“I can walk the ocean floor
And never have to breathe.
Life doesn’t frighten me at all
Not at all
Not at all.”
-Maya Angelou
Amal Elanouari is an accomplished multilingual clinician and academic providing psychotherapy and consultations with over 20 years of experience in the fields of psychiatry, psychology and social work.
Amal grew up in the Western Sahara, in Africa and has native fluency in English, French, Arabic, and Amazigh. For greater than 20 years, she has trained and held academic positions at several of the world’s premiere institutions, including the Sorbonne in Paris, University of California-Berkeley, University of California-San Francisco, and Stanford University Medical Center. Throughout her work, she has received numerous accolades acknowledging her expertise in psychotherapy and mental health services, which have included top honors for her thesis in semiotics and psycholinguistics and national awards in mental health interventions and program design.
She is currently affiliated with Stanford Health Care-Stanford medicine clinics and operates a boutique private practice offering innovative psychotherapy services for individuals and couples. Her integrative therapy methods employs elements drawn from her decades of training in psychodynamic, cognitive-behavioral, dialectal-behavior, acceptance-commitment, mindfulness, acute-chronic-complex trauma, and couple and sex therapies. She has a strong command of current psychiatric practices, including alternative medicines, as well as audio-sound, eco, and bibliography therapies.
She also has expertise in providing culturally-inclusive and affirming counseling, and coaching practices as well as social justice and racial trauma oriented clinical care in a wide variety of settings. She offers additional holistic perspectives of psychosomatization and optimization of one’s overall health metabolically by reducing inflammation and managing oxidative stress that affect brain health in order to improve overall mind and body health.
From the beginning, Amal will work with you to identify and translate your mental health needs into easily understandable problems with clear solutions. In her work with you, she will develop a specialized and customized treatment plan, which will act as a map to ensure your unique needs are addressed with consistent progress. She has tremendous dynamism and compassion which will assist you to experience relief in an authentic presence and dynamic connection, and help gain therapeutic wisdom and psychological mastery to achieve change work that make a true and real difference in the lives of individuals and couples that she sees.