A note from our founder on why Promise of Hope exists, and what we promise the people who walk through our doors.
Fourteen and a half years ago, I walked into treatment.
I was not unique in that moment, and I know that now. Every week in this country, thousands of people make the same walk — some after a single wake-up call, some after decades of them. What I remember most is not the fear, though there was plenty. It’s that I had almost nothing left to bring with me except a very small, very stubborn willingness to try one more thing.
Treatment saved my life. I want to say that plainly, because I think sometimes we soften the stakes when we talk about recovery, and the stakes deserve to be said out loud. I am here today — running this practice, writing this note, loving the people in my life — because someone was there to help me when I asked. That is the whole story, and it is also the reason Promise of Hope exists.
The counselor who made the difference
In my early days of recovery, I had a counselor who changed everything. Not because they had a proprietary technique or a secret curriculum, but because they saw me. They took my story seriously. They believed I could get better before I believed it myself, and they held onto that belief steadily enough that I eventually borrowed some of it.
That experience taught me something I’ve carried into every part of building this practice: one clinician, meeting one person at the right moment, can change the entire trajectory of a life. Recovery is not a miracle. It is not luck. It is the accumulation of small, deliberate acts of care — the phone calls returned, the sessions kept, the honest conversations that most of us are too tired or too ashamed to have anywhere else. Someone has to be on the other side of that work. Someone has to show up.
For fourteen and a half years, I have been part of the recovery community on the receiving end, and on the giving end, and both have shaped who I am. When I decided five years ago to open Promise of Hope, it was not because I thought I had all the answers. It was because I knew, from my own life, what the right kind of help can do — and I wanted to build a place where more people could find it.
Why this practice exists
The short version is that Promise of Hope is my way of giving back to the community that gave me my life.
The longer version is that I have watched, over the years, how many people get turned away, rushed through, or talked at when what they actually need is to be heard. Mental health and substance use issues are tangled up in shame, stigma, and old stories we tell ourselves about what we deserve. The first thing a person often needs when they walk into a clinician’s office is not a treatment plan. It is the quiet, grounded experience of someone on the other side of the desk who believes they are worth the time.
That is the foundation we built this practice on. Everything else — the clinical expertise, the treatment modalities, the paperwork and the policies — is in service of that first, most human thing.
What client-centered care actually looks like
“Client-centered” is a phrase that gets used a lot. Here is what we mean by it at Promise of Hope.
We mean that your story guides the work. We mean that our clinicians are trained in many different modes of care — because no single approach is right for every person, and the idea that it could be is how people get left behind. Some clients need structured, evidence-based therapy. Some need space to talk through what’s been buried for years. Some need medication management alongside their counseling. Some need help untangling mental health symptoms from substance use, which almost always show up together and almost always need to be treated that way.
Our job is to meet you where you are, and then to walk with you — not in front of you, not behind you — through the process of addressing what you came in with. That is the work. It is less glamorous than people sometimes imagine recovery to be, and it is more powerful than most people believe possible until they’ve lived it.
Hope is not a slogan
Our motto is where there is hope, there is healing. I want to be honest about what that phrase means to me, because it’s easy for something like that to read as a nice saying on a wall.
Hope, in recovery, is not optimism. It is not the feeling that everything will turn out fine. It is something much smaller and much tougher than that — the working belief that change is still possible, even when the evidence in front of you suggests otherwise. Hope is the thing that gets a person to the first appointment. It is the thing a good clinician helps a client protect and rebuild, one session at a time, until the client can carry it on their own.
Healing follows hope because it cannot come before it. You cannot do the hard work of recovery without some flicker of the belief that it is worth doing. Part of what we offer here — arguably the most important thing we offer — is that flicker, for the people who arrive without one.
Hope, help, and healing
Those three words are not marketing. They are, in the order we believe they happen, what we offer every person who contacts this practice.
Hope, because most of the people who come to us have run low on it, and we have enough of it to share while they rebuild their own supply.
Help, because hope without action does not get anyone very far, and our clinicians are here to do the practical, skilled, often-difficult work of helping you move forward.
Healing, because that is what all of this is ultimately for — not a cure, not a fix, but a genuine, lived experience of becoming more whole than you were when you started.
If you are reading this and any part of it sounds familiar — if you are in the early, uncertain place I was fourteen and a half years ago, or watching someone you love stand there — I want you to know two things.
The first is that recovery is possible. It is genuinely, stubbornly, beautifully possible. I have lived it, and I have watched hundreds of other people live it.
The second is that you don’t have to figure out the rest of it alone. That is what we’re here for.
When you are ready, we are too.
— Dana Shaw, Promise of Hope Founder