About

Hello, I’m Amanda Mouttaki

I grew up in northern Wisconsin and built my adult life in Morocco, where I have lived for many years as part of a Moroccan-American family. I have raised children across cultural contexts and spent years working through different languages, expectations, and family systems.

I have lived both sides of the immigration equation. I know what it is to be deeply connected to a place and still be read as an outsider in it, and I know what it is to watch someone I love go through the same thing in the other direction.

That shapes how I listen, but it does not mean I will assume your story looks like mine. Yours will not. What it does mean is that you will not have to start by explaining the basics, and you will not have to defend your choice to be here.

M.S. Clinical Mental Health Counseling, University of Wisconsin–Superior, expected May 2027

14 years living and working in Marrakech across languages and cultures

Member of the American Counseling Association and the Association for Creativity in Counseling

Supervised by Megan Byars, LPC, NCC

Assumptions

Cultural humility, in practice

When you first meet me, there are things you may assume about who I am based on what you can see. I present as a white American woman, and those identities carry meaning, including privilege, inside the counseling relationship and in the systems we both move through. I do not want to minimize that. What is visible about me also tells only a small part of my cultural story.

Living between cultures has made me aware of how much of a person stays invisible. Migration, family roles, money, religion, language, loss, gender, race, nationality: these intersect in ways you cannot read off someone’s appearance or place into a category. Two people who appear to share an identity may experience it very differently. Two people whose lives look nothing alike may recognize something in each other.

Being immersed in another culture has not made me an expert on that culture, and having lived through hard things has not made me an expert on yours. Cultural humility, for me, means staying curious instead of assuming I already understand. I will sometimes misunderstand, use language that does not fit, or miss something that matters to you. Tell me when that happens. My responsibility is not to prove I always get it right. It is to listen, stay open to correction, and take seriously what you tell me about your experience.

I hope this makes a space where neither of us has to flatten ourselves into categories, and where the complexity of who you are is not something we work around, but something we get to understand together.