How Veronica Kahnles work as mental health counselor helps her husband, Yankee Tommy Kahnle, main

Veronica Kahnle didn’t think she could have both, but she couldn’t imagine life without either. She’d been dating her now-husband, Yankees reliever Tommy Kahnle, since 2011, the year she began working, initially as an intern, and later as a licensed mental health counselor, at Four Winds psychiatric hospital in Saratoga, N.Y. The couple had been keeping up a long-distance relationship for a few years, first from Charleston, S.C.; then from Florida; then from Trenton, N.J.; and then from Colorado.

As Tommy entered his 2015 season, and Veronica entered her fifth year of calculating time differences and checking box scores and buying expensive cross-country flights, she was faced with a choice: Do I leave the job I earned my master’s degree to get? Or do I stay in Saratoga and put my marriage at risk?

She’d never envisioned herself as a baseball wife. She says she needs to be working, to retain some degree of independence and identity, but not just any work. She needs to do this work. Veronica describes it as “giving patients hope when they initially had none.” If you’ve been admitted to the acute inpatient facility at Four Winds, it means you’ve met at least one of three criteria: suicidal, homicidal or psychotic. It means hope hasn’t been easy to come by.

What she didn’t know was how her career might help his. That her job put his in perspective. That without her experience, his tools might not have been enough. That all the coaching and the grind of the minor leagues might not prepare him for what was to come at his workplace in the way the darkest days at hers would.

Sometimes, when Tommy Kahnle is on the mound in a high-pressure situation – say, bases loaded with a one-run lead – he draws in a breath and he holds it. His lungs exhale and his shoulders drop and now they’re weightless. It’s not a complex strategy. It isn’t the brainchild of an army of mental skills coaches. But when your job is to be thrown into the fire, in front of the largest and most vociferous media market in the world, the simple can turn complex. The slow can turn fast.

In those moments, the Yankees reliever draws a breath, because it works for Veronica, his wife. And Veronica always had more at stake.

(Wendell Cruz / USA TODAY Sports)

They both graduated from Shaker High School, near Albany, N.Y., and met a few years later, in 2009. There was no shyness, no anxiety between them. It felt right; it felt natural. So, when Veronica introduced Tommy to her family in 2011, she was confused by the contradictions in his nature.

To be fair, it is a little confusing. Tommy Kahnle — the Yankees middle reliever who recorded a 3.67 ERA over 72 regular-season games last season, and a 2.25 ERA over eight postseason games — might not be described as shy by his teammates or by the media that cover him. He has a tendency to go a bit overboard during postseason celebrations. Last September, video spread of Kahnle after the Yankees clinched the AL East, using the champagne-protectant tarp as a Slip ‘N Slide in the background of a YES Network interview.

At times, the 30-year-old reliever can come across as childlike. But that same rambunctious character is also the player who loathes on-camera interviews, who has a hard time holding a conversation with someone he first meets. Both of those things can be true, and in Tommy Kahnle’s case, they are.

“He’s naturally a very shy person,” Veronica says. “Especially meeting people for the first time. I didn’t really know he was like that until I started seeing him interact with new people – like when I introduced him to my sisters, for example. I brought him to dinner at my mom’s house. He wouldn’t say a word. They would talk to him and he would just look at me and wait for me to answer for him.”

Kahnle’s father-in-law, Chris Peretin, is a maintenance technician at the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, N.Y. Sometimes at work, he’ll stream Yankee games from his computer in the basement, hoping to catch a glimpse of his son-in-law. He’s been doing this since Tommy’s rookie season with the Colorado Rockies in 2014. But Peretin noticed a difference in New York.

“When he was in Colorado, even in Chicago (with the White Sox), there was not as much press,” Peretin says. “In New York, I’d watch him in front of the camera and you could see how nervous he was.”

When Veronica got word that the Kahnles would be moving back to New York in 2017, she felt both joy and fear. On one hand, New York was home — it was where they met, and were married in 2016 — and pitching for the Yankees was Tommy’s dream. He’d been drafted by them, and always wanted to make his debut in pinstripes, so this was the next-best thing. On the other, New York is the epicenter of the sports media world, and her husband would be thrown into stressful situations, situations that could invoke either ire or admiration from Yankee fans.

In a roundabout way, Veronica has been preparing for this life since she began working toward her master’s degree at the University at Albany. She was trained in dialectical behavioral therapy. In order to implement it, you need to live it yourself. The concept is to not look backward; to focus only on what you can control; to be centered in the here and now. The concept is that there is power in being present.

“If you live your life like that, you can enter into a world like professional sports very adaptably,” says Veronica’s former Four Winds supervisor, Kerry Murray O’Hara. “If somebody gets hurt tomorrow, all hell is not going to break loose. It’s the reality of, ‘Here’s what I’ve been dealt. How am I going to pick up the pieces and move forward?’ It’s that kind of perspective.”

In 2017, moving forward meant moving to New York. It meant figuring out how to get Tommy through those on-camera interviews. Figuring out how to deal with the pressure, to learn to take a breath.

At the beginning it was hard. Tommy would tell Veronica he’d black out while he was on camera, having no recollection of what he’d just said. Like her father, she could see his discomfort. In those moments, Veronica would go back to basics and turn the complex simple:

Start with a breath.

You’re not a superhero. No matter what you do, people have anxiety – life is not easy.

Keep moving forward. Focus on what you can control.

Over time it got better, due to equal parts repetition and heeding his wife’s advice.

“The interviews were tough. You want to show people the Yankee Way; you want to be professional,” Tommy says. “She’s definitely helped me with the transition. She’s given me strategies I use in baseball. I’ve used (her breathing exercises) out there on the mound a lot, especially when things aren’t going right. It works. It’s the most straightforward thing, but it works.”

He adds: “If Veronica can deal with life-or-death situations with her patients … I mean, it’s definitely different, what she’s dealing with. There are times when it’s upsetting. When we go on the road, and we come back home and she finds out one of her patients she used to have passed away, it’s tough. Her job gives me perspective. She’s dealing with life or death. I’m just getting an out.”

(Steve Mitchell / USA TODAY Sports)

Once a patient is checked into Four Winds, the clock starts ticking. Veronica has six to eight days, on average, to give them hope. Six to eight days to show them – not tell them – why life is worth living. Six to eight days to step into the darkest stage of their life, and hopefully, guide them out.

Veronica is doing it because she can’t see herself doing anything else.

“As far as I can remember, maybe even middle school age, I just loved psychology,” Veronica says. “But it wasn’t until I really started working full time that I got to see the rewarding aspect of it. Just being able to help guide people to a place where they feel like they want to live in this world. The kind of patients we get, they can’t really see that light at the end of the tunnel; they can’t really find that reason to go on.

“But I’ve been able to see those patients come to the inpatient program in the worst state they’ve ever been in, see them progress over six to eight days, then see a complete turnaround when they go on to the outpatient program. That’s really what’s rewarding, for me.”

It takes about a week to stabilize a patient with suicidal, homicidal or psychotic tendencies, according to Veronica. Most insurance companies will only cover a couple days at a time.

The work is intense, and the allotted time frame raises the stakes even higher. When Veronica decided to travel on the road with Tommy, Four Winds changed her status to per diem, and kept her in the acute inpatient facility, where she wouldn’t be taking on patients for months at a time. At the end of the regular season, or the postseason, Veronica will give herself a week off. Then she’ll text her supervisor at Four Winds, and say, “I’m home. When you need me, I’m here.”

Sometimes, that means Monday through Friday. Other times, it means holidays, or when another therapist needs time off. In an instant, she’ll shift gears from watching her husband in what feels like a do-or-die situation, to an actual do-or-die situation.

“She told me (about Four Winds) and I was like, ‘Jeez, how do you deal with this?'” Tommy says. “I don’t know how she does this line of work. I was blown away.”

Murray O’Hara recalls a time when 22-year-old Veronica was working as a master’s level intern for her in 2011 and a client checked into the acute inpatient facility. He was in his mid-60s, a significant substance abuser and, as Murray O’Hara described him, “seriously high-risk.” Veronica was assigned to the case with a primary clinician, as usual, so she could shadow rather than work alone.

The man wanted to leave the hospital, and was about to. But unbeknownst to Murray O’Hara, Veronica had set up a separate meeting with him. Something didn’t feel right to her. He said he wasn’t suicidal, but her gut told her something was off.

She went to her supervisor and explained why she was worried.

“She was willing to take that step and put herself out there in a way that I don’t think a lot of clinicians at that point would have done,” Murray O’Hara says. “As soon as she and I discussed it, I really felt that she was right. She had sound clinical judgement, for someone really young, and a guy that was pretty intimidating and would constantly yell things at her and question her because of her age, and she still toed the line. It was striking. And she has always been that way.

“Now, he wasn’t happy about that. He was actually quite angry with her. But she was able to manage that anger, with my support and the support of others, in an incredibly professional way, because it was the right thing to do, even though he didn’t like it. Sometimes we still have to step in and do what we feel like has to be done to save someone.”

Murray O’Hara believes that for the most part, this work can’t be taught. A lot of it is innate.

“You cannot be swept up in the energy,” she says. “And I don’t think I’ve ever seen her lose her cool. It’s our job to maintain calm in the midst of the storm. And many people can’t do that. Veronica always could. I think she has that naturally. After doing this for so many years, I can tell, very quickly, who’s faking that and who’s not.

“Veronica would talk to me calmly. She would say, ‘I’m so sad,’ or something very transparent and genuine, versus just pretending that everything’s OK. Because reality is, as a psychologist, when I hear that something horrific has happened, I should not be fine. You know what I mean? That’s inhuman. That’s detached and inhuman.”

A big part of the job is asking difficult questions. If she’s treating a 30-year old woman who is highly suicidal, with a history of substance abuse, Veronica needs to ask about her relationships with her mother, father, siblings, spouses and children. If this woman has been abused, Veronica needs to ask about that. But beyond asking, she also needs to hear the answer. She needs to know how to respond, and what to do next.

“There is no typical day at Four Winds,” Murray O’Hara says.

In a few weeks, Tommy will find himself back on the mound, first at Steinbrenner Field during spring training, then at Yankee Stadium. Veronica will find herself back in Florida, then in New York, as she temporarily steps away from the work she can’t see herself living without, to be with the person she can’t see herself living without. She’ll travel with her husband all season long — and, potentially, all postseason long — and once it ends, she’ll give herself a week. She’ll text her supervisor, and she’ll say, “I’m home. When you need me, I’m here.”

And there will be times when Veronica Kahnle is at Four Winds in a high-pressure situation, trying to give hope and comfort to a patient who has neither. She will breathe in and she will hold it. Her lungs will exhale and her shoulders will drop and they’ll be weightless. It’s not a complex strategy. But when your job is to be thrown into the fire, when you’re responsible for human lives, the simple can turn complex. The slow can turn fast.

In those moments, Veronica will draw a breath.

(Top photo courtesy of Veronica Kahnle)

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