What do therapy sessions with you look like?
Sessions at Alafiora are designed around one consistent principle: every minute of clinical contact is intentional, and every session is oriented toward meaningful progress. Standard sessions run 50 minutes. For clients navigating more complex material or who benefit from sustained immersion in the work, extended sessions of 110 minutes are available. For established clients who need focused clarity between deeper sessions, 30-minute sessions are offered as well. Session format and frequency are always determined by clinical presentation, severity of symptoms, and where the client is in their arc of care.
Structure within sessions is not fixed. Some clients require consistent scaffolding to maintain progress and a sense of safety as the work deepens. Others need to lead, to have agency over what enters the room and when. Dr. Lapite-Garrett holds both with equal skill. What does not change across either approach is the quality of insight generated, the clinical themes that emerge, and the forward movement toward the goals the client came to do.
Clients consistently describe Dr. Lapite-Garrett as warm, compassionate, clinically insightful, and fully present. Her approach is subtly directive: she does not impose a direction, but she does not leave a client wandering either. She listens with precision, reflects with care, and gently moves the work toward what matters most.
Dr. Esther Lapite-Garrett is a licensed psychologist and the founder of Alafiora, a premium private practice offering depth-oriented, attachment-centered care for individuals navigating complex sexual trauma and the relational patterns that form in its aftermath. The clients Dr. Lapite-Garrett works with include survivors of rape, incest, sex trafficking, intimate partner sexual violence, and childhood sexual abuse. What followed that history is the center of her clinical practice: the love obsession, limerence, compulsive sexual behavior, hypersexuality, and emotional dysregulation that form in the aftermath of sexual harm, and that most generalist approaches were never quite equipped to treat.
Alafiora is one of a small number of practices equipped to work with the full spectrum of how these patterns express themselves in contemporary life, including the migration of erotic and romantic attachment into AI companionship, parasocial bonds, fantasy-based intimacy systems, and the accelerating escalation that occurs when real-world connection no longer feels safe, satisfying, or possible. The clients who carry these presentations arrive having spent considerable financial, emotional, and psychological resources on experiences that brought temporary relief and deepening shame in equal measure.
The clients Dr. Lapite-Garrett works with are not struggling with a lack of insight. They have read the books, tried the prior therapy, and understand their patterns with a clarity that has not been enough to stop them. They wake at 3am with a body that will not settle. They reach for sex or connection not from desire but from the need to feel something, or to feel nothing at all. They love with an intensity that outlasts what the relationship warrants, cycling through obsessive thought long after every rational part of them knows the situation has ended. They make choices in moments of emotional flooding that they do not recognize as their own afterward. They experience behavior escalation, spending elevations, and deepening secrecy. Even still, they find that the pattern repeats, each time carrying a little more shame and a little more distance from the person they understood themselves to be.
What years of prior effort could not move, the work at Alafiora finally does. What changes in our work is structural. The clients who engage fully describe experiencing more than symptom management but a fundamental shift in the organizing patterns that formed them, patterns that prior treatment approaches could not reach.
Alafiora is a private-pay practice offering sessions virtually, in person, and on location across multiple states. The practice maintains a small, intentionally limited caseload to ensure each client receives the full depth of care their history requires. Visit https://www.alafiora.com to learn more or inquire confidentially.
