Today we’d like to introduce you to Jake Porter.
Hi Jake, please kick things off for us with an introduction to yourself and your story.
I was raised in Mont Belvieu, Texas, about 30 miles east of Houston. It was a very small town back then, where most everybody knew most everybody else. My mom was a school teacher, and my dad was a local businessman. We grew up surrounded by aunts, uncles, cousins, grandparents, and lots of friends.
My plans to attend the University of Texas at Austin were interrupted during my senior year of high school when I was offered a scholarship from a small liberal arts college in Upstate New York, Elmira College. I decided to give New York a try, and I had four wonderful years at Elmira. I triple majored in music theory and composition, psychology, and philosophy and religion. My intentions were to be a counselor and also teach in higher education at a university or seminary.
That was all interrupted when the small church I’d grown up attending lost its pastor while I was home the summer between my junior and senior years of college. I was asked to fill in preaching for a week or two, which turned into a month, then two. I basically served as an interim pastor for that summer before returning to Elmira for my senior year of college. During that summer, the church experienced a lot of excitement and growth. A few folks started to get the notion that I should actually become the next pastor. After some consideration, I sent in my resume to the search committee.
To make a long story short, they ended up calling me as the pastor when I was just 21 years old. Looking back, I think that was crazy — on their part, on my part — I don’t know what any of us were thinking. At the time I was the youngest Baptist pastor in the State of Texas. That began my 13-year tenure as Senior Pastor of Mont Belvieu’s First Baptist Church.
My time as a pastor was very rewarding and rich with beautiful experiences walking with families through some of life’s greatest and most painful moments. I’m truly grateful for my time doing that important work.
There was another story happening in parallel, though. As a result of some of my own issues and past circumstances, I was suffering the consequences of trauma and addiction, totally in secret. A few years into my time as a pastor, I hit a sort of bottom and realized I needed to get help. I began a process of therapy and joined a recovery community, and life began to change for the better.
My recovery experience inspired me to go back to school. I’d already completed two seminary degrees, a master of divinity and a master of theology. With an eye toward doing more counseling work, I attended Lamar University and earned a master’s degree in clinical mental health counseling and then began doctoral work. My doctoral research focused on the intersection of affective social neurobiology, human development, and spiritual formation. Eventually, I was fully licensed by the State of Texas as a Licensed Professional Counselor.
At first, I started doing clinical work as a side job, thinking I would continue pastoring forever. But the demand grew in ways I never could have imagined. I’d developed a model for working with couples after the discovery of secret betrayal. This process takes place over several full days back to back, which we refer to an “intensive.” The betrayer would come clean about all the acting out, answer the betrayed partner’s questions, validate the information with a polygraph, and then we would work on restoring trust.
I had amazing success with some very difficult cases, and started getting referrals from outside the area. First Washington State, then New York, then Georgia and Indiana. The demand for my time doing the clinical work grew to the point that I could no longer keep pastoring effectively. So in 2017, I left vocational ministry and started Daring Ventures Counseling, Coaching, and Consultation, LLC, a highly specialized practice focused on helping individuals and couples overcome the effects of trauma and addiction.
Today we have a multidisciplinary staff who are recognized around the country for their skills. I now only see couples for intensives using the Couple–Centered Recovery® model that I created. Some of my colleagues think that my work is edgy, or even borderline dangerous, but I think it is changing lives faster and deeper than more of the traditional models of recovery.
In traditional recovery models, addicts are told that their recovery is THEIR recovery, and to have boundaries with their partners, who need their own separate process of healing and recovery. Partners of addicts have traditionally been automatically labeled as co-addicts or codependents. More recent research, however, has demonstrated that the symptoms that we’ve traditionally labeled as codependence are actually trauma. The experience of intimate betrayal is traumatic.
We also now know how often addiction is rooted in attachment disorders or developmental deficits related to early attachments. Basically, early relational experiences are what allow us to cultivate the capacity to regulate our emotions in a healthy way. If we don’t have those secure early experiences, or if we experience trauma early on, we might not gain those capacities. Then we turn to unhealthy ways of dealing with these internal feelings; addiction is born.
So more often than not, both addiction and betrayal are, at their core, attachment issues. My Couple–Centered Recovery® Model places the most important attachment relationship in clients’ lives — their marriage — at the center of the healing process, leveraging the power of the biologically wired-in attachment system for the healing of each of them individually and their relationship together.
Daring Ventures is now visited by couples from across the nation and, literally, around the world, all seeking to experience the power of healing truth and relational connection. Each of our intensive experiences is custom designed for that particular couple after an extensive assessment process. I’ve been blessed with seeing couples go from dysfunction and distress to thriving and flourishing.
We also now offer coaching and therapy for individuals and couples, and are developing intensive outpatient programs for clients who struggle finding sobriety or who have more complex diagnostic issues. I’m so proud of team. I always say they make me look really good!
I also have the joy of serving as Associate Professor of Counseling at Houston Graduate School of Theology, where I teach in the master’s program and direct the Doctor of Professional Counseling Program. So, in the end, I ended up living my original plan: doing therapy and teaching in higher education.
Being a part of the healing journey for others who have suffered from similar traumas and addictions gives me a joy beyond what I can really express. It helps me make sense of my story, and feels like a way that God is using my pain for the good of others. I’m so grateful for the work I get to do.
Can you talk to us a bit about the challenges and lessons you’ve learned along the way. Looking back would you say it’s been easy or smooth in retrospect?
My own recovery journey was not perfectly smooth. I’ve experienced challenges as a faced old traumas in my other therapy, and as fell into old behaviors and coping mechanisms. I’ve lost good relationships, good friendship, because of poor choices I have made. But these experiences also give me a perspective when I work with clients who are on their own recovery journeys. I know the hardships, the rationalizations, the excuses, and many of the escape routes from those old habits into freedom.
The Covid pandemic was also a challenge in my business. We had just moved into a much larger, expanded office space when in person sessions were nearly entirely canceled. My work with couples from out of state had to be postponed as folks were not flying. We had to quickly pivot to a telehealth platform wherever we could, and then to think of additional services we could offer in order to stay afloat. I’m so grateful for the creativity that was demanded of us, though, because many of those changes have led to the exponential growth we are experiencing today.
Appreciate you sharing that. What should we know about Daring Ventures?
Daring Ventures exists to see generations freed from the pain of trauma and addiction into flourishing relationships of connection, healing, and love. We do this by joining our clients’ journeys with authentic care and clinical excellence, walking with them into greater courage, hope, and connection.
Our clinical team specializes in behavioral addictions, including sex, porn, gambling, spending, and more. They have had incredible success with hard cases referred to us by colleagues, cases of dual diagnosis and what has been thought of as “treatment resistant” issues. We believe that if we slow down enough to do the thorough assessment work with genuine curiosity, we can come to an understanding of what is really going on and needs to be done for each client. Hope is a core value in our practice, so we believe healing is possible for all people.
We also have a team of coaches who work with addicts and partners of addicts across the country. They do individual sessions and facilitate support groups. Each of them is highly trained to work with their target populations. They are sought after by clients from all over.
I’m proud of our reputation for helping marriages come back to life. I genuinely believe that people can change when their non-conscious, dysfunctional patterns of relating are brought into the light so they can be replaced, with effort and focus, with new ways of connecting. The reason people travel from far and wide to come to Daring Ventures in Houston is because they’ve heard we can help their relationships heal, survive, and even thrive. That feels really good.
We’d be interested to hear your thoughts on luck and what role, if any, you feel it’s played for you?
Every time I’ve faced a challenge that seemed like it would derail my whole life’s plan, I’ve been able to later look back and see how that hardship actually set me up to grow and flourish.
I know I was born with a lot of resources: two supportive, loving parents with good jobs and an extensive support network. I had a great education and lots of opportunities. I take none of that for granted. I was born with a lot of advantages that others don’t have.
I don’t really believe in luck, but I do believe in providence. I believe there’s God who is weaving my story together, assembling pieces from a vantage point far above my own perspective. Way too much has been given to me to believe otherwise.
My greatest blessing in life is my family. My wife, Kristen, is the embodiment of forgiveness, grace, and love, and she’s been an essential support to me in all the work that I do. We have one daughter, Magnolia Jane, who is just 10 months old. She’s a perfect little bundle of joy who has completely reoriented my entire life in the best way possible.
Contact Info:
- Email: jake@daringventures.com
- Website: http://daringventures.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/drjakeporter/
- Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/drjakeporter
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/c/JacobPorter1/featured
- Other: https://drjakeporter.com
