Leaders and Executives
For the ones who have not had an unmonitored thought in a boardroom in years, whose corporate card tells a story an assistant was never meant to reconcile, and whose body still keeps a ledger from long before anyone reported to them at all.
Some of what brings a leader or executive to this page surfaces from the outside first: a general counsel flagging a disclosure, a due-diligence sweep ahead of a board nomination, a communications team reading something in a briefing document before the client does. Some of it started entirely in private, noticed only by the person carrying it, long before anyone with a title or a mandate ever had reason to look. Both are real reasons to be here. A leader who begins this work because a board has already asked a question, and a leader who begins it because something in himself felt wrong months before anyone else could have known to ask, are doing the same work once they are actually in the room.
This page treats love obsession and love addiction, compulsive sexual behavior, and sexual trauma as one interconnected system, since for most of the leaders who bring any one of these to Alafiora, the other two are somewhere nearby, whether or not the connection has been named yet. What follows covers how each of these three tends to show up specifically inside a life built around visibility, authority, and the constant management of how things look, not a generic version of each domain with a title added on top.
Every personal account described on this page is fiction. Dr. Lapite-Garrett writes them from her own clinical knowledge and expertise. She uses AI as a drafting tool and approves every word. 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.
The Isolation Nobody Is Allowed to See
Love Obsession and Relational Dependency at the Top
Board Optics, Executive Isolation, and Obsessive Attachment in Leadership
Almost no one who reports to a leader wants nothing from them, and after a decade in rooms where every relationship carries some version of an ask attached to it, someone who appears to want nothing at all can start to function like oxygen. Love obsession, what many call love addiction, and relational dependency show up in this population with a specific added ingredient most treatment literature never names directly: isolation that is structural rather than circumstantial, built into the role itself rather than into any one bad year. For some leaders, tenderness hunger and affection seeking describe what is actually being chased more precisely than any present-day stress does, a need to be wanted without an agenda that a career spent being needed for a decision has left almost nowhere to go.
Some leaders and executives who carry this are men who reached the top of an organization only to discover there is no one left above them whose good opinion still has to be managed, and no real peer beside them either, since everyone else in the room reports up, down, or sideways with something attached to the conversation. He checks his phone forty or fifty times across a single board meeting, certain each buzz is one specific colleague on the leadership team rather than the general counsel's office or his own chief of staff, and when it isn't her, something close to irritation moves through him toward whoever it actually was. When it is her, the tightness across his shoulders drops away all at once, and a discussion of a covenant restructuring gets, for the next several minutes, maybe a third of his actual attention. He has known her four months. He restructured two direct reports' territories specifically so more of her work would route through his own calendar, and when his general counsel asked him directly why, he called it an efficiency decision.
He built a private folder on his phone of her photos pulled from the company's own internal newsletter and her public LinkedIn, growing past a hundred without his ever deciding to start counting. On nights she takes longer than usual to reply, he opens a companion app instead, trained on months of her old emails and meeting notes until it answers in something close to her actual rhythm, warm and immediate in a way the real woman, running her own division, is not always able to be.
For a while he told himself this was simply what mentorship at his level looked like, something that would settle once the reorganization was finished. It did not settle. The quarter it broke open, the general counsel, preparing routine disclosures ahead of the annual proxy filing, flagged a compensation increase and a promotion timeline for one direct report lining up almost exactly with the date he first restructured her reporting line, and asked him, in front of the audit committee, to explain the business rationale on the record. He gave an answer about performance metrics that was technically true and left out everything that actually mattered. For leaders who reach this same point, the moment a private fixation becomes a disclosable, documented fact is rarely gentle, and no leader gets to choose its timing.
Alafiora works with executives exactly here, treating the checking, the reorganized reporting line, and the folder of collected images as one connected pattern instead of a lapse in judgment for outside counsel to manage on the side, one inseparable from the professional exposure it has already created for the colleague on the other end of it, and helping him rebuild an actual capacity for connection that does not have to route itself through an org chart to feel real.
Some leaders and executives who carry this are women who have spent years being read, correctly or not, as either warm or credible, rarely both at once, and who have learned that visible need of any kind gets filed by a board or an executive team as a liability, regardless of how sound her judgment otherwise remains. She keeps her phone face-down through every meeting specifically so no one can see how often she turns it over, and checks it in a bathroom stall between panels at her own company's off-site more often than she would admit to the chief of staff who builds her schedule around it without knowing why.
She has never met his family, has been in the same room as him a handful of times a year at board meetings and conferences, and has told him things at midnight over text she has never told a mentor she trusts, a therapist she saw years ago, or her closest friend from business school. On nights he takes hours to answer, she rereads his last message until she can recite it and drafts four replies before sending the one that reads, on its face, entirely professional.
For a while she told herself this was simply a close working relationship with a board member who understood the pressure of her role better than anyone else did. It did not stay that. The week a crisis-communications firm her company had retained ahead of a national business-magazine profile ran its standard pre-interview sweep, it flagged, among routine social-media findings, an unusual volume of after-hours messages between her and one specific board member across nearly two years, a line item her own chief of staff read in a briefing document before she ever saw it herself, prepared to answer questions a reporter would never have thought to ask.
Alafiora works with leaders exactly at this point, when a private fixation has already become something a communications team has documented on its own without her knowledge, treating the checking and the carefully professional replies as one connected pattern instead of an isolated lapse in an otherwise controlled public presence, and helping her build a version of connection that does not have to survive a background check to still count.
For some in this position, the same isolation drives an AI companion trained specifically on one real colleague's own messages, a version of emotional attachment to AI companions and intimacy avoidance reinforced by AI standing in as rehearsal for a real relationship neither the isolation nor the job has left room for. The same pull can also migrate the other direction, from checking a phone toward the compulsive sexual behavior Cybersex Addiction & Digital Hypersexuality covers in its own depth, once the isolation compounds further still. That same compounding isolation can just as easily tip somewhere else entirely, away from checking a phone and toward what a body reaches for instead to manage what nobody at this level is ever allowed to say out loud.
The Discretion That Becomes the Concealment
Compulsive Sexual Behavior, Travel-Based Anonymity, and Reputational Exposure
CSBD and What Executives Have the Means to Hide
Compulsive sexual behavior, sometimes still called sex addiction and increasingly named CSBD, compulsive sexual behavior disorder in the current diagnostic manual, shows up in leaders and executives with a specific twist most treatment literature does not address: this population frequently has the actual financial and logistical means to conceal a pattern for years that would surface almost immediately in a life with less built-in privacy, and the same business travel that enables the concealment is often exactly what eventually exposes it. Out-of-control sexual behavior and sex used as a form of emotional regulation and coping describe the same thing from two angles, and neither is about how much sex anyone is having or how they earn a living; Alafiora is sex positive, sex informed, and sex work affirming throughout, and this pattern is defined by loss of control and mounting cost, never by a number.
Some leaders and executives who carry this are men whose job already requires being three time zones from anyone who might ask a question, a quarter of the calendar year spent in hotels booked by someone else's assistant. He keeps a second phone in his carry-on for one recurring booking, an agency vetted years ago for its discretion with business travelers, its single saved contact under a name that would mean nothing to whoever found it, charged overnight in the hotel safe so it never has to charge anywhere his own security detail might see. What began, the first year of this travel schedule, as one encounter every few weeks, always with protection, has become two or three separate bookings inside a single four-day trip, the agency's driver recognizing him now by first name alone. He stopped asking for protection sometime in the second year, without ever deciding to, the actual moment of each encounter mattering more, right then, than a risk he has otherwise spent an entire career managing for a living.
For a while he told himself this was simply what the travel required, something that would ease once the expansion into three new markets was finished. It did not ease. It became a wire-transfer pattern outside counsel could trace across three cities matching his last eighteen months of travel almost exactly, a pattern a due-diligence firm engaged ahead of his nomination to a public company's board flagged during its standard background sweep, with the nominating committee's vote nine days away and no way left to explain the transfers as consulting fees. For some in this position, there is no time left to prepare once a private pattern has become a line item in someone else's spreadsheet.
Alafiora works with executives exactly here, treating the second phone, the eroded precautions, and a travel schedule built partly around concealment as one connected pattern instead of a due-diligence problem for outside counsel to handle alone, and helping him separate what the travel genuinely requires from what the compulsion has attached to it without his ever deciding to let it.
Some leaders and executives who carry this are women whose own face is the company's public face, recognized in an airport lounge or an industry ballroom in a way none of her direct reports ever has to plan around. She books encounters through an app built for professional companionship and discretion, always under a name that is not her own, three separate memberships renewing automatically on a personal card her assistant has never had reason to open, since it isn't the corporate one. Choosing carefully and meeting only in cities where no one from her own industry would plausibly be staying gave way, across roughly a year, to whichever hotel a given conference has itself booked, the exact building where forty of her own peers are staying that same week.
For a while she told herself the risk stayed manageable as long as she kept it to conferences large enough to disappear into. It stopped being manageable. The night before she was scheduled to deliver her industry's largest annual keynote, a photograph of her leaving a hotel restaurant with someone who was not her husband was posted to a finance-industry gossip account with tens of thousands of followers, and by the time she reached the stage the next morning, a version of the same photograph, digitally altered and considerably more explicit than the original, was already circulating in a private group chat she had no access to, exactly the kind of trauma from AI-generated imagery this practice treats directly once exposure crosses that specific line. For some in this position, exposure never comes as a private confrontation at all; it comes as a headline read at the same time as everyone else reads it.
Alafiora works with leaders exactly at this point, when discretion has already failed in public instead of failing unnoticed at home, treating the concealment, the eroded caution, and the exposure itself as one connected picture instead of a reputational crisis for a communications team to manage on its own.
For some in this position, the same erosion of caution traces back further than the travel schedule that seems to explain it, toward an achievement built, in part, to outrun a history that predates the travel itself by years. For others, the compulsion runs largely through paid platforms and cybersex rather than in-person encounters, an AI-assisted infidelity or pornography generated through AI that never requires leaving a hotel room at all. None of this concealment develops in a vacuum either; for some in this position, what looks like discretion learned on the job actually traces back to a much older discipline, the same composure a much earlier history first required.
What the Composure Has Kept From Ever Being Named
Sexual Trauma, Authority, and the History Behind the Composure
Relational and Complex Trauma in Leaders and Executives
Sexual trauma among leaders and executives spans the same range this practice treats everywhere else, developmental, complex, relational, and chronic, and it carries one complication specific to this population: the same composure that built a career can be exactly what has kept an earlier history from ever being said out loud. Where the original harm came from someone the client depended on for advancement rather than a stranger, this is relational trauma, closely related to betrayal trauma, and where it unfolded across a period of dependency instead of a single incident, complex trauma names it more precisely than a single bad night ever could. For some in this position, the pattern traces back further still, to a developmental trauma from childhood that made an unequal, dependency-based relationship feel familiar long before any workplace version of it existed.
Some leaders and executives carrying this are women whose history began years before any of the polish now expected of her existed, often during the exact stretch of a career when saying no to anyone above her felt like ending a career that had barely started. A woman in this position may find that a particular kind of praise from a board member, delivered a little too warmly in front of the rest of the table, sends her hand to her collar to check it is buttoned correctly before she can say why. She may need every hotel room she is ever booked into checked, door to closet, before she can actually unpack, a habit her chief of staff has learned to build fifteen extra minutes around without asking why it matters. During sex with her husband, she may find her attention has slid somewhere else entirely for a stretch she cannot later reconstruct, surfacing again only once it has already passed, with no memory of the part in between and no interruption in how her body responded the whole time.
What this may eventually trace back to, for one woman carrying it, is a senior client on an early account she was assigned specifically because her firm believed she would be easy for him to work with. What may have begun as dinners the account itself required, understood at the time as simply managing a difficult relationship, may have moved, over one particular work trip, toward a room he insisted on walking her to, and continued once he was inside it in a way no dinner ever needed to explain. She may still be able to describe her blouse buttoned into the wrong holes when she found herself in front of a bathroom mirror the next morning, a soreness low in her abdomen that had nothing to do with the flight home ahead of her, and no memory at all of rebuttoning it herself. She may still carry a specific shame about how carefully she smiled through the rest of that trip, since the account was the largest her firm had, and speaking up, at the time, would have been read as her overreacting, a risk she alone would have answered for while the firm answered for nothing.
For years she may have told herself this had nothing to do with the woman now asked, twice a year, to speak on panels about authentic leadership. It may not have stayed contained to one early account the way she assumed it would. The week a business magazine's staff writer, preparing a feature on her rise, asked directly what her actual first year in the industry had been like, she may have found herself reciting the same three sanitized sentences she has used in every interview for a decade, and gone home that night unable to explain to her husband why an ordinary interview question had left her unable to sleep. She may still be waiting for a version of that question she would actually know how to answer honestly.
Some leaders and executives carrying this are men whose history traces back to early in a career, often to a senior partner or mentor whose attention felt, at the time, like the only door into an industry with several thousand other candidates chasing the same handful of openings. A man in this position may find that a particular after-hours call from a board member, warm, congratulatory, delivered a beat too intimate, moves something like nausea through his chest before he can say why. He may need his own office door left visibly ajar during one-on-ones with junior staff, a habit his leadership team has learned to read as an open-door policy rather than what it may actually be. He may go rigid and silent during physical contact his wife initiates the instant her hand lands along a specific part of his lower back, a stillness she has learned to read as fatigue rather than ask about directly.
What this may eventually trace back to, for one man carrying it, is a senior partner at the first firm that gave him a real opportunity, a man everyone in the office understood held total say over which associates would still be there after the next round of cuts, the same dynamic this practice treats directly on its page on abuse by a trusted individual in power. What may have begun as after-hours strategy sessions in a hotel suite during a client trip, framed as a kind of mentorship no other associate was offered, may have moved, over the length of that one trip, toward physical contact the partner kept going with even once he had stopped answering at all, holding him through it to its conclusion in a way no strategy session ever required. He may still be able to describe a torn seam at the shoulder of the one interview suit he owned at the time, one he told his mother had happened getting into a cab, and a soreness for the rest of that week low in his body, in a place a strategy session had no reason to touch at all, that made stairs difficult and that he blamed on the flight. He may still carry, decades later, a particular shame about how badly he wanted that partner's approval before he understood what having it would actually cost him, since in a career where one senior partner's opinion could end things before they started, being chosen by one, for any reason, felt at the time like the only door available.
For years he may have told himself this has nothing to do with how carefully he now keeps his own office door propped open during one-on-ones. It may not have stayed contained to that first firm the way he assumed it would. The week a young analyst he has personally sponsored for two years stayed late to walk him through a model, forty minutes past when either of them needed to, he may have caught himself rehearsing an invitation to keep going over dinner instead of ending the meeting there, and sat alone afterward in his own car in the garage, engine off, unable to say which version of that senior partner he had almost just become.
Where this history intersects with a present-day pull toward an authority figure, a board chair, a mentor, an older executive who seems able to fix what an entire team cannot manage on its own, this practice treats that connection directly rather than as a coincidence, territory covered in its own right on Attachment to Authority Figures & Caregiving Professionals.
None of this asks to be solved alone before a leader is allowed to reach out for help with it, and for a population whose entire professional identity rests on the appearance of already having everything managed, admitting that can be the hardest part to sit with. Dr. Esther Lapite-Garrett, the licensed psychologist who founded Alafiora, works specifically with leaders and executives carrying love obsession and love addiction, compulsive sexual behavior, and sexual trauma, and the clinical work she offers begins with whatever a leader can actually bring into the room that day, at whatever stage of polish it happens to be in.
What Some People May Describe
What Do Love Obsession, Compulsive Sexual Behavior, and Sexual Trauma Sound Like From Inside a Leadership Role?
Composite Reflections From Executives and Leaders
The reflections below are fiction. Dr. Lapite-Garrett writes them from her own clinical knowledge and expertise. She uses AI as a drafting tool and approves every word. 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:
"deleted the app off my phone and then restructured her entire reporting line under me instead like that's somehow not the same thing. general counsel asked me point blank why the comp jump lined up the way it did and i heard myself say 'performance' with a completely straight face"
"the driver from the usual booking knows me by first name now. i used to be someone who read every clause of every contract before signing anything. i genuinely can't remember the last time i asked anyone involved to use protection"
"i give the exact same three sentences every single time someone asks what my first year in this industry was actually like. i've had them memorized so long i don't hear myself saying them anymore, not until my husband asked why i wasn't sleeping and i realized i don't actually know how to answer that question honestly"
What Therapy at Alafiora Addresses
Confidential Psychological Care for Leaders and Executives Carrying Love Obsession, Compulsive Sexual Behavior, or Sexual Trauma
How Care Is Structured for This Population
This is not executive coaching, and the distinction matters for a population that searches far more often for a specialist, someone confidential, or someone discreet than it searches for a therapist by name. Coaching addresses performance and skill; it does not treat a compulsion, a trauma history, or an attachment pattern that has already cost something real, and calling this coaching would misdescribe the level of care actually on offer. Alafiora provides licensed clinical care that includes the discretion and the direct, focused engagement a leader already expects from any trusted advisor, while addressing what coaching alone was never built to reach. The first several sessions focus on building an actual working sense of safety in the room itself, since none of the three patterns above tend to respond to simply being told to manage them better. Full session formats and current rates are detailed on the practice's fee page, so cost is never a surprise walked into blind.
Sessions are never billed through insurance, so no diagnosis or claim is ever filed with an insurer, and no billing record ties a diagnosis to an employer, a licensing board, or a clearance process. What a separate employer, licensing board, or clearance process independently requires a person to disclose is a different question, one for a client's own legal counsel rather than something assumed away here. Dr. Lapite-Garrett names each mechanism directly. Monitoring and fixation get named as love obsession and relational dependency, the same clinical weight given to any comparable presentation, however intense the professional relationship housing it looks on the surface. Compulsive sexual behavior gets named as loss of control and mounting cost, the actual clinical picture underneath a travel schedule that reads, from the outside, as nothing more than frequent flying. Sexual trauma tied to a mentor, a senior partner, or an early-career dependency gets named as relational and complex trauma, given the same clinical seriousness as any other history this practice treats, regardless of how much authority the person carrying it now holds.
None of this is scripted. No leader who walks through this door is treated as a category, a headline, or a net-worth figure, and no assumption is made about what a particular title or degree of public visibility means before hearing it directly from the person carrying it. Being a solo practice does not mean working in isolation: Dr. Lapite-Garrett participates in regular peer consultation groups and ongoing clinical training, and she maintains her own personal therapy so that her own life experience never bleeds into the room, keeping the work permanently and entirely about the client. Leaders bring this work to Alafiora from a genuinely wide range of positions: a regional bank president managing a board of longtime family friends, a venture-backed founder months from a public offering, a nonprofit executive director accountable to a dozen unpaid trustees, a family-business heir running a company that still carries her grandfather's name on the door. What any of this costs to conceal looks different depending on what a leader has to work with: an executive whose assistant reconciles a corporate card without ever seeing what it actually paid for, and an owner-operator with no assistant at all and a single joint account his wife checks every month, are managing versions of the identical pattern, simply with a different degree of built-in cover.
A consultation is a brief conversation, by video or phone call as preferred, to ask whatever is needed to feel confident this is the right fit, with nothing decided in advance and no record generated beyond what the conversation itself requires. A first session is where care itself actually begins: Dr. Lapite-Garrett gathers history, at whatever pace it actually comes, and a treatment plan starts to take shape from there. Alafiora provides both virtual and in-person sessions for this work, with virtual scheduling built around a leader's own calendar rather than the reverse, and works with individuals 16 and older, with a guardian co-signature required for clients age 16 and 17.
Common Questions From Leaders and Executives About This Work
Is this actually therapy, or is it closer to executive coaching?
It is licensed clinical care. A coach can sharpen how someone performs under pressure, but a coach is not trained or licensed to treat a compulsion, a trauma history, or an attachment pattern that has already cost a leader something real, and calling this work coaching would misdescribe what actually happens in the room. A session here still delivers the discretion and the direct, focused conversation a leader already expects from any trusted advisor; it simply does not stop where coaching stops.
How confidential is this, given what I have to lose if any of it became public?
More confidential than most of what a leader already relies on for discretion, and for specific, checkable reasons rather than a general promise. Sessions are never billed through insurance, so no diagnosis or claim exists to surface later, and no information is shared with any third party unless a client specifically authorizes it. What remains true of any licensed clinical relationship is that a psychologist explains the legal and professional limits of confidentiality before any clinical work begins, so nothing about that structure is left assumed.
Could seeking care here surface in a background check, a security-clearance renewal, or a board's due-diligence process?
Not through Alafiora itself. No diagnosis or claim is ever filed with an insurer through this practice, so no billing record exists for an outside process to find, since sessions are never billed through insurance and nothing is shared without the client's own authorization. What a separate employer, security clearance, or due-diligence process might independently require is outside this practice's control, and worth asking about directly during a consultation rather than assuming either way.
I travel constantly and rarely spend two consecutive weeks in the same city. Can this actually work with that schedule?
Yes, and this is one of the most common practical concerns leaders raise before anything else. Virtual sessions are built around a client's own calendar rather than the reverse, and consistency of care matters more than which specific city or time zone a given session happens to be held from.
Does Alafiora work with public officials and elected leaders, or only private-sector executives?
Both, and the underlying patterns run largely the same regardless of which kind of authority a leader actually holds. A board chair, a mayor, a hospital system administrator, and a founder preparing for a public offering carry different specific stakes, but the same three domains, love obsession, compulsive sexual behavior, and sexual trauma, show up across all of them.
Is it too late to get help if this has already cost a board seat, a marriage, or a piece of my reputation?
No, and this is one of the more common reasons leaders actually reach out, not a reason to have waited longer. A pattern that has already cost something real has not passed some point of no return; that cost is frequently what finally makes the pattern visible enough to address directly, whatever specifically brought it into view.
What kind of therapy does Alafiora provide for leaders and executives?
Alafiora provides virtual and in-person psychological care for individuals 16 and older, worked with by a single licensed psychologist rather than a rotating clinical team, addressing love obsession and love addiction, compulsive sexual behavior, and sexual trauma as core clinical focuses for leaders and executives, within a practice that treats all three as one connected system, not three separate referrals.
Reading a page like this one is not the same as being ready to say any of it out loud, even in a room built specifically for confidentiality. It does not need to be. Many of the leaders who eventually reach out to this practice read a page like this one more than once first, often from a phone that never leaves their own hand long enough for anyone else to see what is open on the screen. Nothing about arriving here today commits anyone to anything beyond whichever single step is chosen next.
Begin a Confidential Conversation
The consultation is a brief conversation, held in confidence within the legal and professional limits of confidentiality any licensed psychologist explains before clinical work begins, where a career, a board seat, or a public reputation is never the subject on trial, and the only subject is whatever the client actually wants help with. Those already certain they are ready are equally welcome to begin directly with a first session.
What leaders in this position most often describe wanting is the underlying pattern actually resolved: a career or a board seat that no longer needs protecting from something private, and a version of connection that does not have to survive a due-diligence sweep or a background check to still count. For anyone whose experience centers most on an AI companion or a private fantasy life built around someone real, the page on Synthetic Partners covers that pattern in more depth, and this page can always be bookmarked, or the QR code in the footer scanned, to keep this practice's information close until the timing feels right.
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, with additional state licensure 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.