Member Spotlight: Robert and Kay Camenisch ‘Uprooting Anger’
By Michael Miller · Aug 01, 2014
Robert and Kay Camenisch needed some answers to anger.
The couple was counseling young men at a residential treatment center near Tulsa, Oklahoma, several years ago and asked the parents to visit for a week so they could discover the barriers between parents and sons.
What they found shocked them.
“We found terrible anger in the parents,” Robert says. “The parents were so angry at each other and their kids.”
The anger was being handed down, they discovered, leading to the boys’ problems. Kay asked God to show Robert and her how to minister to the suffering families in a week.
“I could see that the children were learning anger in the home, and they would be angry parents,” Kay says. “It broke my heart.”
She went through the Bible and listed all of the synonyms for anger she could find, but could discover no quick-fix answer. The first week of her study, Kay says, she was “amazed by the high percentage of passages that spoke of God being angry.” For two weeks, she repeatedly went over the verses, “praying for an overview insight that would give me a quick-fix, one-size-fits-all answer to anger that we could pass on to parents in a week’s time and send them home on a journey toward wholeness.”
Changes at the counseling facility kept that from happening there, but Kay kept at it and was able to compile rough drafts of her insights that would later be developed into meditations and help others the Camenisches counseled. After many starts and halts, edits and rewrites, the result is the eight-week Bible study Uprooting Anger: Destroying the Monster Within ($15.99, Carpenter’s Son Publishing,). The Camenisches, who live in Stanford, Kentucky, now also offer conferences on the causes of anger and how to uproot them.
Through working on the meditations, Kay also began to realize the depth of the anger problem in their own family.
“We had had anger in our home,” Kay says. “Robert had explosive anger. He learned it as a child. That’s why I knew it passed down through the generations.”
Kay didn’t think she had a problem until she started working on the studies. She realized it may have been deeper and more destructive than her husband’s.
“I think it’s just a basic sin issue,” she says. “I knew that I got angry sometimes, but I blamed it on Robert. I’d say I was reacting to him, like the sin issue of ‘the woman you gave me made me do it’ (Genesis 3:12). We blame it on somebody else instead of seeing our own sin. When we think that we’re frustrated or tired and stressed, we call it those things, but people around us experience anger.”
Getting at the roots of anger is key, Robert and Kay say.
“What I learned as I did my study, looking at one passage at a time, was that we try not to be angry,” Kay says. “We try to manage it and deal with it, put it away, whatever. But what God showed me is that anger has many different roots. They may be grief, unforgiveness, fear, hurt, things that the anger grows out of. Trying to fight anger is like trying to cut a tree down when what we need to do is pull the roots out. As long as the roots are there, we’ll easily be triggered for more anger.”
What Robert and Kay discovered, they said, is that in order to defeat inappropriate anger, people need to love others and to rely on the Savior.
“Learning to love is learning to focus on Jesus and what He’s willing to give me,” Robert says. “Instead of fighting the sin, I learn to appropriate more of who He is. We human beings can only deal with sin through grace, and that’s through Jesus.”
As Kay’s meditations on anger developed, the Camenisches started passing them out to anyone who asked for help with managing their anger. They finally felt God directing them to publish the study in the form of 31 lessons. The only problem was, they couldn’t find anyone to publish it. In the meantime, Kay sent a draft to a prison chaplain in Florida to use as a pilot study with inmates to see “if it had any value.”
Eventually, the Camenisches were told that without Kay being a widely known teacher on the subject, the study probably wouldn’t sell. She understood.
“If I went in a store and saw my name on an anger counseling book, I wouldn’t necessarily buy it,” she says. “I’d look for a name I knew.”
The Camenisches decided to shelve the book, uncertain what to do next. Kay called the prison chaplain to let him know she was going to “put it up forever,” but she was also curious how it had been received among the prisoners. What she heard made the couple reconsider their plans.
“He was so excited about the work God was doing in the men’s lives,” she says. “He said after the fourth lesson, one of the men said, ‘Since I’ve been in prison, I’ve been through four anger-management courses, and I’ve gotten more help and more hope out of this than all the others put together.’”
The chaplain told Kay that he could see the men “mellowing before my eyes,” that they were “changed men,” and that “God has reformed them through this study.”
That changed things. Robert and Kay sensed that the book was needed after all, so they would self-publish. They put out a first edition in 2007 after “praying in” some of the expense and paying the rest out of pocket. That 31-lesson edition didn’t work well for church-based studies, so Kay added a fifth lesson for each week, ending up with an eight-week study of 40 lessons. That version was published in 2014.
The first four lessons of each week include Scripture passages to read, a meditation, application exercises, prayers, and verses for “digging deeper.” Each week’s fifth lesson is an opportunity to reflect on the previous four lessons and to think about at least one recent struggle with anger.
The structure works well for individual or group study. Uprooting Anger is being used in prisons and in groups of ex-offenders across the country in at least a dozen states, including a study of 60 people in New York’s Sing Sing Correctional Facility. It has also been used with success in churches, but the Camenisches hope that the new eight-week edition will make the study even better suited for congregational use.
Their conferences have also proved popular and are mostly collaborative. They both teach in the “Uprooting Anger” conference; Kay does some sessions by herself and others with Robert. Robert does the teaching at the “Blood Covenant” conference, with Kay as his “number one student.” He also is the primary speaker in their “Having a Hearing Heart” conference with help from Kay in some sessions.
“She gives a woman’s perspective and reminds me of issues that are important to women and how to communicate things important to ladies and not just talk to the guys,” Robert says. “When I teach, she’s always there. I don’t even like to preach on Sunday morning without her in the congregation.”
Their small church also has an outreach ministry with young people from disadvantaged (“rough, non-Christian,” Kay says) families.
“The kids are products of their dysfunctional environment,” she says. “We now have about 25 teens who come regularly and they have completed nine lessons of Uprooting Anger. They say they need help with anger. Their uncharacteristic attentiveness is amazing. They’re eager to find answers, and I’ve gotten reports that indicate they are applying the Word to their lives. This felt like a real test, but there is already evidence that lives are being changed through the study.”