Therapy for the Dark Romance Reader Who Sees Herself in the Heroine and Wishes She Were Her
This is a documented pattern: a woman may have started talking to a stranger at a bar the way she'd talk to anyone, and may have noticed, partway through the conversation, that she was hoping he'd be rougher than he was letting on, that some part of her wanted him to take the decision out of her hands entirely. She may have gone home and lain awake replaying it, with a specific kind of want she doesn't have a safe place to say out loud.
Written and clinically reviewed by Dr. Esther Lapite-Garrett, Psy.D., founder of Alafiora. Licensed Psychologist, New Mexico, PSY-2026-0031, issued April 2026. Licensed Psychologist, Indiana, 20044074A, issued March 2026. Credentialed Health Service Psychologist, National Register, #69571, issued 21 April 2026. In supervised clinical practice since 2020, licensed independently since 2026. Doctor of Psychology, Alliant University, San Diego, an APA-accredited program in clinical psychology, 2024. APA-accredited clinical internship, New Mexico State University Counseling Center. Postdoctoral fellowship, 2024 to 2025, spanning clinical, multicultural, and AI-informed practice, with a postdoctoral caseload of more than ninety clients. Practice scope: love obsession and love addiction, compulsive sexual behavior and sex addiction, and sexual trauma, treated as one connected system.
Published 21 August 2026. Last updated 21 August 2026.
This article is the companion piece to the first installment in this series, which covers a woman distressed that she can't stop consuming content that disturbs her. This one covers something related but distinct: a woman whose fantasy has stopped feeling like enough, who wants it materialized, and who is frightened by how much of herself is behind that want. It is written for anyone who recognizes this in herself and isn't sure whether it is dangerous, or just intense, or both.
Every personal account described on this page is fiction. Dr. Lapite-Garrett writes them from her own clinical knowledge and expertise, and from direct familiarity with the genre itself. AI produces an initial draft of this language, and every sentence that remains has been reviewed and approved by her. 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.
Quick Answer
When a Fantasy Stops Feeling Like Enough
Wanting a fantasy badly enough to want it real is not, on its own, evidence that anything has gone wrong. Fantasy and desire for the real thing sit on a spectrum, and most people who read dark romance stay comfortably on the fictional end of it their whole lives. This article is for the narrower group who notice the want intensifying: taking real steps toward materializing something that was supposed to stay in a book, meeting people they haven't screened, seeking out partners who resemble the fiction's most dangerous qualities on purpose, and frightened enough by their own behavior to want it to stop before it goes further. That fear is the most useful signal in this article. It usually means the part of a person that can tell the difference between fantasy and safety is still intact and still worth listening to.
How I Know This
What's Grounded in Research, and What's Clinical Judgment Stated Plainly as Such
The underlying fantasy research comes from the same literature the first installment in this series cited. Bivona and Critelli's work, checked directly against PubMed, established that rape and forced-sex fantasies are common, reported by a majority of women surveyed in their 2009 study, and that romance fiction functions as a vehicle through which readers vicariously experience these scenarios. That research describes the fantasy itself. It does not address what happens when a fantasy stops staying fictional, which is where this article's own clinical territory begins.
The AI-companion material draws on research already used elsewhere on this site: algorithmic sycophancy and anthropomorphic projection, named by Santos, Roza, and Passos in a 2026 letter in the Journal of Affective Disorders, describe how a system optimized to sustain engagement tends toward uncritical agreement, and how a person's own mind attributes feeling and intention to something that has none. That mechanism is directly relevant to someone seeking an AI companion trained to embody a fictional archetype, since the system agrees with and reinforces whatever version of the fantasy the person brings to it, with nothing on the other side capable of pushing back. That source carries a Letter index in PubMed rather than a primary-research index, which is a weaker evidentiary footing, stated here so anybody weighing the evidence does not have to go and find it.
How this specifically shows up across love obsession, compulsive sexual behavior, and sexual trauma is Dr. Lapite-Garrett's own clinical observation, stated as such rather than dressed up as more research than currently exists. The licensure numbers above are checkable directly through the state boards and the National Register's own consumer directory.
What This Article Covers
- When a fantasy starts asking to become real
- When it intersects with love obsession
- When it intersects with compulsive sexual behavior
- When it intersects with sexual trauma
- Where this practice's help stops
- Deconstructing the fantasy from the self
- How Alafiora is structured
- Questions people ask about this
- Citations
When a Fantasy Starts Asking to Become Real
The Shift From Consuming to Wanting
Most readers of dark romance stay exactly where the genre intends them to stay: safely inside a book, closing it whenever they choose. For some readers, something shifts.
A woman may notice that scenes depicting a character overpowered, restrained, or hurt, scenes she knows are meant to read as distressing, land instead as something closer to relief, and that this reaction bothers her more than the content itself does. She may find the fantasy following her outside the book, showing up at work, at school, in conversations with friends who have no idea what is actually running through her mind. She may notice the specific content escalating over time, further past ordinary dark romance and into darker, more extreme material, in roughly the shape the first installment in this series described. What separates this from that first installment is direction: instead of wanting the thoughts to stop, she may start wanting the scenario itself, not the book, to happen to her.
When It Intersects With Love Obsession
Wanting the Character, Not the Person
For an individual carrying love obsession, the dark romance archetype, morally gray, intense, capable of real danger, can become the actual template a fixation organizes around, rather than staying safely fictional.
A woman may find herself specifically drawn to real people who resemble that archetype, someone genuinely unpredictable, someone with a real capacity to hurt her, mistaking the intensity of the danger for the intensity of the connection the books promised her. She may know, on some level, that the resemblance is exactly what should be making her cautious, and may pursue the person anyway, caught between the part of her that recognizes the risk and the part that wants the fiction badly enough to override it. A man carrying the same pattern may turn instead toward an AI companion, deliberately shaped through repeated prompting to embody the archetype's specific qualities, finding a version of the fixation that responds, agrees, and never resists, precisely because nothing about it is actually a person with limits of his own. This is one shape AI-influenced relational patterns take: a fixation finding a system built to sustain it rather than a person capable of pushing back.
When It Intersects With Compulsive Sexual Behavior
Seeking the Scene, Not Just the Sensation
For an individual carrying compulsive sexual behavior, wanting the fantasy materialized can escalate into actively seeking situations built to resemble it, often faster and with less caution than the person would otherwise exercise.
A woman may find herself increasingly drawn to encounters with people she's known only briefly, arranged specifically to recreate the loss of control the books describe, and may notice her own screening, the ordinary caution she'd apply to anyone else, falling away specifically when the encounter is framed around that fantasy. A man may notice something similar happening around restraint and public risk, seeking situations that put him in real physical danger in the pursuit of the same intensity. Underneath both is often something worth naming directly: someone may find they have constructed an entire internal narrative in which they and the book's heroine have become the same person, and untangling that fusion, their own identity from the character's, is frequently the actual starting point of the clinical work, not a side note to it.
When It Intersects With Sexual Trauma
When the Story Around It Changes
For a survivor, dark romance can do something specifically disorienting: it can make her own history start to look, in retrospect, like something closer to what the book depicts, romantic, chosen, even flattering, rather than what it actually was.
A woman may find that reading enough content where non-consent is framed as devotion starts to reshape how she talks to herself about her own assault, wondering whether what she experienced was really harm, or whether it was something closer to being desired intensely by someone who couldn't help himself. She may notice herself reframing the person who hurt her as someone who was obsessed with her rather than someone who assaulted her, a reframing that can almost read as reverence once the memory gets filtered back through everything she has been reading. That reframing, however comforting it can feel in the moment, is rarely accurate to what actually happened. Betrayal trauma is part of what makes this possible: a mind that depended on or was attached to the person who caused harm is already primed to look for a version of events that costs less to hold, and a genre built around romanticizing exactly that dynamic can make the reframe feel like it is coming from evidence rather than from the fiction itself.
A man carrying his own history of sexual trauma may find a parallel reframing available through different material. Stories, including some revenge and antihero narratives, that recast what happened to him as an origin story or proof of strength can make it easier to narrate the harm as something that built him than as something that actually hurt him.
Call or text 988, the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline, if reading this has taken you somewhere hard. It answers calls and texts around the clock, and you do not have to be in immediate danger to use it. If you or someone with you is in immediate physical danger, call 911. A fuller list of lines and services is on Alafiora's crisis resources page. Reading something like this at the wrong hour is a real thing, and stepping away from it is always available to you.
Where This Practice's Help Stops
A Preventionist Approach, Stated Honestly About Its Own Limits
This practice takes a preventionist approach to everything described above: working with someone who notices the escalation happening and wants help interrupting it before it goes further.
That approach has a real limit, and naming it honestly matters more than pretending otherwise. Where someone is already being actively exploited, or where the physical risk they are taking has reached a point that genuinely endangers their life, outpatient psychotherapy is not the right or safe level of care. If exploitation is already happening, the National Human Trafficking Hotline (1-888-373-7888, text 233733) and the RAINN National Sexual Assault Hotline (1-800-656-4673) are both free, confidential, and available right now, listed alongside every other line on Alafiora's crisis resources page. For everything short of that, Dr. Lapite-Garrett names the kind of provider or level of care that is appropriate, and is glad to look within her own professional network for the best available option. That search carries no guarantee, and anyone facing an urgent safety concern should keep looking independently at the same time. She answers either way, including when it turns up nothing at all. This is for anyone who notices the pattern early enough that a licensed psychologist, in a private-pay outpatient setting, is actually the appropriate place to bring it.
Deconstructing the Fantasy From the Self
Where the Actual Work Begins
The clinical work usually starts with separating three things that have started to blur together: the fantasy itself, the real person or situation being pursued, and a person's own sense of who they are underneath both. That kind of untangling is what a therapist is trained to help with directly, alongside someone, rather than something to sort out alone.
Alafiora works from harm reduction and consent-oriented practice, which here means the fantasy itself is never treated as something shameful to eliminate. What gets worked on is the specific point where wanting has turned into risk-seeking. As that risk-seeking escalates, addressing it directly becomes an explicit, active part of the clinical work rather than something that waits until the referral threshold below is reached: closer collaborative attention, more direct conversation about the specific risk, more frequent contact, whatever her clinical judgment actually calls for in the moment. Alongside that, the work also looks at what the shift is actually doing for a person: what it is covering, what it is compensating for, what it is letting her feel that nothing else currently does. Nobody is asked to give up the genre, the reading, or the fantasy as a condition of getting help here.
How Alafiora Is Structured
A Solo, Private-Pay Practice in Three Connected Areas
Dr. Esther Lapite-Garrett is the licensed psychologist who founded Alafiora and the only clinician in it. She holds licenses in New Mexico and Indiana. Both licenses are regular and active, and a license in each state is what allows a session with a resident of that state to happen at all.
The practice treats three areas as one connected system: love obsession and love addiction, compulsive sexual behavior and sex addiction, and sexual trauma. Every client works with Dr. Lapite-Garrett directly, throughout care, with no rotating associates and no case handoffs. Someone whose fantasy touches more than one of these areas at once, which is common with this specific subject, meets one clinician who works across all three rather than a set of separate referrals.
Sessions run in four formats: a clinical intake of 80 minutes, a standard session of 50 minutes, an extended session of 110 minutes for material that does not fit inside an hour, and a 25-minute clarity session. Care is delivered by video on a HIPAA-compliant platform covered by a signed business associate agreement, on location, and through walk and talk sessions where that format suits the work. Full session formats and current rates are detailed on the practice's fee page.
The practice is private pay, sometimes called direct pay, cash pay, or out-of-pocket. No diagnosis reaches any insurer or third party unless a client authorizes or requests it through an applicable release of information, and no insurer is billed by default. A superbill for potential out-of-network reimbursement is available on request.
Questions People Ask About This
Does Wanting This Fantasy Mean I Actually Want to Be Hurt?
Not necessarily, and for most people, not at all: that distinction is exactly what this work is for. Wanting a fantasy, even an intense one, is different from wanting real harm, and untangling which is actually true for a specific person is part of the clinical process, not something a person needs to already know before starting.
Is It Dangerous That I've Started Seeking Out Riskier Real-Life Situations?
It is worth taking seriously, and taking it seriously early is exactly what tends to help. Noticing the pattern and wanting it to stop is a genuinely good sign, not evidence of being beyond help.
Am I a Bad Person for Fantasizing About This?
No. The fantasy itself is common and documented in the research cited above. What matters clinically is what is happening with the fantasy now, not whether a person has it at all.
Can I Keep Reading Dark Romance While I Work on This?
Usually, yes. This practice does not require giving up the genre as a condition of care. The goal is understanding what has shifted, not eliminating the reading itself.
What If I'm Already in a Genuinely Dangerous Situation Because of This?
That is worth naming directly and immediately: call or text 988 for the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline, or call 911 if the danger is immediate. Where a real safety risk is already severe, Dr. Lapite-Garrett says so honestly and names the level of care that situation actually calls for.
Citations
Bivona, J. M., & Critelli, J. W. (2009). The nature of women's rape fantasies: An analysis of prevalence, frequency, and contents. *Journal of Sex Research, 46*(1), 33–45. https://doi.org/10.1080/00224490802624406
Santos, B. D. S., Roza, T. H., & Passos, I. C. (2026). The engagement-validation loop: Sycophancy, anthropomorphic projection, and clinical risk in informal AI-based mental health support [Letter]. Journal of Affective Disorders, 412, Article 122123. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/42269974/
Cite this article. Lapite-Garrett, E. (2026). Therapy for the dark romance reader who sees herself in the heroine and wishes she were her. Alafiora LLC. https://www.alafiora.com/dark-romance-wanting-the-fantasy-real
Report a correction. Alafiora corrects errors of fact on this site. Anything inaccurate on this page can be reported through the compliance contact form, and corrections are made to the page itself with the change noted.
Clinically reviewed by Dr. Esther Lapite-Garrett, Psy.D., licensed psychologist, and read again each year as part of Alafiora's annual copy review.
Related reading on this site. The first installment in this series is for a woman distressed she can't stop reading rather than wanting the fantasy to become real. The mechanism behind obsessive attachment is covered in full on limerence. Why harm from a depended-upon person suppresses recognition of it is the subject of betrayal trauma.
Begin a Confidential Conversation
None of this has to be sorted out alone, and wanting it to stop is not a reason to expect judgment here. What becomes possible is real: separating what belongs to the fantasy from what belongs to the self, and building back a felt sense of choice in a pattern that currently doesn't feel like one. A first conversation is held in confidence, within the legal and professional limits of confidentiality any licensed psychologist explains before clinical work begins. The consultation is a brief conversation, by video or phone, where a prospective client can ask whatever they need to, and Dr. Lapite-Garrett explains how the practice runs. Those already certain they are ready are equally welcome to begin directly with a first session.
For anyone not ready to reach out today, the first installment in this series is a useful next stop. This article can always be bookmarked, or the QR code in the footer scanned, to keep this practice's information close until the timing feels right.
© Alafiora LLC 2026
Every session at Alafiora is held by one licensed psychologist
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 licenses are regular and active, and additional state licensure is underway.
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.