Return a value from forEach in protractor - Managing closures

I have the following helper code from which I am trying to return the number of occurences of a string.

this.getActualFilteredStatusCount = function(strFilter){
    return this.getTotalRows().then(function(count){
        var totalCount = count;
        var statusElementsObjs = $$(CommonElements.filterElement);
        var occurence = 0;
        var index = 0;
         $$(CommonElements.filterElement).each(function(item){
            return item.getText().then(function(input){
                ++index;
                    if (input.indexOf(strFilter)>=0){
                         ++occurence;
                         console.log(occurence);//this worked fine
                    }   
                    if(index>=totalCount){
                        return occurence;
                    }
            });                             
        }); 
    });
}

This function only returns undefined or 0 but not the right value.

I read up a lot of articles on using Closures but just couldn't understand on breaking this problem up. Any suggestions or alternate ways of doing this would be helpful.

via Venkat Raman