Cherry Hills Village Psychologist for Love Obsession, Compulsive Sexual Behavior & Sexual Trauma
Cherry Hills Village doesn't have a single traffic light inside its own borders, by design, and a few minutes away the Denver Tech Center's glass towers fill every weekday morning with the same executives whose horses graze those same large lots on the weekend. In both, a name has usually traveled through a country club roster or a corporate assistant's own short list before it ever reaches the person who needed it. Care reaches wherever a client in Colorado is sitting: the woman who takes the call from a barn office after the trainer has gone home for the day, and the man whose corporate card has started raising questions nobody in his own office has asked him directly yet.
Licensed in New Mexico and Indiana.
Held entirely by video, statewide in Colorado, under a telehealth-only license.
What This Page Covers Six sections. Most take three minutes or less to read; the longest takes eight.
- A Village Built to Stay Small, and a Tech Center Built to Grow: Confidential Telehealth Therapist for Cherry Hills Village & Greenwood Village
- Care at Alafiora™: Licensed Psychologist Dr. Esther Lapite-Garrett, Colorado Telehealth Practice
- Serving Cherry Hills Village and the Surrounding Communities: Telehealth Coverage Area: Greenwood Village, Columbine Valley, Bow Mar & Cherry Creek
- What Some People May Describe: Composite Reflections From Cherry Hills Village & Greenwood Village
- What Therapy at Alafiora™ Addresses: Confidential Telehealth for the South Denver Metro: How Care Is Structured With a Private-Pay Psychologist
- Common Questions About Therapy in Cherry Hills Village: Cherry Hills Village Psychologist FAQ: Love Addiction, Sex Addiction & Sexual Trauma Treatment
Session formats and current rates →
Also in Where Alafiora™ Practices: Colorado · Aspen, CO · Boulder, CO · Castle Pines & Lone Tree, CO · Colorado Springs, CO · Indiana · New Mexico
Cherry Hills Village is small enough, and Greenwood Village's executive world close-knit enough, that a referral still travels the way it would in a much smaller town. A name offered here tends to come from a fellow country club member, a colleague at the same firm, or an assistant who has recommended someone entirely outside the usual network. A name that arrives that way brings all of it along.
Alafiora™ sits outside that network by design, and in Colorado, by law. Dr. Lapite-Garrett is licensed in Colorado, with a status of active and telehealth-only, which permits care by video only; the license does not authorize a Colorado office or any in-person service anywhere in the state, and this page describes only what that license actually allows. Care reaches Cherry Hills Village, Greenwood Village, Columbine Valley, Bow Mar, and Cherry Creek entirely by video, which means beginning does not require a car parked somewhere a neighbor or a fellow club member would notice it.
Every personal account described on this page is fiction. Dr. Lapite-Garrett writes them from her own clinical knowledge and expertise. AI helps shape the first draft, and Dr. Lapite-Garrett reviews and approves every word before it is shared. The individuals, the histories, and the sequences of events here, including those written as he or she and including any pattern shown escalating over time, are not drawn from any current or former client of this practice, and no client information of any kind was used to make them. No one's trajectory appears on this page. What appears is what these psychological phenomena may look like when they occur.
A Village Built to Stay Small, and a Tech Center Built to Grow
Confidential Telehealth Therapist for Cherry Hills Village & Greenwood Village
An Arapahoe County Client Community
Cherry Hills Village was incorporated in the 1940s specifically to stay the way it already was: large equestrian lots, no commercial district, no traffic lights, a founding board of trustees that wanted the zoning kept exactly as rural as it already looked. Homes here still commonly sit on an acre or more, horses are still a common sight in backyard paddocks, and the Village's own gathering points are its trails and the Cherry Hills Country Club, whose course has hosted multiple U.S. Opens and PGA Championships over the decades. A few minutes away, Greenwood Village grew in almost the opposite direction. Developer George Wallace began assembling what became the Denver Tech Center in 1962, and it has since grown into one of the largest office corridors in the region, home to employers in retirement services, agricultural banking, and financial management, filling its office parks each weekday with a workforce that, by evening, drives home to many of the same neighborhoods surrounding Cherry Hills Village itself.
What connects the two is old and new Denver money sitting closer together than almost anywhere else in the state. Cherry Hills Village carries generations of Denver's original energy, cattle, and banking fortunes, multigenerational estates where a family name has meant something specific in this county since before the interstate existed. Greenwood Village carries the newer layer, corporate executives, private equity principals, and finance professionals who arrived with the Tech Center's growth and built their own version of the same large-lot, low-visibility life. Nearby, Columbine Valley and Bow Mar hold smaller, even more private versions of the same instinct, both incorporated specifically to keep outside development and outside attention at arm's length, while the Cherry Creek shopping district functions as the one place all of these worlds actually mix, on Saturday mornings and at the school pickup line as much as anywhere else.
The Private Side of a Carefully Kept Life
Love Obsession, Compulsive Sexual Behavior & Sexual Trauma Among Cherry Hills Village & Greenwood Village's Old-Money and Executive Community
A place built this specifically to stay small and unbothered runs on discretion as its actual currency, whether that discretion protects a hundred-year-old family name or a career built on a trading floor two decades ago. What a family or a professional reputation has taken generations, or a whole career, to build is not something anyone here sets aside easily, even for an hour, even in private.
Some women in this community may have married into one of Cherry Hills Village's older, multigenerational estate families, active for years on the same handful of school and country club committees her mother-in-law once ran. The attention starts small: a fellow committee member she exchanges maybe two messages a month with about event logistics, nothing more than that on paper. What isn't on paper is how many times those texts get reread, or how precisely she's learned the exact way he signs off, hunting for a warmth in it that was very likely never there to begin with. Whole conversations get built on the drive back from Cherry Creek, an entire alternate version of her marriage where he'd sought her out at some event years ago rather than simply landed at the next seat, none of which the two of them have ever actually had. Somewhere in there she starts volunteering for whichever sub-committee happens to meet closest to his usual seat, calling it dedication to the cause each time. It ends, if it ends, at a fall gala: watching him lean toward his own wife across their table with an ease he never once needed a rearranged committee assignment or a memorized text to produce.
A different pattern in this same community runs on the frequent travel and largely unmonitored spending that come with a senior role at one of the Tech Center's larger firms. Picture a man holding a leadership position at a finance or private equity firm headquartered in Greenwood Village, flying to New York or overseas several times a month, whose corporate card gets reconciled by his own firm's finance team only in broad travel categories, never itemized. Pornography during long stretches of solo travel is the starting point, nothing more than that for a while. A first paid encounter near whatever airport he happened to be passing through follows within a year, and two or three trips a month billed to an account nobody at the firm thought to question is where it settles. Most Monday mornings, walking back into an office where he has spent fifteen years building a reputation, he tells himself this trip was the last one and means it completely, right up until the next one gets booked. His own firm's controller flags the irregular travel expensing during a routine audit before he ever reckons with any of it himself, and the conversation reaches his partners before it reaches his wife. This is exactly the weight Leaders and Executives is written for, a role built on this much travel and this much unsupervised time. Moral Injury and Self-Betrayal names what sits underneath the compulsion itself: a promise made in full sincerity every Monday and broken again by the next trip, a betrayal that deserves its own reckoning apart from the behavior that keeps producing it.
Still others throughout Cherry Hills Village may carry harm that predates every corporate title and every committee seat in this story by decades. A woman whose family may have kept horses on the same Cherry Hills Village property for three generations, riding competitively through her early teens under the same trainer her mother had used before her, may find her heart rate spiking at nothing more than the specific smell of a tack room, with no explanation she's ever been able to give anyone standing beside her when it happens. The explanation, when it surfaces, traces back to her early teenage years, to a period when that same trainer, trusted completely by her own parents, began finding reasons to keep her at the barn after her lessons had technically ended. She may not have told a single person for over twenty years, in part because her family has stayed close to the same equestrian community her entire adult life and she has never found a version of the story that didn't also implicate people she still sees at every horse show. The week it may resurface in full is the week that same trainer, now retired, is honored at a barn's anniversary celebration with a toast that calls him one of the kindest men in the sport.
988 is reachable by call or text any hour, in English or Spanish. When speaking isn't an option right where you are, its chat runs at 988lifeline.org instead. The practice's list of crisis lines separates sexual assault, domestic violence, and trafficking into their own numbers. If you are in immediate danger, 911 reaches local dispatch any hour of the day.
None of it gets said at a fall gala or a Monday-morning meeting: not the memorized text, not the broken promise about the next trip, not the toast raised for the wrong man at a barn celebration. Alafiora™ is where it gets said instead, to a psychologist who has no relationship to any of these three beyond the work itself.
Care at Alafiora™
Licensed Psychologist Dr. Esther Lapite-Garrett, Colorado Telehealth Practice
Nobody is assigned here. The same psychologist takes the first call and every hour after it, so nothing has to be told twice to somebody new. Dr. Esther Lapite-Garrett founded Alafiora™ as a boutique psychological practice, and she trained in psychodynamic and attachment-based approaches to complex trauma, love obsession, and compulsive sexual behavior. She works from the premise that behavior, however distressing, serves a function, and that lasting change begins with understanding that function before attempting to remove it.
Individuals working through the aftermath of sexual assault, betrayal, or cumulative violation often begin with Understanding Sexual Trauma & Its Many Forms, where pacing and consent shape every part of the process. Those caught in patterns of obsessive longing, fixation, or fantasy frequently find language for their experience in Understanding Love Obsession, Love Addiction & Attachment's Many Forms. Individuals whose relationship to sexual behavior has become compulsive, secretive, or beyond their own control are welcomed, without judgment, into the work described in Understanding Compulsive Sexual Behavior, Sex Anxiety & Their Many Forms. Many clients move fluidly between these areas, since attachment, trauma, and compulsion are rarely separate experiences in practice. Among the leaders and executives commuting into the Tech Center's finance and private equity firms, and the multigenerational Cherry Hills Village families living inside a small, closely watched community, these three domains tend to arrive together often enough that treating them separately would miss most of what is actually happening.
How Care Is Delivered
Video-Only Therapy for Cherry Hills Village, Greenwood Village, Columbine Valley & Bow Mar, Colorado
Dr. Lapite-Garrett is licensed in Colorado, with a status of active and telehealth-only, which authorizes care to Colorado residents entirely by video. There is no Colorado office and no in-person option anywhere in the state, since Colorado's license authorizes video care only. Sessions are held through a HIPAA-compliant platform backed by a signed business associate agreement, at an ordinary hour's length or as an extended session for anyone who needs longer than one, from wherever a confidential connection can be maintained: a study on a Cherry Hills Village property, a home office in Greenwood Village, a barn office between lessons. For clients whose work regularly takes them out of state, it matters to say plainly: care continues only while the client is physically present in Colorado, or in Indiana or New Mexico, the two other states where Dr. Lapite-Garrett is licensed. A trip to New York or overseas does not fall inside that coverage on any given week.
Why Is Care in Colorado Video Only, Rather Than On Location Like Some of Alafiora™'s Other Markets?
The video-only limit is not a design choice; it is the entirety of what Colorado's license authorizes, and this page describes that scope rather than a preference. New Mexico and Indiana are different: full licensure there lets Dr. Lapite-Garrett add on-location visits to video, an option Colorado's telehealth-only status simply does not include. For Cherry Hills Village and Greenwood Village specifically, that restriction turns out to suit the community's own instinct toward privacy: nothing to see in a driveway, no arrival for a fellow club member or committee colleague to register.
What Becomes Possible
Life After Love Addiction, Sex Addiction & Sexual Trauma Treatment in Cherry Hills Village & Greenwood Village
Further along, what tends to change is specific and unremarkable on its face: a committee seat picked at random again instead of engineered, a Monday-morning promise that finally survives the next trip, and a barn anniversary attended without a racing heart. None of the three arrives quickly, and this practice exists for the length of time each one actually takes.
Serving Cherry Hills Village and the Surrounding Communities
Telehealth Coverage Area: Greenwood Village, Columbine Valley, Bow Mar & Cherry Creek
Care reaches each of the communities below by video only, on identical clinical terms; what follows are the practical differences in how each client tends to use it.
Cherry Hills Village. For someone on one of the Village's larger properties, the first practical question is usually finding an hour where household staff or a visiting trainer won't be present for a video call, and that gets settled at the consultation.
Greenwood Village. Video reaches Tech Center executives and their families the same way, at whatever hour fits around a trading day or a travel schedule.
Columbine Valley & Bow Mar. Care reaches these small, private lakeside and golf-course communities as readily as anywhere else in the county; the privacy already built into these towns tends to make a video hour especially natural here.
Cherry Creek. The neighborhood's own residential streets are reached the same way as its more visible shopping district, on the same terms as everywhere else on this list.
Does Care Reach Clients Only While They're Physically in Cherry Hills Village, or Anywhere in Colorado?
Anywhere in Colorado. The license covers the whole state, so the only real requirement is that the client be physically located somewhere in Colorado at the time of the session; the communities named above are simply the ones clients here name most often.
The facts most first inquiries ask about, gathered in one place:
| At a Glance | Alafiora™ in Cherry Hills Village |
|---|---|
| Psychologist | Dr. Esther Lapite-Garrett, a doctoral-level licensed psychologist and Alafiora™'s sole practitioner |
| Colorado licensure | Active, telehealth-only status; no Colorado office, no in-person services anywhere in the state |
| Also licensed in | Indiana and New Mexico, where care also includes on-location visits |
| Session format in Colorado | Video only, statewide |
| Session lengths | An ordinary hour, or an extended session for anyone who needs longer than one |
| Communities named on this page | Cherry Hills Village, Greenwood Village, Columbine Valley, Bow Mar, Cherry Creek |
| Who is seen | Individuals 16 and older, with a guardian co-signature required at 16 and 17 |
| Payment | Private pay. No insurance billed. A superbill for out-of-network reimbursement is available on request |
| Session rates | Published in full on the Rates and Fees page |
| How to begin | A consultation first, or directly with a first session |
What Some People May Describe
Composite Reflections From Cherry Hills Village & Greenwood Village
The reflections below are fiction. Dr. Lapite-Garrett writes them from her own clinical knowledge and expertise. AI produces a rough draft, and she reviews and personally approves every word that stays. They are not quotations from clients of this practice, whose privacy is protected absolutely, and no client information of any kind was used to make them. They appear here so that anyone who recognizes themselves, whoever they are, does not have to arrive at care carrying an experience they have never once seen written down.
How some may describe this experience:
"i sign up for whatever sub-committee meets closest to his usual seat and tell myself it's for the cause. i have his exact text sign-off memorized, the little dash before his name. i have entire conversations with him in my head on the drive home from cherry creek, a whole version where he sought me out at some dinner years ago, none of which actually happened. watched him lean into his own wife at the gala like it was nothing and realized he's never once looked at me like that. married into this family fifteen years ago and i genuinely don't know what i was hoping to find at a committee meeting"
"tell myself the same thing every monday walking back into the office, that this trip was the last one, i mean it this time. i believe it completely until the next one gets booked. our controller flagged a pattern on my travel card during a routine audit and it's going to my partners before it's going to my wife. it's been actual hotel rooms near whatever airport i'm passing through for a while now, two or three trips a month, and i stopped using protection over a year ago and never told a single person that part. i built a whole reputation at this firm over fifteen years and never once got flagged for anything until now"
"they're toasting him at the barn's anniversary party like he's one of the kindest men in the sport and i have to stand there and clap. i was thirteen the last time he kept me after my lesson ended. my family has stayed in this same tiny world my whole life and i've never found a way to say what happened that doesn't also mean saying it in front of people who still ride with him"
Reading a paragraph and recognizing something in it is one act. Saying it out loud to another person is a separate one, and nothing requires finishing the first before attempting the second. What the people in this community are carrying has, for the most part, already been managed carefully, and for a long time, by someone whose name means something specific in this small, closely watched world. Dr. Esther Lapite-Garrett founded Alafiora™ and treats love obsession, compulsive sexual behavior, and sexual trauma as one connected system for individuals throughout Cherry Hills Village, Greenwood Village, Columbine Valley, and Bow Mar, meeting each person wherever they happen to be able to start.
What Therapy at Alafiora™ Addresses
Confidential Telehealth for the South Denver Metro: How Care Is Structured With a Private-Pay Psychologist
What an early session actually contains is a week in detail: the text that got reread, and the committee assignment that got engineered around it. For a client whose own family name or firm reputation carries real weight in this county, the question of what does and does not leave the room gets answered out loud in the first hour, before any history is asked for. The eighty-minute intake is priced at $475, and once ongoing work begins, a fifty-minute session settles to $300; Rates and Fees lists every other format alongside them.
Dr. Lapite-Garrett names each mechanism out loud. Obsessive checking and rereading get named as love obsession and love addiction, relational dependency, and, where a fixation attaches to one specific individual rather than to being in love generally, person addiction. Compulsive sexual behavior gets named as loss of control and mounting cost, often working as a way to regulate the pressure of a demanding, frequently traveling professional life, and never as a verdict on what someone actually wants for their own life, since Alafiora™ is sex positive, sex informed, and sex work affirming throughout. A history of assault, betrayal, or accumulated harm gets named as sexual trauma, whether that is a single acute incident, developmental trauma carried from the years the nervous system was still forming, the relational kind that happened inside a bond a person depended on, or betrayal trauma where the dependence itself suppressed the recognition, and it is worked with at the client's own pace.
Individuals throughout this community bring this work to Alafiora™ from a genuinely wide range of circumstances: leaders and executives at Tech Center finance and private equity firms, multigenerational Cherry Hills Village families living inside a small, closely watched community, physicians affiliated with the area's major hospital systems, and adult children managing an aging parent's finances who notice something before anyone says it out loud. What concealment costs depends on what a person has to lose, and in a community built this specifically around staying small and unbothered, that cost is often higher than it looks from outside.
A consultation is a brief conversation, by video or phone call as preferred, where anything can be asked in order to feel confident this is the right fit, with nothing decided in advance. A first session is where care itself actually begins: history is gathered at whatever pace it comes, and a treatment plan starts to take shape from there. Alafiora™ works with individuals 16 and older, with a guardian co-signature required for clients age 16 and 17.
Common Questions About Therapy in Cherry Hills Village
Cherry Hills Village Psychologist FAQ: Love Addiction, Sex Addiction & Sexual Trauma Treatment
Is there a psychologist for Cherry Hills Village who treats love obsession, sex addiction, and sexual trauma together, not as separate concerns?
Yes, and this is the practice's actual structure, not a marketing description. Dr. Lapite-Garrett treats love obsession and love addiction, compulsive sexual behavior, and sexual trauma as one interconnected system, since for most clients who bring any one of these three to treatment, the other two are somewhere nearby, whether or not the connection has already been named.
Does Alafiora™ see clients in Cherry Hills Village in person, or only by video?
Only by video. Dr. Lapite-Garrett is licensed in Colorado with a status of active and telehealth-only, which authorizes telehealth care to Colorado residents but does not permit a Colorado office or in-person services anywhere in the state. A session runs on a HIPAA-compliant platform from wherever a client is physically located in Colorado at the time.
What kind of therapy does Alafiora™ provide for residents of Cherry Hills Village and the surrounding communities?
Alafiora™ provides psychotherapy, held entirely by video for Colorado residents, addressing love obsession, compulsive sexual behavior, and sexual trauma as one connected system. Clients are individuals 16 and older, worked with by a single licensed psychologist with no rotating clinical team, throughout Cherry Hills Village, Greenwood Village, Columbine Valley, Bow Mar, and Cherry Creek.
Is it too late to reach out if this has already cost me a marriage, a career, or my family's standing in this community?
No, it is not too late, and in a community this small and this closely watched, this is one of the more common reasons people actually reach out, not a reason to have waited longer. A pattern that has already cost something real is not past the point of being treated; the cost is often what finally makes it visible enough to address directly.
My work involves frequent travel out of state. Does that affect care?
Care continues only while a client is physically located in Colorado, Indiana, or New Mexico, the three states where Dr. Lapite-Garrett is licensed. A trip to New York, another US city, or overseas doesn't fall inside that coverage on any given week, though the same standing hour picks back up as soon as a client is back in one of the three. The practice can discuss what continuity looks like for a schedule that travels frequently.
Does Alafiora™ bill insurance in Colorado, or is this a private-pay practice?
Cherry Hills Village sessions are private pay, sometimes called direct pay or out-of-pocket, and Alafiora™ bills no insurance for any of them. A superbill for potential out-of-network reimbursement is available on request, and current rates and session formats sit on the Rates and Fees page. Paying privately keeps the record narrow: no diagnosis or treatment plan goes to an insurer, and nobody outside the room decides how many sessions are appropriate or how long they run, unless the client authorizes a release of information themselves.
Checking a license before contacting anybody found online is a reasonable thing to do. Dr. Lapite-Garrett's Colorado license, active and telehealth-only, can be verified directly through the Colorado Department of Regulatory Agencies at dpo.colorado.gov, using the state's own public license lookup tool. Checking with the board takes a few minutes and costs nothing.
Begin a Confidential Conversation
A first conversation is brief and confidential, inside the same legal and professional limits any licensed psychologist is required to disclose before care starts, and none of it functions as a trial for whatever brought someone to make the call. The only subject is what the client actually wants help with. Asked directly, most people in this position name something ordinary as what they're actually hoping for: a committee meeting, a business trip, a family gathering with nothing in it that needs explaining to anyone. Someone already certain of that is equally welcome to begin directly with a first session.
For anyone weighing what a demanding, closely watched professional life is doing to a private struggle, the page on Leaders and Executives goes further into exactly that specific weight. A reader can leave now and still hold onto this, through a bookmark or a scan of the QR code in the footer.
Every session at Alafiora is held by one licensed psychologist in clinical psychology
Dr. Esther Lapite-Garrett is the founder and sole practitioner of Alafiora. There are no associates, no rotating providers, and no case handoffs: the person who reads a client's history in the first session is the same person still holding it two years later. She is licensed in New Mexico and Indiana, both regular and active, and in Colorado, active for telehealth only.
Her training is doctoral-level, which typically extends several years beyond a master's-level license in assessment, diagnosis, and the treatment of complex, overlapping presentations. She keeps a deliberately small caseload so that depth is possible, participates in ongoing peer consultation and clinical training, and maintains her own personal therapy.
Whatever brought someone to this page today is never put on trial here
A consultation is a brief conversation with no obligation attached. Those already certain they are ready are equally welcome to begin directly with a first session.