I said to the group, "you know we can cover anything you want, I have an agenda of spirituality, and singles, and so forth, but if there is anywhere you want to go…" and somebody said: "let's talk about sex." And everybody laughed. And they stayed with it. So I said: ok, we will talk about sex and spirituality, which I had no experience doing. So what I shared with them was a recent experience in my own recovery. I was five years sober at the time and just becoming a counselor. I shared with the participants a struggle I was having in my own recovery. I was having difficulty maintaining a long-term significant relationship. Long-term for me meant more than three months, by the way. I was a sober three-monther! I was able to have an intimate relationship and it could even have a rich and alive sexuality for up to three months. But somehow there was this time, when I got to know the person and we got closer, where either the relationship had to go or the sex died. And I really thought I was uniquely flawed. But, by this point I was working on it. In my own way I was figuring out several ways to work on it. And I asked the retreat group: Do any of you identify with this? And I was just using my example to get the conversation going, and amazingly all 45 hands in the room went up. And they didn't just go up, they went way up. Wow! What was happening? When all of the participants strongly identified with my struggle and desire, I had two simultaneous reactions. One was comfort that I was not alone and the other blind fury that no one had told me that this was a cultural challenge as much as a personal one. My epiphany was that "god, if we can heal alcoholism and drug addiction in community, when there is still no medical cure, why aren't we speaking about this and other problems out loud. We can surely heal this in community also. Furthermore, if this is true, what else are we all struggling with that is not being spoken about?" In retrospect, I see that this retreat was a clear demarcation of my own crossing the threshold into Stage Two recovery. The fury and curiosity ignited by this retreat initiated my intense research on the two-stage recovery model. So, needless to say that set me off on a journey and completed the first part of the story.

I really feel that my recovery paradigm shifted at that time and moment in December, 1985.

From that moment on, I was on the frontier, because there was no one else talking the same language. Thank God for Ernie Larsen and John Bradshaw, their books came out in the mid-eighties. Larsen birthed the term Stage Two Recovery and his version of that. And then, in 1988 Bradshaw actually put the first framework to Staged Recovery in Healing the Shame that Binds You. It was a nice graphic illustration of the process. I loved that illustration! I said Yes! Yes! This is it. This is what we are talking about. We can mirror it. We can look at it and say yes! This is what we are doing. We can name it. And, naming it is so important. If you name something then we can engage with it in a meaningful way. So I adopted Bradshaw's model as he turned in another direction. I always thought that he didn't see the power of what he had there. But I took his offering and began to work with it in a very focused way. And at that time, Dr. Barbara Warren joined me and we lead weekend retreats on it for a couple of years and we had a lot of fun, and they were very powerful retreats. And from Bradshaw's model, we evolved and learned a great deal together.

I want to emphasize the idea of newness, because it very much affects you as soon as we get into a paradigm and we acknowledge that we are there. The only thing you can do is create support for one another, you know, those who care, like Barbara came in and supported and joined me. And not only did she do that but she took a position as an adjunct professor on my doctoral committee to help me formulate these concepts in an academic framework. Only by doing this could we get more acceptance around it. To my amazement, the research was honored with the year 2000 Outstanding Leadership in Research award by the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) and NAADAC: The National Association of Addiction Professionals. A research reward! Me, a butcher's son! I couldn't believe it!

It usually takes 10-20 years for a paradigm shift to occur. I know that I have already been operating in my emerging recovery paradigm for 17-18 years. You folks together have been in yours for 4 years, 5 years. There is a great possibility that you could be in it right now. And it is happening, trust me. It is happening all around us. We just haven't named it yet. If you look around, you are going to see the concepts that I am going to share with you as we go along are really not new. Just go to our website TheInstitute.org and peruse the content, links and recommended reading in the Doorways on Authentic Process Healing, Addiction & Recovery, and on Community. You will be amazed. Many of you may already know this on a deeper but unsaid level already. We just haven't packaged it in a way that works for us, yet. I am inviting and suggesting that we consider doing that as we move on into this conference.

By 1994, after an extensive surveying and research project, we discovered what people wanted from Stage Two recovery. I was doing workshops sometimes 2-3 weekends a month on staged recovery at this point, because I wanted to learn about it. And in the workshops I would give surveys out to people and say: What is it you want from Stage Two recovery? When you come to Stage Two recovery, what do you want from it? People articulated what they wanted from Stage Two recovery. After 4 years we took all that information and two groups of eight put their information together and we came out with 8 sentences of intent. Everything, finally chopped up and refined, came down to what we call The Constellation of Desires people bring to Stage Two recovery.

People entering Stage Two recovery often are not aware that they have these desires. Depending on where you are in your own recovery, you may, or you may not relate to these. You may say: well I don't have a sexual-spiritual split. But you may be saying that from a perspective of never having a long-term relationship in sobriety that included alive sexuality, where both the relationship and sexuality work. I don't know. You have to ask yourself that. So far I have not met a recovering person, who has been able to fuse them both without some help and facilitation in getting through those barriers. This same concept is evident in all these desires:

1) A desire for help in identifying, expressing, and accepting conflict feelings and barriers for wholeness.
2) A desire to connect in more meaningful ways with others, and to be part of a community.
3) A desire to heal the internalized schism between sexual and spiritual (or love) energies.
4) A desire to grasp our role in power dynamics, thereby resolving our difficulty with authority figures and intimates.
5) A desire to sustain consistent loving relationships, and experience real intimacy on all levels.
6) A desire to achieve a "shame-free presentation of self." What do we mean by that? We get to a point in our development where we have connected with enough parts of ourselves where we are no longer ashamed of any aspect of our personal history, or who we are, or where we have been. Not only are we not ashamed by it, but it is the solid ground we stand on. Whether our biographical history is pleasant or unpleasant is not important. It is still our history. And our history is significant, it keeps us grounded. And it is such a delight to be able to be shame-free, whatever our history happened to be, wherever our evolution has taken us.
7) A desire to discover our individual life purpose.
8) A yearning to "know who we are" in a real and spiritual sense.

This is what people bring to and experience in their working through Stage Two, this is what they are getting.

By 1995, we clarified the "five powers" for dissolving barriers to wholeness that we were already using.

Notice on the slide "Respect for Self and Other" is at the top from bottom of the powers with lines and arrows. I think of those arrows and those lines as being an electric current. Because they are the energy that runs through the other five powers. When we say respect for self and others, those words are intentionally placed, as respect for self is first, then others. So if we are ever on sketchy ground, in any complex situation, we can always check in with ourselves: Am I respecting myself? Am I respecting the other? And if we can say yes to both of those, we are on really solid ground. We know we are ok.

1) The Power of Community Based Healing. You folks know about this already. What I am saying now is let's stake and hold our claim that we know it, and let's use it intentionally.

2) The Power of Shared Intentionality. Intentionality is one of the most powerful forces in the universe, but we haven't always been consciously aware of that. To demonstrate the power of shared intentionality, I like to use my 12-step experience. When I came into recovery I had no idea that I could possibly stay sober, I was doing drugs and alcohol since I was 13 years old. The thought I could live a life without them was inconceivable to me. But, you know, I had an intention, and I got together with this group of people in a room and they all had a similar intention, and we shared that intention and, son of a gun, I got sober. And I did it just by sharing an intention with a bunch of my recovering cronies.

3) The Power of Shared Belief. In my recovery story the belief was: this can actually happen to me. They are sober, they have been coming around for a while, maybe I could do it too. Maybe I could. And I did. The power in that shared belief. What I am saying is that especially when we enter Stage Two, is that we want to use these powers very consciously.

4) The Power of Authentic Process. How will this affect our progress? In 12-step jargon, for those of you who are familiar with it, you might think of this as rigorous honesty. Authentic Process is an update with an energetic twist. But it basically means their is power in being real. This is what I reminded myself I wanted to do when I spoke to you this morning. Michael, just be Michael, you know? You don't have to do anything to impress anybody. Just be you. The authentic process is the process of being real with each other.

5) The last and most recently added power is: The Power of Grounding through Resource. This comes with the evolution of the word resource that I will explain shortly. To fully grasp this power, let's do a little exercise. However, before I do the exercise I want to introduce you to a friend of mine. This is an invisible (unseen) friend. And a lot of the healing in Stage two has to do with invisible or unseen realities. So let me introduce you to that phrase now. What is an invisible or unseen reality? Love? How about love? Is love an invisible reality? How about the experience of connection? Powerful, yet unseen. Compulsion, too is an unseen reality. We may see manifestations of these realities, but in the moment of their occurrence, they can not be quantified. We have a lot of these invisible realities. They are very, very real and very, very important, but they are invisible so we don't pay as much attention to them as what we can see or touch. But we experience them nonetheless. In Stage Two recovery you have to pay a lot of attention to invisible realities because they become guiding powers and principles. As we learn to tune into these unseen guides, through the felt senses of the body, they direct our course. One of these invisible realities is possibility. That's what this gathering is about. You and I hold that kernel of possibility inside ourselves. Let's awaken it and bring it out into the world.

So now that you know something about these unseen resources, there is a little friend I want to introduce you to. His name is "Curious Observer Self." He or she is the guy or gal who kinds of hangs out here, and he can watch you and he can just notice, or she, notice what is happening in your being. And the curious observe self has no judgment and no agenda. Just curious, like "hmmm" how did that happen? Ok, got it? That's interesting!

I want to do a two-minute exercise with you, and if you would make a little room around yourself so you can sit comfortably with your feet on the floor, because this fifth power you can't really get without experiencing it. So, I will give you a quick experience of it so you know what I am talking about. Feel your feet on the floor and your back on the chair. Good. I am going to ask you, if you are comfortable with it, to gently close your eyes. You don't have to, but for most people the exercise works a little better with your eyes closed.

Ok, so everyone gently close your eyes. And just experience yourself as you feel your feet on the floor, just know what it is like to bring awareness to your feet and the floor. Just notice the empty space or energy between your feet and the floor. Notice the "felt sense" of the body. The felt sense of the body becomes very important. Just kind of tune in to it. Oh yeah, I kind of felt this, I actually feel my foot on the floor, you know that kind of thing. Ok, great. And then feel your butt on the chair, and your thighs, and your back, and just notice and curiously observe if there are any areas where you can feel the sensation of your back or your butt or your thighs touching the chair, when you can actually feel it more in some places than in others. Just notice. Isn't that interesting that you can actually feel your self in your body.

Now I am going to ask you to use a little imagery. Just take the first thing that comes when I suggest this imagery. Imagine a time when you helped someone else in recovery, when you were meaningful and helpful to someone else in recovery, or the other way around, when someone else in recovery was meaningful and helpful to you. And if something doesn't come to you with that, find someone you loved, someone else. And just take whatever image comes, whatever comes first and take it and allow it to grow through your imagery. Just allow it to fill in so you see the room or place, the face, where you were at the time, what was happening. And now with that imagery, I am going to ask you to invite your body to connect with the imagery, to notice how your body responds to that image and just curiously observe the felt senses in your body as you respond to that image. Curiously, curiously. Observe

And when you notice how it responds, just give it permission, give what ever is going on in your body room to be. Let it respond just that way, so it is responding in that perfect way whatever it is. The body has an innate intelligence and just note what happens next if you let it respond how it wants to. In a minute I am going to ask you to softly open your eyes. Before you do I am going to ask you to answer one more question. Just ask yourself, in doing this little exercise was anything illuminated to me? And notice what emerged. Whenever you are ready, you can softly open your eyes. And if you feel like it, and feel that you have some good energy in you and you want to look around the room a little bit, connect eyes with other people, and know that you are not alone.

So I just want to ask if at least a few people had a connection, had an experience of feeling an expansive feeling of energy in their body when you did the exercise? This little exercise begins to give some idea of what I mean by grounding through resource. The helping or loving energy (unseen) was the resource energy, and your body was grounded to allow it's expansiveness which we learn to direct for specific healing. As we learn how to do this better we discover we have many more resources than we think we have, many, many more. There is a lot of energy in those resources and it can be used very significantly as we move along in this healing journey. In the emerging paradigm; we consciously choose to allow the experiences and sensation of pleasure into our bodies, beings, and communities and direct it to heal our confusions, barriers, and limitations. This is what we have been learning. When we fuse the sensation of pleasure with the edges of our challenges a mysterious and beautiful alchemy occurs. This is holism and it can speak to us if we learn to listen with more than just our ears. It brings light, joy, clarity and movement to the moment. In the new paradigm, we're being invited to "dance on the fulcrum of evolution." This is what author Jean Houston discovered about lively, creative people. They have a sense that they are dancing full of energy and light.

I want to take a moment now to identify how I classify myself in doing this kind of work. I say that I'm a peer-practitioner. That's who I am. I am in every sense a peer, as a recovered addict and a multidimensional trauma survivor. I had my own particular set of traumas; growing up gay and different, a gun toting dad chasing mom around the house, mom leaving when I was four, getting stuck with rageful dad, constant uprooting, and sexual molestation. Everyone has had their own kaleidoscope of small and large personal and cultural traumas. Connecting with "invisible realities" has been how I've survived AIDS, Cancer, a heart attack w/triple bypass surgery, near-death experiences, and the loss of many loved ones. Connecting the dots that seem invisible to so many has been my survival strategy. It is also important for me that I see myself as a practitioner, because I have training and in-depth study of the human condition, but I don't see myself as a treatment provider, except, of course, for insurance purposes. This is an example of the new paradigm respecting the old and letting them serve one another.

In the new paradigm, we have to be respectful to one another and the paradigm we are evolving from.

Here is why being a peer-practitioner is important as we take a quick look at the tree illustration from my book (p.15) on "The Staged Model of Recovery". It is also available on our website. I am not going through the whole thing now. I want to mainly point out that in Stage One, which most of you have already done is all conscious material, it is already in our thinking systems, it is already in our neocortex, which is the part of the brain that stacks our experiences. There is little new there. We know that already.

Stage Two, includes working on the unconscious barriers to wholeness and fulfillment through the constellation of desires mentioned earlier. It is all the "stuff" that is just below the surface that comes out as barriers. Acting out is some of that stuff. It usually comes out in one of two ways: as a physiological barrier to getting what we want, or in "acting out" in some way that we wish we didn't. Pretty simple, right? Stage Two is the resolving of the unconscious and physiological barriers to being whole and complete. To do this work, we need skilled people who know how to have respect for and appreciate engaging with the unconscious content and involuntary energetic log jams and eruptions. We need skilled peer-practitioners to teach us how to do this better ourselves. They can act as guides or midwives always "holding" a "safe container" for your innate healing capacities.

Just a quickie on the Tree Illustration of Staged Recovery, the top of the tree trunk are all what we call Stage Two stations; these are markers or navigational points that steer us toward holism or complete recovery. They are great frameworks for understanding, and on top is what we call the fruits of the tree, which are the blessings that come from having done the work. They are the motivation to undertake this journey. That is why it is good to look at the picture. When I first went to therapy in recovery I had no idea what I would get out of it… I didn't know what the therapy was suppose to do. I had no idea of the courage it would require of me.

There was no big picture when I was dealing with my own recovery and adjunct therapy. To tell you the truth, it annoyed the hell out of me! And now we have a big-picture I can look at. And now I know why I am doing the work, what it is, and where I am expected and intend to go.

Another interesting thing happened in the evolution of all this, you remember I said the ground keeps shifting underneath you? When I started doing this work, I first got hit smack in the face with clients already in recovery; 2 years recovery, 12 years recovery, or 20 years recovery, but they were all in long-term recovery. And what we began to notice was that they all had traumatic histories. At that time in the mid and late '80s, all the sexual abuse stuff was coming to the surface, and all the childhood abuse, and the adult-children stuff. We had to really face all this and work with it. We learned experiential therapies, which we were really getting good at, and psychodrama, and we did a lot of weekend retreats and workshops around emotional catharsis and release as it related to personal history traumas. It was all great work. Then hit the '90s. As the '90s and my story progressed, my experience was that I found myself being serendipitously lead to body and energy work. I was finding that we could do the same Stage Two healing in a more efficient, less sloppy way, sloppy meaning a lot less screaming and need for rage work. The energy work was more elegant and subtle, yet it was also even more powerful and empowering in a quieter way. It took until 1996 before someone came along and actually gave me a good language for trauma renegotiation. That person is Peter A. Levine, who wrote the book "Waking the Tiger: Healing Trauma," which is a breakthrough. Peter has researched trauma for more than 30 years. He has studied human beings and animals in the wild to observe how each handle trauma. He has come up with really fascinating information that has proven very valuable to the Stage Two recovery work we are discussing. Our working definition of trauma is that it is a "broken connection with spirit." It is always a loss of connection to a part of ourselves and the wholeness that is our birthright. We lose connection between parts of ourselves, our resources, resilience, and our spiritual and erotic union. Trauma happens when we experience too much, too fast, too soon. It overwhelms our systems and our physiological systems get bound up in powerful energies. When we get traumatized there is an enormous amount of activation released in us, an enormous amount of energy. You hear about these stories about the woman who lifts the car off her child, but she is terrified as this surge of energy comes through her. But for most of us what happens is that this surge of energy never gets to complete. So it is stuck in the body somewhere and we spend the rest our lives avoiding anything that could come near this trauma, or we spend the rest of lives reliving the trauma over and over and over again in some cycle of trying to break our way out of it, but we don't even know we are doing that. The results are that we either feel disconnected, deadened and depressed, or like we have our foot all the way down on the accelerator and brake at the same time.

In Stage Two we began to create and engage with communities organized around resiliency bonding. A powerful concept that was clarified recently by one of our advisors, Somatic Experiening (SE) trainer, Dr. Diane Poole Heller. In such safe settings, my historic traumas presented themselves organically, one by one, for resolution. First came the actual experience of losing my mother, then the ridicule and emotional distance of my two older brothers, my dad's anger and total disinterest, my being molested at age 5. I also had to heal those dreadful school days of terror every moment because I felt so different.

These are but a few of my life traumas that come to mind. They are all now points of strength in my authentic presentation of myself. I survived and I am alive and I am happy. Wow! I realize now that the added safety and resource in the resiliency bonding made my organic body and psyche safe-enough for my defenses/denial to relax so my authentic history and psychic injuries could come gently forth for healing. We need to have groups and communities that are bonded around trauma like addiction, illness, sexual abuse, sexual oppression, etc., for periods of time. However, if we don't create resiliency-based Stage Two structures to move through, we can get stuck in a "trauma bond" that is certainly better than when we were drinking/drugging, but stuck nonetheless in terms of wholeness and self-realization. For example, healing of a primary addiction (in 12-Step or other community setting) is for most of us the dissolving of the first barrier to wholeness. After this is grounded, resilience-based peer-driven communities can most efficiently dissolve other barriers shrouded by the addiction. Based on our findings and experience, we now know that support and healing groups need to be phase related. In Stage Two, we also realize that all addictions and compulsions have an intelligence in them. Mine literally saved my life when I had nowhere to turn with my inner turmoil and no language with which to express them. For some years, the drugs and alcohol helped medicate and quiet my inner demons. Addiction was a way of trying to get back to a good feeling. Substances were used as an attempt to regulate an organic system that was out of kilter. We now know that the same intelligence that presented our addictions runs much deeper and in it holds the blueprint for our health & wholeness. We need to learn how to access and resource this blueprint. It's all about self-regulation and self-empowerment. In resiliency-based communities, and in what we have been calling Stage Two, the three important frameworks of trauma healing are employed: Nervous System Regulation, Safe Containment, and Empowerment. Tomorrow, at our institute, Ana Venezia and I will demonstrate what does and doesn't work.

I just want to point out that in doing the energy work, one of the things we've learned and realized from hard science is that we are 99.999 % space. Did you know that? We are made up of molecules, atoms and sub-atomic particles. While it is true that we have a form, and this is hard for us to really get, but I have a slide that will try to help us see that we are space. While this is scientifically demonstrated, we are just learning to work with the energy forces that give us the illusion of form. These new healing interventions are so much larger, and more visceral, than cognitive understandings, and so much more productive.

One of the things that Levine has laid out so nicely is that our brain is actually separated in three different parts, it's a triune. This particular part, the reptilian brain, is the important part in trauma renegotiation and that is what we are talking about here. It is not the actual trauma that is important. It is not the fact that my mom left when I was four, not for the trauma renegotiation to take place. What is important is how it affected me and how it affects my life as it goes on, that is what we want to work on. One of the nice things about doing trauma renegotiation is that there is no blame. Number one, there is no time for it, why waste time? And number two all we have to do is renegotiate and thaw the frozen energies in our body. I will show you how we do that. There are profound implications in this idea of no blame. Think about it.

The reptilian part of the brain is the primitive brain we share with the wild animal world. As human beings, we have developed two other lawyers on top of it. The reptilian is the brain that has our natural instincts for survival in it. It's the part of the brain that keeps us breathing, that keeps the body functions running, and that will instinctually do anything to help us survive, to keep the organism alive. And notice this part right there, that little blue part? In a minute I will show you a picture of the whole brain and I want to show you how significant the round, blue reptilian brain begins to look.

That is all you see of the reptilian brain. The part around it is called the limbic system, which is the emotional part of the brain, and the big crevassed part around the limbic system is the neocortex. That's the part that I have a love/hate relationship with. The neocortex is the thinking brain. I hate it when it gets in my way with too much mind chatter and gets in the way of healing. It can be a real nuisance. On the other hand, it is the thinking tool that assisted me in preparing this talk.

So for trauma renegotiation we go in through the reptilian brain teasing it out, and we do this by soft-talking. Do you remember that exercise we did? By speaking softly, by using imagery and by tuning into body sensation, the reptilian brain actually talks to us and guides us to healing and trauma renegotiation once we learn how to do it. It just takes a little practice, skill and coaching to learn how to do it. I am currently in Peter Levine's Somatic Experiencing training with a group of other peer-practitioners who are all doing incredible service with their learning. They are demonstrating that as the healing occurs through the reptilian brain, it is instantaneously integrated with the limbic system and the neocortex.

One of the things Levine says about trauma healing is that when we do renegotiate trauma in the body, a significantly powerful force is released. A force for political, social, cultural, spiritual awakening and evolution. A powerful force is released every time we renegotiate trauma, every time we renegotiate a piece of trauma a force is available to us. This has been my experience. I want to show you a picture of what a "resilient nervous system" looks like. A resilient nervous system is what people expect when they walk into my office. They expect me to be there and they expect me to be present, resilient and right there, for whatever it is they are bringing, and I feel that is my job to do, and I like to be resilient. Resilience is presence, and presence to me is godlike.

So with a resilient nervous system there is an easy charge when something activates our system, we can get charged about something, but then there is an easy and natural discharge. We come right back into resilience and presence, we may never need to leave this resilient state. Now, I want to show you how most of us tend to operate. It is with an activated nervous system. When we operate with an activated nervous system because we are apparently dodging all those pockets of frozen trauma energy inside from our historic episodes that have not been renegotiated. And typically some of us can go through life stuck on hyperactivity, panic, hypervigilance, mania, or stuck on depression, disconnection, exhaustion, or we can bounce back in forth as many of us do. Many of us swing back and forth at one time or another.

This is a quick image to see how we actually do the renegotiation.

On the right side, is what we call the trauma vortex of energy. The body is incredible. We have these innate principles to actually heal ourselves. The only problem is that the neocortex, because of the way it has been developed, culturally and evolutionarily, gets in the way. But left to its' own devices, the body can take care of itself. If you ever watch a deer get really frightened, or any kind of animal in the wild, it will go into shock when something happens. I almost hit one the other day with the car, it ran in front of me, and then immediately it was stunned for a moment. Then in a heartbeat, it was like nothing happened. The deer was present, clear, and resilient. This demonstrates a healthy normal innate ability that we all have inside of us to do this. So the body is prepared for it and we can go back to doing it now. Even though we couldn't do it before, we have to learn how to take a healing or "expansion" vortex of energy (some of you experienced that earlier in the exercise) and then pendulate or fuse that energy with an internal barrier (or trauma), like every time you go to want to ask your boss for a raise and the words can't come out, that is a contraction, an internal logjam. In trauma renegotiation we are always pendulating between contraction and expansion energies in the body. It works!

So using the boss/raise example (which is a reaction to earlier unhealed trauma) we call up the image of coming up against that logjam. Then we see how the felt senses relate to that image. What does your body feel like when that happens? And it will tell you. There may be a sensation in the throat, chest will be tightening, a whole series of things. When this happens call on a resource energy. What will happen with the resource energy? Expansive energy. Then we go back and forth. Let's take that resource energy and touch it with the edge of the logjam energy, just touch it with the edge. You will feel sensations in your body, tingling, or just an energy going through your body. We just pendulate the energy back and forth and experience a third possibility; calm, wholeness and a return to resilience. The frozen energy has been thawed.

I envision a day, not too far off, when peers in recovery like all of us, peer-practitioners, like myself and some of you, can begin to put legs under community healing sessions. Peer-practitioners will also facilitate adjunct needs for medical, psychiatric, and medicinal resources. Our peer communities will be the hubs shaping all healthcare services. We will be setting the standards for healthcare service, treatment and education. This is the beginning of a transformation in addiction treatment and mental healthcare with a focus on reducing human suffering and supporting possibility, in essence moving into wholeness. As this happens, Mental Health will transform its focus from figuring out what is wrong with us and of treating symptoms (important as that may be) to the new focus on reducing suffering and supporting possibility. These shifts will actually change the planet and our relationship to it. We have the opportunity to develop peer-driven community services that can lead not only to the well being of those in and needing recovery, but also toward what trauma specialist, Dr. Sandra Bloom calls "the evolution of sane societies."

The transformations I speak of can be efficient, respectful, safe, reasonable, and effective. Surveying the big picture of recovery will begin to change everything we have known. We will see addiction recovery as dissolving the first barrier to wholeness. Each step on the way will be clear in the moment it is taken. We already know that we must take only one step at a time. As we move toward the kind of "recovery management" system historian Bill White speaks of, we will know that Stage Two healing is as important as harm reduction, primary recovery, relapse prevention, and all of the inherent cultural complexities on the landscape.

As you have included me and us in your community, we invite you to access ours. We welcome your perspectives in our evolution. Our Institute community wants to be a resource to your process. If that would be of value to you, as it would be to us, we invite your help co-create the infrastructure we need to make ourselves the resource you would want us to be. Ana Venezia, our acting director, is here to be responsive to your desires for cross-pollination between all our communities and funding sources.

We are already changing everything around us. It is now time to recognize this, pull out of our confusions, and move forward. We can do so by making more conscious the power to influence that we already have and determining how we will use this influence. How many people on this planet have the possibility of their government reaching out to them to "tell it about our process and how it can be supported?" SAMSHA and CSAT, in their own ways, are asking this of us. I believe we are up to learning and shaping the answers in the new paradigm. Yet, it will take new comprehensions and new languaging. Our advisor Nicholas Cimorelli refers to somatic literacy as one such example. It is time for us individually and, as communities, to move into the frontier and be nourished by the newness of the adventure. This is why we are here. This is where my story has brought me.

In closing, I just want to say that this is a hero's journey. Choose to live in this new paradigm. I honor you for the courage it takes to undertake this voyage of self-discovery and healing and thank you for listening.

Namaste, the spirit in me salutes the spirit within you.

Michael Picucci is the author of "The Journey Toward Complete Recovery: Reclaiming Your Emotional, Spiritual & Sexual Wholeness," a co-founder of The Institute for Staged Recovery and a focalizer at The Institute for Authentic Process Healing. He also has a private practice in New York City.

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