---
title: "Dr. Esther Lapite-Garrett, Licensed Psychologist: Meet the Founder of Alafiora"
description: "Meet Dr. Esther Lapite-Garrett, a licensed psychologist and the founder of Alafiora, treating love obsession, compulsive sexual behavior, and sexual trauma as one interconnected system. Doctoral training, the CHAIR clinical framework, and licensure details for New Mexico and Indiana."
url: https://www.alafiora.com/meet-the-psychologist-dr-esther
practice: Alafiora LLC
author: Dr. Esther Lapite-Garrett, licensed psychologist
license: https://www.alafiora.com/website-terms-of-use
copyright: © Alafiora 2026
note: >-
  Educational content, not treatment. Reading it establishes no clinical
  relationship. Every personal account on this page is fiction, written by
  Dr. Lapite-Garrett from her own clinical knowledge and expertise; she uses AI
  as a drafting tool and approves every word. No client information of any kind
  was used to make them.
---

**Alafiora · Meet the Psychologist · A Licensed Psychologist Treating Love, Sex, and Trauma as One System**

# Meet the Psychologist: Dr. Esther Lapite-Garrett

### A licensed psychologist who treats love obsession and love addiction, compulsive sexual behavior, and sexual trauma as one interconnected system, working with individuals sixteen and older across the states where she is licensed to practice, whether that means a session from a parked car between meetings or a quiet room at home.

[ BEGIN WITH A CONSULTATION ] [ BEGIN WITH A FIRST SESSION ]

While this page is written about Dr. Lapite-Garrett, the moment someone becomes her client, the work centers entirely on them.

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## The Psychologist Behind the Practice | Dr. Esther Lapite-Garrett, Founder and Sole Practitioner

Dr. Esther Lapite-Garrett is a licensed psychologist and the founder of Alafiora, a private-pay psychological practice built for the kind of depth that most clinical settings are not structured to hold. She earned her Doctor of Psychology degree from Alliant University in San Diego, where her training was grounded in [psychodynamic psychotherapy](https://www.alafiora.com/psychodynamic-therapy), [attachment theory](https://www.alafiora.com/attachment-centered-care), and the treatment of complex trauma across its most difficult presentations. That training now supports a single, focused practice: love obsession and love addiction, compulsive sexual behavior and sex addiction, and sexual trauma. In her caseload, these three function together as one connected system.

Her clinical career rests on one steady conviction. The most important work in psychotherapy is rarely the most comfortable work, and a psychologist's willingness to go there with a client is what separates real change from a well-rehearsed holding pattern. Dr. Lapite-Garrett works with individuals whose presenting concerns sit at the intersection of sexual trauma, relational injury, identity, and attachment. Some arrive after years of prior treatment that never went far enough. Others are sitting with a clinician for the first time, in a session that only became possible once waiting any longer stopped being an option.

She is not easily rattled, and she has never needed distance from difficult material to stay effective in the room. Her presence softens where softness is what a client needs and sharpens where directness is the more compassionate choice. The room is built so that a person can say anything without bracing for a reaction, and that condition is what makes the depth of the work possible at all.

Individuals looking for a licensed psychologist who treats sexual trauma, attachment, and relational complexity as connected concerns, whether through telehealth, in person, or wherever home happens to be, will find in Dr. Lapite-Garrett a clinician of unusual scope and steadiness. She works with the full range of people this kind of care serves: [leaders and executives](https://www.alafiora.com/leaders-and-executives), [adult entertainment professionals](https://www.alafiora.com/adult-entertainment-professionals), [LGBTQIA+ individuals](https://www.alafiora.com/lgbtqia), [college students](https://www.alafiora.com/college-students), [adult men](https://www.alafiora.com/adult-men) and [adult women](https://www.alafiora.com/adult-women), and others navigating the same three domains from very different circumstances. Full detail on the states where she currently holds an active license lives on [Where Alafiora Practices](https://www.alafiora.com/where-alafiora-practices).

"I don't tell my clients what they want to hear. I tell them what they need to know."

— Dr. Esther Lapite-Garrett

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## Clinical Framework | The CHAIR Model Behind Every Session at Alafiora

That steadiness is not just a personality trait; it comes from a specific structure Dr. Lapite-Garrett brings into every session. Every session is built on a frame, and the frame is what makes the actual work possible. The foundation of Dr. Lapite-Garrett's clinical practice is the CHAIR framework, developed by Nicole Arzt, LMFT, and applied here as the frame every session, every rupture, and every repair is built on. The framework names five conditions that make therapeutic effectiveness possible. They function less like aspirations and more like the standard every session is measured against.

When all five hold at once, the therapeutic relationship becomes what it is meant to be: genuinely safe ground where lasting change becomes structurally possible. This is what allows any specific clinical intervention to actually land, because the relationship underneath it is safe enough to hold it. For clients who have sat in prior treatment where safety felt conditional, where progress felt like a performance for the therapist's benefit, or where the therapist's own discomfort set an unspoken limit on what could be explored, this framework is the mechanism by which Alafiora works differently.

**C, for Consistency.** Clients know what to expect because Dr. Lapite-Garrett brings the same quality of presence, attunement, and clinical rigor to every session. The work itself can shift session to session, and the standard behind it holds steady throughout.

**H, for Holding Onto Hope.** Many clients arrive having already decided that their specific history, their particular patterns, or the shame they carry most privately is something no clinician can actually help with. Dr. Lapite-Garrett holds hope on a client's behalf, steadily, for as long as it takes until they can hold it themselves.

**A, for Attunement.** Attunement means perceiving and responding to what a client is actually experiencing beneath the words being used. It is the difference between a client feeling genuinely heard and a client feeling processed. At Alafiora, attunement is the ground the clinical work stands on.

**I, for Impact.** The work at Alafiora is measured by what has actually shifted, tracked across the arc of every session and every therapeutic relationship. The real question is always whether something has actually shifted, structurally, over time.

**R, for Repair, when misattunement occurs.** No clinical relationship moves without some rupture along the way. What separates real psychotherapy from a pleasant conversation is the willingness to name what went wrong, understand it together, and move through it. Repair is built into the standard of care here.

"While your comfort and well-being are always a priority, they are never at the expense of the clinical and personal growth you came to treatment for."

— Dr. Esther Lapite-Garrett

---

## How She Practices | The Values Present in Every Session at Alafiora

The CHAIR framework describes the structure underneath every session. What that structure actually feels like from a client's chair is its own separate question, and it shows up in specific, repeatable ways. What it is like in session with Dr. Lapite-Garrett is specific and consistent. She is deeply present without being intrusive, her boundaries stay clear without ever going cold, and she meets ordinary human messiness with the kind of steadiness that makes honesty feel safe to bring into the room. None of what follows is a code of conduct posted somewhere in an office. These are the qualities that show up, again and again, in the room itself.

Clients are welcome exactly as they are, in pajamas or in professional attire, calling in from a parked car or a quiet room at home, right after waking up or at the tail end of a long day. The space asks nothing of a client's appearance or performance. The only real requirement is a willingness to show up and do the work; everything else falls away behind that.

Some experiences are better spoken in the exact words that actually capture them, and therapy that requires a client to sanitize how they describe the worst things that have happened to them keeps those experiences at a careful, unhelpful distance. Dr. Lapite-Garrett does not merely tolerate however a client chooses to express their own story. When a client's natural register includes profanity and they seem at ease with it moving both directions, she will meet them there. She does not assume this either way; comfort with the shared language of a session is checked, and led by the client, every time.

When laughter happens on its own, unprompted, it is treated as part of the work itself. Dr. Lapite-Garrett has been caught in genuine laughing fits with clients over the sheer absurdity of life circumstances that seem to conspire to show up mid-session, and that kind of moment is rarely a departure from something serious. It is often the most human thing that happens all week, carrying its own real weight.

Dr. Lapite-Garrett does not grow frustrated with a client who is not producing visible progress on someone else's timeline. She recognizes when a person is trying, and she understands that change moves at its own pace, through its own seasons, in its own shape. Walking into a session when every instinct says to cancel is not a small thing. Often it is the most significant act a client manages all week, and it is treated that way, never brushed past.

The session space belongs entirely to the client, which is why Dr. Lapite-Garrett does not use the hour to talk about herself. That said, a client has a real right to know the clinician they are trusting with this material well enough to feel safe with her, and questions asked directly during a session are always welcome. Transparency in service of trust is honored every time a client asks.

Anger, disgust, grief, boredom, and relief that does not feel like it is supposed to be there all belong in the room. So do feelings toward Dr. Lapite-Garrett herself that feel uncomfortable to name, whatever shape those feelings take. Transference, feelings that surface toward a therapist as part of the therapeutic relationship itself, is treated as clinical information, not as something a client needs to manage around or apologize for. Her psychodynamic and attachment-centered training is built specifically to work with exactly this kind of material, understanding what a feeling is actually carrying and helping a client make sense of it with the same care given to everything else brought into the room. Some clients arrive having been ended by a previous therapist over feelings like these. That is not how this practice works: a therapeutic relationship at Alafiora concludes when treatment is no longer clinically effective or when transparency itself has become an obstacle to the work, not because a client's feelings toward their therapist became complicated.

No topic sits outside the scope of this practice. Fantasies that carry shame, dreams that feel too revealing to say out loud, thoughts and feelings about the therapeutic relationship itself, and patterns of thought that have never once been spoken aloud because they seemed too strange or too dark to survive being said. For many clients, this is the first room they have ever sat in where nothing has to be edited before it is said.

Care is collaborative, and it rarely stays confined to the office itself. When clinically indicated, Dr. Lapite-Garrett coordinates with attorneys, physicians, executive coaches, family office professionals, and other providers who already hold a place in a client's broader life. The therapeutic relationship rarely operates in true isolation from the rest of a person's world, and the strongest outcomes usually do not either.

---

## A Psychologist for Life, When Clinically Indicated | Short-Term Work and Long-Term Continuity of Care

Some clients choose to stay in ongoing care because they have come to understand exactly what this kind of continuity is worth. Therapy at Alafiora is not built around a fixed endpoint decided in advance. Some clients arrive with a specific, circumscribed need and complete that work inside a defined window of time. Others discover along the way that what they were actually carrying needed more room than that. A number of clients have maintained a clinical relationship with Dr. Lapite-Garrett across years and across some of the most significant transitions of their adult lives.

That kind of continuity is a plain fact of how effective long-term care works: a psychologist who already knows a client's full history, who has already witnessed the growth and navigated the ruptures, who never needs to be brought back up to speed when something significant happens, is a clinical asset with real, measurable value. For someone whose professional or personal life runs at high stakes, that continuity is often one of the more stabilizing structures available to them.

**Short-term, phase-specific work.** Focused, time-limited treatment built around one defined clinical goal, with full clinical depth held inside a clear beginning, a clear direction, and a clear end point.

**Extended depth work.** For clients whose history carries multiple layers, whose patterns are long established, or whose material needs sustained immersion over time. The pace is set entirely by what the work actually requires.

**Life-stage transitions.** For clients navigating a new relationship, a major career shift, an identity change, a loss, or the resurfacing of earlier patterns at a new moment in life. The presenting concern changes shape. The therapeutic relationship holds steady underneath it.

**Long-term stabilization and growth.** For clients who have already completed significant trauma work and choose to continue at a lower intensity, as an investment in their ongoing psychological health.

Full session formats and current rates for each of these structures are detailed on [the practice's fee page](https://www.alafiora.com/rates-and-fees), so cost is never something a prospective client has to guess at.

---

## Formation and Training | Education, Licensure, and the Doctoral Training Behind the Fee

None of the presence or the framework described above happened by instinct alone. The clinical training behind this practice represents the accumulated weight of years of supervised work, independent research, peer review, and the kind of intensive postdoctoral immersion that produces a clinician who does not need to reach for a worksheet when a client brings something genuinely difficult. What follows is a summary of that formation.

### Education | Doctoral and Graduate Training at Alliant University

**Doctor of Psychology (Psy.D.), 2024.** Alliant University, San Diego, an APA-accredited program in clinical psychology, grounded in psychodynamic theory and the treatment of complex presentations across the clinical lifespan.

**Master of Arts, Clinical Psychology, 2022.** Alliant University, San Diego, earned en route to the doctorate.

**Bachelor of Arts, Psychology, 2020.** Undergraduate foundation in psychological science, research methods, and human behavior.

### Licensure | Where Dr. Lapite-Garrett Is Currently a Licensed Psychologist

**Licensed Psychologist, New Mexico.** PSY-2026-0031, issued April 2026.

**Licensed Psychologist, Indiana.** 20044074A, issued March 2026.

### Certifications | Additional Credentials Beyond State Licensure

The credentials below are supplementary certifications that sit alongside Dr. Lapite-Garrett's doctoral licensure. Her authority to diagnose and treat rests entirely on the Psy.D. and the two state psychology licenses listed above.

**National Board Certified Health & Wellness Coach (NBC-HWC).** A national board certification in health and wellness coaching, awarded by the National Board for Health and Wellness Coaching.

**Certified Wellness Coach II (CWC).** State of California, 2025.

**Certified Mental Health Coach (CMHC).** Headspace certificate program, 2025.

**Certified Medi-Cal Peer Support Specialist (CMPSS).** Area of specialization: crisis care, 2024.

### Clinical Internship and Postdoctoral Fellowship

**APA-Accredited Internship, 2023 to 2024. New Mexico State University Counseling Center.** A clinical internship concentrated in crisis management, psychological evaluation, and the treatment of sexual trauma and identity-related presentations. Dr. Lapite-Garrett co-led a grant-funded initiative addressing eating disorder competency in the borderland community and provided crisis triage and risk management for at-risk student populations, alongside thorough psychological assessment and short-term individual therapy.

**Postdoctoral Fellowship, 2024 to 2025. Rigorous Postdoctoral Training Across Clinical, Multicultural, and AI-Informed Practice.** Postdoctoral training meeting high standards of clinical rigor, including a caseload of more than ninety clients across EAP and insurance-based settings. The fellowship encompassed clinical psychology alongside multicultural organizational implementation and the clinical integration of AI-informed practice, the same terrain that now shapes how Dr. Lapite-Garrett works with AI-influenced relational patterns and AI-facilitated sexual engagement in her own caseload. She led a training seminar on trauma-informed approaches to the assessment and treatment of sexual abuse survivors, delivered to practicum trainees, postdoctoral colleagues, and senior supervisory psychologists.

### Primary Clinical Modalities

[Psychodynamic](https://www.alafiora.com/psychodynamic-therapy), [emotion-focused](https://www.alafiora.com/emotion-focused-work), and [depth-oriented](https://www.alafiora.com/depth-oriented-care) psychotherapy form the core of clinical practice at Alafiora. Additional training encompasses somatic approaches, motivational interviewing, Superhero Therapy (an approach developed by Dr. Janina Scarlet that uses pop-culture and narrative frameworks to build resilience and process trauma), and behavioral activation, drawn on as the clinical picture calls for them. Process-oriented, relationship-centered treatment is the primary offering here. Worksheet-driven, compliance-based models are not what this practice is built for, and clients tend to do best when they understand that distinction before beginning care.

### Scholarship, Research, and Service

Dr. Lapite-Garrett has contributed to research across trauma, resilience, identity, and sexual health, including her own dissertation examining resilience outcomes among African American trans women. She has served as a peer reviewer for leading professional journals and APA conference submissions, has trained clinical staff and trainees across multiple institutions, and has spoken publicly on mental health, sexual assault, and community wellness as an invited guest of broadcast platforms and professional organizations.

### Languages

English (native), Yoruba (native), Spanish (beginner). Psychotherapy at Alafiora is conducted in English. Dr. Lapite-Garrett is a native speaker of both English and Yoruba, and her multicultural formation, which includes deep familiarity with first-generation, immigrant, intergenerational, intercultural, and diasporic experience, meaningfully shapes the cultural attunement she brings into every clinical relationship.

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## Beyond the Credentials | Who Dr. Lapite-Garrett Is Outside the Session

A degree and a license explain what Dr. Lapite-Garrett is trained to do. They do not explain who is actually in the room. The psychologist is also a person, and that fact is not incidental to the quality of the work itself.

Many clients search for a therapist who is culturally competent, when what they are actually looking for runs deeper than competence alone. They want a clinician genuinely familiar with the day-to-day realities of their world, someone who has actually lived inside them. Dr. Lapite-Garrett describes herself as culturally attuned and culturally fluent because the communities her clients move through are communities she knows from the inside.

She is deeply aware of how colonial models of care have shaped the therapeutic landscape, and she adapts her clinical approach accordingly while holding firmly to the evidence-based foundations that make the work genuinely effective. She stays current in the actual world her clients live inside day to day: the social media conversations, the political realities, and the specific dynamics of faith, family expectation, and community belonging that shape both how distress forms and what healing needs to look like for one particular person in one particular life.

**Relational.** Dr. Lapite-Garrett is in a marriage she describes as happy and grounding, to her husband, best friend, and high school sweetheart, and she maintains deep, long-running relationships with her friends and family as well. She often wears her rings to sessions. On the days she isn't, she will usually mention that her cat has claimed them again, for what is probably the third time that week.

**Politically grounded.** Her own values center on access, equity, and the protection of individual rights. She has worked with clients across the full political spectrum and holds space for each of them with equal care. Her personal views do not enter the room unless a client brings them there first and asks directly.

**Community-rooted.** Dr. Lapite-Garrett stays actively involved in her own community and holds a real investment in the wellbeing of everyone around her, whether or not they ever become a client.

**A therapist who has her own therapy.** She believes the strongest clinicians are also people doing their own sustained, deep healing work across multiple disciplines and modalities. That ongoing work keeps her effective with clients carrying the hardest things, and it is part of the peer consultation and personal-therapy discipline that keeps her own life experience from bleeding into anyone else's session.

**Spiritual, Never Imposed.** Dr. Lapite-Garrett is spiritual herself and is willing to bring spirituality into clinical care where it is a meaningful dimension of a client's own healing. She does not practice faith-based counseling, and she does not impose a spiritual framework on anyone. A client's own relationship with meaning is what determines whether, and how, this enters the room at all.

**Prim and proper, and also completely real.** No one is ever in doubt that they are sitting with a human being. Dr. Lapite-Garrett laughs, and she feels what she hears, even after years of clinical experience have made her steady enough to hold it without being pulled under by it. She describes herself as prim and proper, and means something specific by it: consistent, composed, rarely reactive, responding with care in places where someone else might flinch. The warmth and the precision are both genuine. Neither one is a performance for the room.

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## On AI and the Limits of Algorithms | What a Chatbot Cannot Replicate in the Therapy Room

Her own cultural fluency and her own ongoing personal work both point to the same underlying fact: this kind of care depends on a specific human being who is actually present, session after session, even as more of daily life runs through a screen. AI has meaningfully widened access to information, psychoeducation, and conversational support, and those contributions are real. For certain uses, AI tools have become genuinely helpful, and Dr. Lapite-Garrett does not dismiss them outright. Clients are welcome to bring relevant AI-generated insight into session, where it can be explored with a level of clinical depth no chatbot can supply on its own.

What AI cannot do is what this practice exists to do. It cannot hold a clinical relationship that spans years and accumulates real knowledge of one specific person's history. It cannot attune, in real time, to the physiological and emotional shifts happening in the pauses between words. It cannot make a clinical judgment about risk, pacing, or when to press forward and when to slow down. It cannot be held accountable. It cannot sit inside the specificity of a person's worst moment with the steadiness that comes only from years of training built for exactly that.

The work at Alafiora is aimed at structural change rather than at any single skill learned along the way. Work at that depth requires a human clinician with advanced training, genuine attunement, and the capacity to be affected by what a client brings without being destabilized by it. This same clinical distinction shapes how Dr. Lapite-Garrett works directly with clients navigating AI-influenced relational patterns, AI-facilitated sexual engagement, and trauma from AI-generated imagery, treating those presentations with the same clinical depth she brings to every domain in her caseload.

What Alafiora offers is clinical skill, advanced training, and evidence-based methodology, applied to symptoms, to a person's sense of self, and to patterns that have held for a long time. No specific outcome is promised to anyone reading this.

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## Common Questions About Dr. Esther Lapite-Garrett

### What People Ask Before Their First Session | Credentials, Licensure, and Fit

**Is Dr. Lapite-Garrett a psychologist or a therapist?**

Both terms describe her accurately, though "psychologist" names the more specific credential. Dr. Lapite-Garrett is a doctoral-level, licensed psychologist (Psy.D.), which is a distinct and more extensive credential than a master's-level therapist, counselor, or coach. Most people searching for help use "therapist" as a general term regardless of the underlying credential, and either word will lead to the same clinician and the same clinical work.

**What does Psy.D. actually mean, and is it different from a Ph.D.?**

A Psy.D., Doctor of Psychology, is a doctoral degree focused on clinical practice rather than academic research, distinct from a Ph.D. in psychology, which typically emphasizes original research alongside clinical training. Both are doctoral-level psychology degrees and both lead to licensure as a psychologist. The difference sits in emphasis during training, and the license itself is the same regardless of which degree led there. Dr. Lapite-Garrett's Psy.D. is from an APA-accredited program at Alliant University.

**Is Dr. Lapite-Garrett board certified?**

Not currently. Board certification, most commonly through the American Board of Professional Psychology, is a separate, voluntary credential beyond state licensure, and Dr. Lapite-Garrett does not hold it. What she does hold, and what her actual training rests on, is a doctoral degree from an APA-accredited program, an APA-accredited clinical internship, a postdoctoral fellowship spanning clinical, multicultural, and AI-informed practice, and an active license in every state listed above.

**Is she an AASECT-certified sex therapist?**

No, and it is worth being exact about what that does and does not mean. Dr. Lapite-Garrett does not hold AASECT certification and does not use the title "sex therapist." Her work with compulsive sexual behavior, sex addiction, and sex anxiety comes from her doctoral clinical training and her [sex-positive, sex-informed](https://www.alafiora.com/sex-therapy) orientation as a licensed psychologist.

**Does Dr. Lapite-Garrett only treat one of the three specialty areas, or all three?**

All three, and in practice they usually function together as one connected system. A client's love obsession, compulsive sexual behavior, and sexual trauma history are rarely unrelated, and Dr. Lapite-Garrett was trained, and built this practice, specifically to work with all three at once where that reflects a client's actual experience.

**Does she work with both men and women?**

Yes, and with individuals across the full range of gender identity sixteen and older. The way these three domains show up often looks different by gender, by age, and by life circumstance, and Dr. Lapite-Garrett adjusts her approach to the specific person in front of her, session by session.

**Is care with Dr. Lapite-Garrett available virtually, in person, or both?**

Both, depending on location and a client's own preference. Sessions are held through secure telehealth, in person where geography allows, and in some cases on location, wherever a client's life actually happens to be. Current formats by location are detailed on [Where Alafiora Practices](https://www.alafiora.com/where-alafiora-practices).

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**Begin a Confidential Conversation**

Getting to know the psychologist behind this practice is not the same as being ready to begin, and it does not need to be. A 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 prospective client can ask Dr. Lapite-Garrett anything they need to in order to feel confident in the fit, before any clinical work begins. Those already certain they are ready are equally welcome to begin directly with a first session.

[ BEGIN WITH A CONSULTATION ] [ BEGIN WITH A FIRST SESSION ]

For anyone with a specific question this page did not answer, the [FAQ](https://www.alafiora.com/faq) page covers the practical questions that come up most often, 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.

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