Ep10 Nick Pecenica, Executive Director & Counselor CADAC II, BA
A Better Way

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[00:00:02] Chris Langley: Hi, welcome to Addiction Recovery Place, the podcast that is champion addiction treatment professionals around the world. I'm very pleased to introduce today's guest, Nick Pecenica. is a Founder, Caseworker, and Counselor at A Better Way, which is located in Indiana.

They offer outpatient addiction counseling, and Group and individual sessions, probation packages, and case management, management, in person sessions, and also mentoring. They work remotely across the state in Indiana. Welcome to the Addiction Recovery Place, Nick. Thanks for joining us today.

[00:00:35] Nick Pecenica: Good to be here.

[00:00:36] Chris Langley: Much appreciated.

Thank you so much. Before we start, Nick, I'd just like to read this quote from your website that truly captures the work that every addiction professional does. "So for those who've been given a lot, much is expected every day. I sit amazed at my full belly, relatively good health, wonderful people in my orbit and capacity to continue to pursue my dreams.

I marvel at the growth I've watched my clients achieve, whether it's in their confidence, their evolving language or straight through to what their families testify as meaningful changes. There's nothing else like it. Everyone deserves to feel that way. We want to feel recognized, heard and like you deserve to feel whole." That's an awesome quote Nick and I just wanted to say that because that really does show the work that every addiction treatment professional feels and I certainly do.

And I really related to that when I read that on your website. I think that's a really beautiful bit of writing there. So, I just wanted to share that with our audience just to, just to tell them a little about you. So, so Nick, tell us about yourself and your journey and how you got to, starting at A Better Way.

[00:01:44] Nick Pecenica: For sure. Several years ago, I had a friend who was working, in at DCS, the Department of Child Services, and he was watching me, kind of struggle to do things entrepreneurially. And he's like, you should come join me. And I'm like, I am not for that button down world. I will get fired in two minutes.

I don't have the language and the whole affect. So I got into something adjacent to it, doing a visit supervision and casework. It was just kind of my first kind of brush with that world. From there, I transitioned to DCS. I spent a few years there, went to another casework spot and visit supervision spot, then kind of lingered for a little bit before ended up working in, Putnamville correctional. Then I worked for a remote, counseling operation for a little over a year after that, and then my experiences through all of those things have led to culminating in starting A Better Way.

[00:02:48] Chris Langley: So what year did you start your, your training in your career, Nick?

[00:02:51] Nick Pecenica: For the, for addiction counseling, that what, what year is it now? 2024. So 2020 ish.

[00:03:05] Chris Langley: that's quite a long time.

[00:03:07] Nick Pecenica: Yeah. So I don't give like strict timelines on these things. It all kind of melds together.

[00:03:11] Chris Langley: sure. Kind of, kind of a bit shocking when you realize how long you've been working in a field, doesn't it? Really? So I certainly felt the same way. So, can you tell us a little bit about your services and obviously about your, your colleague Hussain and tell us about the services that you provide your, community in Indiana then.

[00:03:31] Nick Pecenica: So primarily we try to, we try to focus on the addiction counseling part, the outpatient addiction counseling. I've noticed that there's a lot of people who already retain a lot of skills or a lot of really solid means of getting through their life, getting through their day, but they're just disorganized. Or they're not really aware of the language they're using. That's kind of keeping them stuck or particular influences in their life that maybe need to be handled a little bit more deliberately. So, I try to position us into a place that like gets people over hills, that maybe in their own life feel very, very complicated, but just require some outside perspective to kind of help get a little more organized. Hussain, he, Right now is currently working on his doctorate, and I believe it's Family and Child Counseling or something like that. I forget his specific thing, but he's working right now in a clinic in an inpatient clinic in Martinsville but he was pre-med for a little while, I believe, and I'm not 100 percent sure how we ended up at DCS, but we met there and then it kind of chased each other into these different environments, working similar roles until I was like, you know, why don't we just try to do this by ourselves?

Because each of the environments we were in was basically learning experiments and how not to do the work.

[00:04:54] Chris Langley: Yeah. Okay. So how long have you been working with him?

[00:04:58] Nick Pecenica: I've been working with him since 2020.

[00:05:00] Chris Langley: Wow. Excellent.

[00:05:01] Nick Pecenica: He was my desk mate over at DCS.

[00:05:03] Chris Langley: Okay. So, how, how's your service funded?

[00:05:07] Nick Pecenica: So right now I am very, very lucky to have a friend who is primarily, allowing us to keep the lights on. She's single handedly, gave us a nice donation and is, doing a recurring monthly kind of thing. otherwise just being very, very budget conscious. It doesn't take a lot to run a remote clinic.

So as long as I can keep like the digital forms paid for and the licensing up to date and the insurance, all that kind of stuff, I can work that into pretty much any, concurrent life budget kind of thing. So just by keeping the bills really low, I live in the middle of nowhere. I need four grand a year to keep my lights on.

So, the business is kind of packed into that.

[00:05:52] Chris Langley: So you have no salary yourself. It just comes from, from funding or donations. Is that, is that I'm just,

[00:05:58] Nick Pecenica: Yeah, I'm functionally working for free until people donate or somebody like after we've had a few sessions and things. And they're like, Oh yeah, this is worth something. And then like, I had a client who seemed to do really well, really quickly and like surprise sent me like 200 bucks for three sessions.

And I was like, cool, I guess I'm worth 66 bucks this couple of weeks, like an hour or whatever it might be.

[00:06:18] Chris Langley: So the funding goes up and down, obviously depending. There's no steady stream of funding for you.

[00:06:23] Nick Pecenica: Yeah, no, not, not at this point.

[00:06:25] Chris Langley: Wow. Okay. That's a, that must be incredibly stressful for you, but you know. You know, congratulations for providing the service to your community. That's pretty incredible.

[00:06:35] Nick Pecenica: Honestly, it's funny. Cause like, I just, I've noticed that like the stress levels that get referenced a lot in this work. And I have very consciously organized my life in a way that makes it so stress is immensely manageable. part of me living the way that I do is that I can go into a fair amount of debt.

I can work pretty much any job and pull in a little bit of cash and still be trying to hopefully have the work speak for itself more than make a lot of sacrifices in what it takes to kind of stay stuck to a, an organization that maybe isn't doing it like how we would like to do it.

[00:07:11] Chris Langley: Yeah. So at least, you know, that you're, you're working to your own, kind of way and you're not restricted to working with, with an organization that has very strict rules, I guess. So that's, that must be pretty nice to have that kind of freedom as well. So, over the time of you running A Better Way, Nick, what changes in drug use, have you seen and how, how these affected your community?

[00:07:36] Nick Pecenica: I, I've mostly heard. So I sat in once on a report from the Monroe County Coroner, and she was talking about the massive influx in fentanyl and not just fentanyl but carfentanil and all the different derivatives and how there are like the kits that are available to test what you're taking don't even cover everything that you might see, and she was like this is killing people all up and down age brackets income brackets it does not discriminate. And the numbers had like doubled year over year, if not more from, I think she was, she went back to like 2018 through till I think the last time this was like 2023. So other than just fentanyl showing up everywhere, I've had a lot of people just anecdotally testifying to the harm reduction medications that they're taking, saying that this is just like another drug to them. That's not everybody, but that's certainly a large plurality of people who are like, I'm just now addicted to this. So to the extent that any harm reduction medication is taking over. That's what a lot of people are referencing as their new drug of choice, so to speak, but those are the two primary ones.

[00:08:47] Chris Langley: So people are calling fentanyl their drug of choice.

[00:08:50] Nick Pecenica: No, people are calling their, their, people are, people are saying that they're, they're functionally addicted to Suboxone or methadone.

[00:08:57] Chris Langley: getcha. Okay. When we first spoke, last week you mentioned that fentanyl is pretty much found in any, any drug. Is that including marijuana? Is that, is that, can you tell us a little about

that?

[00:09:11] Nick Pecenica: Yeah, I've had, one client in particular comes to mind who was talking about getting new customers as they were switching. To other kind of drugs and things and talking about putting fentanyl in weed, in, in hookahs or weed hookahs, getting friends and things otherwise addicted to other substances that I was like, Still fascinates me to this day.

I talk about this guy a lot because, I was driving him to an appointment and I'm like, also the person who brought him his children. So I was like, you know, who you're disclosing these things to. but yeah, there's, there's, it's a wild world out there as far as, and it's, it's usually a handful of people that are the primary sources of the greatest proportion of things.

So one of them gets a hairy idea about how they want to implicate a wide portion of the population. It's that quick. You know, you think. I'm taking something, I'm taking something even from my regular dealer and it's changed and you don't know. Now, Indiana is surrounded by three states where weed is legal, so I think most people now are getting it from like dispensaries across the border but for a while there it wasn't so clear.

[00:10:17] Chris Langley: Yeah,I mean, I was really surprised when you told me that I was, I was actually quite shocked that this is going on. I've never really come across this before. so have you noticed more people accessing your services due to addictions to opioids, especially since the COVID 19 pandemic?

So I hear drug use has risen since then because of lockdown.

[00:10:40] Nick Pecenica: Yeah, I have found more people testifying to how much the need is, less a willingness or facilitating of getting them to us. There are, there are systems in place and there are companies in place that are, that are, I don't know, grandfathered in, or the ones that are popular, the ones that everybody knows, and we don't provide harm reduction medication. And so that's what most people are gravitating towards. That's why I've kind of discovered the longer that we've been open, filling an even more specific niche of those people who are like, they're genuinely want to get off their suboxone. They don't want to be strung along for years, getting comfortable with where they're at. Then they come to us when they want to deal with that heightened anxiety when they want to, maybe I'm thinking of a client in particular who maybe got into their addiction late in life.

So they already had that strong foundation and they're not like, kind of reinventing the wheel. And they just, again, needed that, that reorganization piece. or somebody to talk to that wasn't, you know, part of their chronic conditioning. We tend to be able to help those people the most. If you're, you know, just starting out, if you're kind of really laying that foundation, if you need that whole kind of community thing, we don't really have that yet.

And especially because we're not like in person, building the rapport sometimes can take a little bit, you know, extra. But I would, I would love to have more people. I definitely interacted with a lot of people I think would be appropriate for our level of care. But the systems that exist already are servicing another kind of layer of where people are at, you know, in their perception of the recovery and kind of getting over that barrier is its own, own kind of game.

[00:12:17] Chris Langley: Yeah. How, where'd you get your referrals from?

[00:12:21] Nick Pecenica: Right now I've got a handful of colleagues that I've worked with who have sent me referrals that they know how I work and they recognize which kind of clients are going to be appropriate for us. We've, just done general flyering and outreach, like in town. So sometimes so many people will call us just out of the blue. and say, "Hey, I saw this" or from people that I've previously worked with who kind of pass along and say, "Hey, you know, they helped us. Maybe that, you know, if you're at that stage where you want to get somewhere, go to them."

[00:12:51] Chris Langley: Excellent. Doing these podcasts, I've discovered many different opinions around harm reduction. So tell us your ideal explanation of what harm reduction is.

[00:13:02] Nick Pecenica: Harm reduction for me fundamentally is keeping people alive. Anything else that gets kind of like lumped into it is somebody else's kind of interpretation. And so, you know, keeping people alive, great. You can't work on a dead person, whether or not that constitutes people becoming more accountable, responsible, developing their agency, feeling like they have a grasp on what has chronically plagued them or otherwise whole different question. So you can operate under harm reduction and do all sorts of added or different kinds of harm.

[00:13:38] Chris Langley: Absolutely.

[00:13:40] Nick Pecenica: But, yeah,

[00:13:41] Chris Langley: I love that explanation. Thank you. Thank you very much for that. you mentioned your, your work in courts and case management. Can you tell us a little bit about this and what you do and the commitment and this level of work, you have to do for your clients going through the very long criminal justice process that you have here in America?

[00:14:00] Nick Pecenica: When it comes to any kind of court stuff, I, it's one of the more straightforward things, at least for me, if it's not written down and it's not in some kind of report or if I didn't have to like, you know, affirm it, like under oath, like it doesn't exist. So if I need to, you know, say somebody has been in treatment, I will just say that I'm giving opinions on. Anything else? So that that's relatively straightforward. And then it's like, I volunteer independently with other organizations that work through the courts that I can't, I can't overlap or like associate necessarily with my company. but yeah, when it comes to court, I find that a lot of people are just mostly confused by it. And if you can kind of cut through the noise, especially if it's maybe family court, and or just give them a, an endorsement and backup and reassurance of like what the work that they have been doing with you. That cuts through a lot of the noise with our courts.

[00:14:53] Chris Langley: So how long do you work with people with, with this? I mean, what's the longest period of time that you've gone through?

[00:14:58] Nick Pecenica: I've had people have attempted to subpoena me four years later. but yeah, especially I could have cases from back when I was at DCS. Like I could have cases from 2018 that might try to reach out to me at some point, depending on what develops. Like in those families lives now, whether or not I'm going to respond to them different question and 99 times out of 100

I'm going to say if it's not in my report already, I got nothing else to say.

[00:15:24] Chris Langley: Amazing. So you still have people from six years ago that you were working with suddenly get in contact with you and say, Hey, Nick.

[00:15:30] Nick Pecenica: Hussain got people from even further because he, he had more independent kind of clients and stuff for a while. And he did more of the straight therapeutic interventions at some of the companies that we work for. So yeah, we, it, you never know when you're going to get a call out of the blue or something in the mail.

Yeah.

[00:15:44] Chris Langley: Wow. That's, that's, that's, that's quite incredible. last few questions for you, Nick, what future plans do you have for A Better Way?

[00:15:54] Nick Pecenica: In my perfect world, I get that handful of people who have either been personally affected by the work that we've done or who can, you know, bank roll the basic floor of keeping our lights on and then we start building on the community aspect. One of the interviews that I watched of yours with the people with all the money and we have some of those kind of like rich people playgrounds around Indiana too is the community aspect. We try to fix these, these chronic kind of rots in society that develop these addictive coping strategies and we don't replace the things that we actually need psychologically and socially. And then I just like, "Oh, okay. We've reduced harm." Like, no, we need to build. When I was working at my, previous company, there were some really, really good groups.

I miss those people so much, but they weren't, like, going out and bowling together. Some of them were. Some of them lived close enough or knew each other and they would, like, interact outside of the group. But it was like, these would be really good social groups to be reinforcing each other and building on these skills and getting to where you really want to go, but the infrastructure is not there. And a lot of the people are working themselves to death or are otherwise, you know, obligated and other things. I want to be able to say like, "look, it's not just us talking in circles about whatever our particular kind of issues are. It's literally building on these new skills and putting ourselves in these new physically, maybe uncomfortable spaces so that we can develop deeper as people."

[00:17:25] Chris Langley: Yes, wonderful, wonderful. So where can people find you or contact you online to discuss your services, Nick?

[00:17:33] Nick Pecenica: So my website is abetterway.club all of my personal information, it'll reach directly to me is, is on there, I think plastered on seven or eight of the pages, but yeah, that's the, that's the most efficient way.

[00:17:46] Chris Langley: Excellent stuff. And lastly, is there anything I've forgotten to mention or that you'd like our audience to know about?

[00:17:53] Nick Pecenica: I was, I was challenging myself to come up with something that you hadn't included earlier before this, and I didn't come up with it. Nothing was glaringly out. So I think that, I think you've done a pretty good comprehensive look at what's kind of going on.

[00:18:07] Chris Langley: I think your work speaks volume, Nick, and I really do take my hat off to you and Hussain for what you're doing for your community and, you know, I'd like to also personally thank you for coming on and taking the time out of your very busy day today to come and talk to us on the podcast and, maybe in six months, we can have you back on again to see what else you've been up to that.

That would be great. But thank you very much for your time today. And, definitely keep in touch. All right.

[00:18:32] Nick Pecenica: Hey, I appreciate you having me, man. Like, I, I hope I have something worth saying in six months to have what we've built or gotten to.

[00:18:39] Chris Langley: Well, you've certainly added a lot of value to this, and I really appreciate it. Nick and your expertise and knowledge is quite astounding. And the work that you do is just wonderful. So, you know, keep doing what you're doing and, you know, keep providing that great service to your community because it's much needed.

So thank you very much indeed. Thank I appreciate it. Take care.

[00:18:57] Nick Pecenica: Thank you. Appreciate it, man.

Do, do, do, do, do.