Dr. Esther Lapite-Garrett | Alafiora
If you have spent years holding everything together for everyone around you, meeting every responsibility with precision, while privately wondering why love still feels like a wound you cannot close or why your relationship with sex, desire, or intimacy feels like something you cannot quite trust or control, this practice was built with you in mind.
I am Dr. Esther Lapite-Garrett, a licensed psychologist and the founder of Alafiora, a private practice offering depth-oriented, attachment-centered care for adults navigating complex and cumulative trauma. I work most often with BIPOC adults who carry significant responsibility in their professional, familial, or community lives, and who arrive at therapy already exhausted by how much of themselves they have had to manage in silence.
My clinical focus centers on survivors of sexual trauma in its many forms, including complex PTSD, childhood sexual abuse, intimate partner violence, and trafficking. I also specialize in the relational and attachment patterns that frequently develop in the aftermath of that history: love addiction, limerence, obsessive attachment, and the particular anguish of loving someone with an intensity that frightens you and that no amount of reason seems to reach. I work with compulsive sexual behavior, sex anxiety, hypersexuality, and the complicated relationship with desire that forms when sex has been used as currency, comfort, escape, or survival. These are the patterns that tend to live in the space between what a person presents publicly and what they are actually carrying privately, and they are precisely the patterns this practice was designed to hold.
I work with clients whose complexity has exceeded what prior treatment was built to contain. That is not a criticism of prior care. It is a recognition that some histories require a particular kind of clinical depth, consistency, and willingness to stay in the room with what is hard.
As a Nigerian-American psychologist, I understand the particular experience of seeking care within systems that have not historically seen BIPOC communities with clarity or care. I understand what it means to be the one who holds things together, and to have very few places where you are allowed to put them down.
Sessions are available virtually across multiple states. Alafiora is a private-pay practice. If you would like to explore whether this work is right for you, or to learn more about the full scope of services and engagement options, I invite you to visit alafiora.com. Everything you need to take the next step is there, including a confidential inquiry form for those who are ready to begin.
If something here has felt familiar, that recognition is worth honoring.