Terry Petrenchik, PhD, is a clinician-researcher who has spent over 25 years working in and studying mental health. Her work sits at the intersection of interoception research, affective neuroscience, and the science of early life trauma and adversity. Her work is grounded in an understanding that the body-mind relationship shapes our lived experience and that strengthening that relationship changes everything.

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Her clinical experience spans foster care, residential treatment, community mental health, family homelessness, and pediatric occupational therapy, always with a focus on what’s happening inside a person, not just what’s visible on the outside. Terry has held faculty positions at universities across the U.S. and Canada, including Indiana University and McMaster University, where she taught, mentored, and conducted federally funded research on childhood participation, disability, homelessness, and developmental trauma.

 

Terry has developed a wide range of clinical tools including the MAIA-Y Card Deck, the MAIA-Y Digital Deck, and The Interoceptive Self Perception Scale (ISPS™). She is the founder of Well & Ready Kids and The Interoceptive Self, where she brings research, clinical insight, and lived experience to those interested in knowing more about how our inner and outer lives are rooted the body and internal sense of self.